It’s that time of the year again so naturally I’m here to once again provide a run-down of the winners of each of the categories because as usual news coverage of this event is almost non-existent.
The physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for proving that neutrinos oscillate and therefore change identities while travelling from the Sun to Earth. This means that neutrinos must actually possess mass, even if that mass is extremely small, leading to a revision of the Standard Model of physics that originally required neutrinos to be massless.
The chemistry prize once again goes to a series of discoveries that could also qualify for the medicine prize. It goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for each discovering a different mechanism for repairing damaged DNA. Tomas Lindal was also the first to note that without some way to repair damage, DNA decays at a rate that should make life impossible on Earth.
The physiology prize itself goes to two separate efforts that ended up providing vital medicines against parasitic diseases. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura discovered Avermectin which is used to treat River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis. Youyou Tu found a promising plant from traditional Chinese herbal medicine and extracted the active component to create the medicine now known as Artemisin, used against malaria.
As usual, the economics prize is awarded for a lifetime of work which is more difficult to summarize in a single paragraph. It goes to Angus Deaton who helped answer such questions as how consumers distribute spending among different goods, how much of a society’s income is spent and how much is saved and how to best measure poverty and the effectiveness of welfare spending.
