As usual as I like to do a rundown on the scientific prizes every year because it’s downright criminal how little attention the announcements get. The task is a little easier this year because the discoveries they involve should be straightforward for the layman to understand.
The Physiology or Medicine prize goes to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on what is now known as regulatory T cells, or tregs for short. Sakaguchi defines this new class of T cells that carry both the CD4 and CD25 proteins on their surface. He showed that T cells with CD25 protect against autoimmune diseases in mice, yet if he removed all of the T cells with CD25 and injected versions with CD4 instead, they developed serious autoimmune diseases. So the mice needed T cells with both types of proteins on their surface.
Brunkow and Ramsdell studied scurfy mice, a strain of mice in which half of the males have an autoimmune disease that gives them scaley and flaky skin and short lives while the females are normal. Reasoning that this was due to mutation in the X chromosome, they searched for the genes responsible. After years of work, they identified and named the gene FOXP3 and also showed that its human equivalent causes the rare autoimmune disease in men.
Sakaguchi along with other researchers then proved that the FOXP3 gene controls the development of tregs. They prevent other T cells from attacking the body’s own tissue. Conversely, cancer cells are able to attract tregs to prevent the immune system from attacking tumors. By adding or removing tregs as needed, modern doctors can then control how active the immune system should be in different circumstances.
The Physics prize goes to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for proving that quantum effects apply on the macroscopic scale. By now, even laymen should be aware of the weirdness of the quantum realm including phenomena such as quantum tunneling. But most would understand that this applies to the microscopic scale of individual particles. The three winners of this year’s prize showed that charged particles in a superconductor can behave as if they were a single particle and leap across a non-conducting layer.
Their experiments used the so-called Josephson junction which previously won the Nobel physics prize in 1973. They had to screen the experimental setup from outside interference and carefully feed weak electrical currents into it. They measured how long it would take for the system to tunnel out of a zero-voltage state and proved that the system had quantized energy levels. Though the voltage levels remain small, it still involves vast numbers of particles, making it a macroscopic phenomenon. Today, it is this discovery that sets the foundations for building quantum computers.
The Chemistry prize goes to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi for creating the first metal-organic frameworks (MOF). These are a type of molecular architecture which contain large cavities to hold molecules and have since proven useful in a large variety of applications such as harvesting water from the desert air.
The story begins when Robson was building wooden balls as models of atoms that students could join to form molecules. He needed holes drilled in the balls in specific ways to match the atoms and realized that the positioning of these holes automatically ensured that the molecules that could be built from them had the correct form and structure. Then he built such a structure for real using copper ions and found that they organized themselves into a regular crystalline structure full of cavities.
Kitagawa later had a similar idea, building a two-dimensional structure with cavities. Though the material was dismissed was being useless, he persevered and eventually came up with a three-dimensional structure that could absorb and later release methane, nitrogen and oxygen without changing shape.
Finally Yaghi built two-dimensional structures out of copper or cobalt that could host guest molecules in its spaces. He coined the term MOF and his MOF-5 hides an enormous area inside it. Only a couple of grams of MOF-5 holds an area as big as a football pitch. Today modern versions are made to capture carbon dioxide, water vapor and toxic gases among other applications.
The Economics prize goes to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt who showed how economic growth is sustained by technological innovation and the creative destruction in which new and improved processes and products outcompete obsolete ones. This year’s prize is especially notable as Mokyr is known as an economic historian rather than a more usual economist.
He noted that economic growth was almost indiscernible and only really took off after the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr showed that the Scientific Revolution led to reproducible results that when combined with commercial knowledge and a society open to change was what allowed for sustainable economic growth.
Aghion and Howitt meanwhile constructed a mathematical economic model that similarly shows how technological advancement leads to sustained growth. They realized that beneath the surface of a growing economy, countless companies go out of business every year and just as many get started. Even in companies that survive, jobs are continuously being created and destroyed. It is this creative destruction that leads to sustained growth. Their model links together production, R&D, the financial markets and household savings to explain the larger economy.