2022 Nobel Prize winners announced

It’s that time again — the first of the 2022 Nobel Prizes have been announced. The Nobel Foundation says it will invite the 2022 Nobel Prize laureates to the Nobel Week in Stockholm in December, together with the 2020 and 2021 laureates. A prize award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall and a banquet at the Stockholm City Hall are also planned.

Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. Through his pioneering research, Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also discovered a previously unknown hominin, Denisova.

Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now-extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today; for example, affecting how our immune system reacts to infections. Pääbo’s seminal research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline: paleogenomics. By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.

Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 to Alain Aspect, John F Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science. Their work has helped explain how quantum mechanics allows two or more particles to exist in what is called an entangled state, where what happens to one of the particles determines what happens to the other particle, even if they are far apart.

For a long time, the question was whether the correlation was because the particles in an entangled pair contained hidden variables — instructions that tell them which result they should give in an experiment. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell developed the mathematical inequality that states that if there are hidden variables, the correlation between the results of a large number of measurements will never exceed a certain value. However, quantum mechanics predicts that a certain type of experiment will violate Bell’s inequality, thus resulting in a stronger correlation than would otherwise be possible.

Clauser developed Bell’s ideas, leading to a practical experiment. When he took the measurements, they supported quantum mechanics by clearly violating a Bell inequality. This means that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory that uses hidden variables. But some loopholes remained after Clauser’s experiment, one of which was closed by Aspect. He was able to switch the measurement settings after an entangled pair had left its source, so the setting that existed when they were emitted could not affect the result. Finally, using refined tools and long series of experiments, Zeilinger started to use entangled quantum states. Among other things, his research group has demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, which makes it possible to move a quantum state from one particle to one at a distance.

Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Carolyn R Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K Barry Sharpless. Sharpless and Meldal have laid the foundation for a functional form of chemistry — click chemistry — in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. Bertozzi has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilising it in living organisms.

Chemists have long been driven by the desire to build increasingly complicated molecules, but these are generally time-consuming and very expensive to produce. Around the year 2000, Sharpless coined the concept of click chemistry, which is a form of simple and reliable chemistry where reactions occur quickly and unwanted by-products are avoided. Shortly afterwards, Meldal and Sharpless — independently of each other — presented the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, an elegant and efficient chemical reaction that is now in widespread use. Bertozzi subsequently took click chemistry to a new level, developing click reactions that work inside living organisms. Her bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell, and are now used globally to explore cells and track biological processes.

The Nobel Prizes in Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences will be announced in the coming days.

Illustration depicts entanglement. Image ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

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