Nobel Prize

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded half to David Baker ‘for the design of proteins using computational techniques’ and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper ‘for the prediction of protein structure’.

On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to American physicist John Joseph Hopfield and Canadian-British computer scientist Geoffrey Everest Hinton. Although the prize was awarded in physics, the justification reads that it was based on ‘discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning through artificial neural networks’, which is clearly associated with computer science.

When it seemed that all functions of ribonucleic acids (RNA) had been studied and described, scientists discovered new types of RNA at the end of the 20th century that influence inheritance, development, and diseases. This year, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of one of these new RNAs. According to the Nobel Committee's decision, two American biologists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, received the award in Physiology and Medicine for their "discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation".

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists working on experimental and theoretical aspects of quantum mechanics. As set out in the verdict of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the prize was awarded "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing violations of Bell's inequality and pioneering quantum computing".

Professor Filip Chybalski's commentary on the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was awarded to David Card "for empirical contributions to economics of labour" and Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens "for methodological contributions to causal analyses".

Prof. Łukasz Albrecht's comment on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded to David MacMillan and Benjamin List "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis":

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were honoured for the ground-breaking discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, now widely used as a genomic editing tool that has revolutionized medicine. After the decision of the Nobel Committee had been announced, Charpentier noted that this success was possible thanks to, inter alia, dr. Krzysztof Chyliński, co-discoverer of the family of patents describing the use of CRISPR / Cas9.

Gravitational waves are another tool for space exploration, especially of phenomena related to large-scale objects. It may well be, as Barry Barish suggests in the CERN Courier, that they will help us better understand how the universe began or the Big Bang theory