2020 Nobel season opens with medicine prize
Breakthroughs in the field of health will be honoured Monday when the 2020 Nobel season begins with the medicine prize, as the world battles the worst pandemic in a century.
The medicine prize announcement, due at 11:30 am (0930 GMT), will be accompanied by the physics prize on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday.
The most closely-watched awards - for literature and peace - will observe on Thursday and Friday, as the economics prize wraps things up on Monday, October 12.
This season, the coronavirus pandemic has put the global spotlight on research.
“The pandemic is a major crisis for mankind, but it illustrates how important science is,” Nobel Foundation head Lars Heikensten said.
No prizes are anticipated to be awarded this season for work directly from the new coronavirus, as Nobel prizewinning research usually takes many years to be verified.
The prize-awarding committees are “not at all influenced by what is going on in the world at that time,” Erling Norrby, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences which awards the science prizes, told AFP.
“It takes time before a prize can mature, I would say at least 10 years before you can fully understand the impact” of a discovery, Norrby, himself a virologist, said.
The work of the various prize committees is shrouded in secrecy and the names of the nominees aren't disclosed for 50 years, resulting in rampant speculation.
- T-cells, breast cancer, scissors? -
Swedish public radio SR and the country’s biggest daily Dagens Nyheter both suggested Monday’s medicine prize could head to French-born Australian Jacques Miller and Max Cooper of the US for their discoveries of T-cells and B-cells in the 1960s, which resulted in breakthroughs in cancer and virus research.
The pair won the prestigious Lasker Prize in america last year.
Or the nod could go to Lebanese-born American geneticist Huda Zoghbi on her behalf discovery of a genetic mutation that contributes to the mind disorder Rett Syndrome, both SR and Dagens Nyheter said.
Dagens Nyheter also tipped American Mary-Claire King, who learned the BRCA1 gene accountable for a hereditary form of breast cancer, and researchers who worked on an end to Hepatitis C, Ralf Bartenschlager of Germany and Americans Charles Rice and Michael Sofia - a trio also awarded the Lasker Prize in 2016.
Two names mentioned frequently are Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer Doudna of the united states, for his or her gene-editing technique referred to as the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipping tool, a kind of genetic “scissors” used to cut out a mutated gene in a human embryo and replace it with a corrected version.
Chinese-born American Feng Zhang also claims to have learned the technique, that could be eligible for both the medicine and chemistry prize.
Others also mentioned include immunologists Marc Feldmann of Australia and Indian-born British researcher Ravinder Maini, for work on arthritis rheumatoid, and American oncologist Dennis Slamon for research on breast cancer and the medications Herceptin.
For Tuesday’s physics prize, astrophysicists Shep Doeleman of the united states and Germany’s Heino Falcke could win for work that resulted in the first directly observed image of a black hole in April 2019, according to Dagens Nyheter.
SR meanwhile saw it likely to American mathematician Peter Shor who paved the way for today’s research on quantum computers, or France’s Alain Aspect for his work on quantum entanglement.
For chemistry, SR predicted the honour could go to Christopher Murray for his work on semiconductor nanocrystals or even to US gene sequencing pioneer Leroy Hood, while Dagens Nyheter tipped Americans Harry Gray, Richard Holm and Stephen Lippard for work in the field of bioinorganic chemistry.
- Greta for peace prize? -
Nobel watchers say the peace prize could head to press freedom champions such as for example Reporters Without Borders or the Committee to safeguard Journalists, climate activists such as for example Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, or an organisation like the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization or Transparency International.
Stockholm’s literary circles saw Canadian poet Anne Carson and American-Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid as strong applicants for the literature prize, while Canada’s Margaret Atwood and US authors Marilynn Robinson and Joyce Carol Oates have made Nobel buzz for a long time.
Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hungary’s Peter Nadas, Albania’s Ismael Kadare, Korea’s Ko Un and France’s Michel Houellebecq are also frequently mentioned, while British novelist Hilary Mantel is a recently available addition.
