Many of the major events this year has been cancelled but the Nobel Prizes have been awarded even if fewer people than usual are still paying attention.
The prize for Physiology or Medicine this year is probably the easiest to understand. It goes to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice for their work in isolating and identifying the virus that causes Hepatitis C. Alter was a colleague of Baruch Blumberg who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976 for the discovery of the Hepatitis B virus. The team realized that blood transfusions were still causing hepatitis even after screening for Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B.
Alter proved this by showing that chimpanzees developed hepatitis after being given blood free of Hepatitis A and B but attempts to isolate the new virus proved futile. In was only until 1989 that Houghton managed it by amplifying genetic material drawn from infected chimpanzees and using human antibodies to identify which portions of the genetic sequence they attached themselves to. However this cloned, purified version of the virus still could not infect chimpanzees and it was Rice who in 1997 noticed a mutable portion of the new virus and realized that it might be hindering replication. After he used genetic engineering to stabilize the virus, he proved that it was indeed the cause of Hepatitis C and which is why we are now able to reliably screen for it.
The prize for Physics will probably get the most mainstream attention because it is for the discovery of black holes, awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. Penrose is practically a household name for fans of science-fiction so it’s a little funny that he is only now gaining mainstream fame. Black holes were always a theoretical possibility ever since Einstein published his general theory of relativity but Einstein himself never believed they really existed in the real universe. It was Penrose who worked out the detailed mathematical proof that real stars and dust clouds can indeed collapse to form black holes.
Black holes are by definition invisible to direct detection but their presence can be inferred from the effect of their gravity on visible stars. Genzel and Ghez each lead separate teams. They used the world’s largest telescopes to track for decades the movements of the brightest stars at the center of our galaxy to show that they are all orbiting a massive, invisible object at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, what we now call the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole that has 4 million times the mass of our sun.
The subject of the prize for Chemistry will be a familiar one to those few who regularly read this blog, the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique. As it goes to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, this has been lauded for going to an all women team but I think it’s also significant for how recent the discovery is and yet how obvious this award is given that everyone now uses the technique.
This story begins in 2011 when Charpentier noticed that the immune system of the Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria possess a mechanism that cleaves the DNA of viruses in two. She then collaborated with Doudna to recreate this pair of genetic scissors in a test tube and simplified it. They also proved that it could be reprogrammed to target any DNA molecule instead of just viral DNA, turning it into a powerful, general purpose tool.
Finally the prize for Economics goes to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, both of whom advanced the understanding of auctions. This takes into account the format of auctions, differing levels of information available to the participants and how participants expect other participants to behave. In particular the novel auction formats they devised were used by countries to sell off radio frequencies to telecoms operators.
