Friday, October 12, 2012

The Nobel winners!


   Why did the scientist only have a door knocker at his house?
 So, he could win the No-bell prize!

            This past week, the Nobel prizes have been awarded to those who have made major advances in the realms of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine or Physiology, Literature, and Peace. The award in economic sciences will be awarded on Monday. For this post, I will be examining the work of the winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine/Physiology.

Alfred Nobel - the man behind the awards
            First, I would like to take a look at the life of the man behind the awards - Alfred Nobel. Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1833. From 1850 to 1852, he worked in the laboratory of one T. Jules Pelouze in Paris.
            After the Crimean War, Nobel was looking for something new to research and a new product to sell. One of Nobel's Chemistry teachers, Nikolai N. Zinin, gave him the idea to research nitroglycerin. Nobel did this and found uses for it as an explosive. After his younger brother Emil died in an explosion at a factory in Heleneborg in 1864, Nobel worked toward making the explosive safer.
            In 1867, after finding that a mixture of nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth was much safer, he obtained a patent for what he had dubbed "dynamite." From this invention, Nobel became a very wealthy man and his (third) and final will and testament left a large part of his fortune to the establishment of a fund that would present awards to people making advancements in various fields of science, literature, and toward peace. The people that Nobel left in charge of this did not want to fulfill the request, and it was five years after his death in 1896, that the first round of Nobel prizes were awarded.

2012 Nobel Prize in Physics
            This years Nobel Prize in Physics went to Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland for their research in Quantum systems. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award was " for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems." Haroche is a researcher at the Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Wineland is a researcher with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. The Nobel laureates essentially took the opposite approach to the same research, quantum optics. Wineland worked toward trapping electrically charged atoms and measuring/controlling them with photons (light) and Haroche controlled/measured photons by sending atoms through a trap. From this research, it is believed that a quantum computer could be created and super accurate clocks could become a reality.
Read full text from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences - here
Read full scientific text - here

2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
            This years Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two American scientists - Robert J. Lefkowitz, from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, and Brian K. Kobilka from Stanford University School of Medicine, in California. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award was "for studies of G-protein–coupled receptors." What these Nobel laureates have done is essentially explained how cells interpret signals from the brain, and this is through receptors. The receptors they worked with and mapped out, the G-protein-coupled receptors, deal with adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, light, flavor, and odor. This also has potential application in the field of medicine because many medications work through these receptors.
Article on the Scientists from the New York Times - here
Read full text from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences - here
Read full scientific text - here


2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology
            This years Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology went to John B. Gurdon of the United Kingdom and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan, "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed 
to become pluripotent" (or the capacity to differentiate into any mature cell type). John B. Gurdon, did research in 1962 and found out that the specialization of cells is reversible. He did this through experiments done on frog egg cells and mature intestinal cells, which then developed into a normal tadpole. Shinya Yamanaka did his research in 2006, and was able to take mature mice cells and reprogram them to become immature stem cells. From his research, it was found that mature cells could be developed into any type of body cell needed.
Read full scientific article from The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet - here

Full list of Nobel Prize winners - here



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