The Nobel Prizes are given every year in October to those who have most benefited mankind in one of six fields: peace, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. For each prize, 9 million Swedish kronas (equal to a million US dollars or two metric tons of silver) is split among the winners.
The winners for 2018:
Medicine & Physiology:
James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo win for discovering immune checkpoint therapy, which uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer. It works (sometimes) on skin, lung, and kidney cancer. Allison says it is a great example of how basic science can save lives.
Physics:
Donna Strickland, Gérard Mourou, and Arthur Ashkin win. Mourou and Strickland developed a laser technique called chirped pulse amplification (CPA). Ashkin used that to create optical tweezers, using lasers to pick up or move very small living things, like viruses or bacteria, without harming them. Strickland is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize since 2015.
Chemistry:
Frances Arnold, George P Smith, and Gregory Winter win for using directed evolution to create proteins. Arnold, a chemical engineer at Caltech, gets half the prize, being the first to use something like natural selection to evolve chemicals for a particular purpose. She used it to create enzymes, proteins that speed up chemical reactions. Smith and Winter used it to create antibodies, proteins that kill bacteria and viruses. It is now used to make drugs, even green fuels,
Literature:
Olga Tokarczuk, a leading Polish novelist, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. Best books: “Primeval and Other Times” (1996) and “The Books of Jacob” (2014), both concerned with history, in the 1900s and 1700s respectively.
Peace:
Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege win for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war”, making a “crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes.” Murad, the first Iraqi ever to win the Peace Prize, was made a sex slave by ISIS and was sold several times. She escaped in November 2014, becoming a champion for Yazidi Iraqis. Dr Mukwege runs a hospital in D.R. Congo under UN protection. He has treated many wartime victims of sexual violence. He was African of the Year in 2009.
Economics:
William Nordhaus and Paul Romer win for “constructing models that explain how the market economy interacts with nature and knowledge.” Nordhaus was the first to create a model that shows how the economy and climate change affect each other. He is for the carbon tax. Romer’s model shows that capitalism does not reward those with new ideas, that government has to step in and push research, as is done in the US.
Winners listed by country of birth:
- Britain: Winter
- Canada: Strickland
- D.R. Congo: Mukwege
- France: Mourou
- Iraq: Murad
- Japan: Honjo
- Poland: Tokarczuk
- US: Allison, Ashkin, Arnold, Smith, Nordhaus, Romer
by county of immigration:
- none were immigrants, which is surprising based on past years.
by gender: Boys 9, Girls 4.
– Abagond, 2018, 2020.
Update (January 4th 2020): Added the Literature Prize, which was not awarded till 2019 due to a #MeToo scandal at the Swedish Academy.
See also:
- Twitter: @NobelPrize
- nobelprize.org
- Nobel Prizes past:
- Posts on individual Nobel Prize winners:
- Tagore – Literature, 1913
- Fritz Haber – Chemistry, 1918
- Einstein – Physics, 1921
- Jane Addams – Peace, 1931
- Winston Churchill – Literature, 1953
- Martin Luther King, Jr – Peace, 1964
- Solzhenitsyn – Literature, 1970
- Kissinger – Peace, 1973
- Aung San Suu Kyi – Peace, 1991
- Toni Morrison – Literature, 1993
- Nelson Mandela – Peace, 1993
- United Nations – Peace, 2001
- Barack Obama – Peace, 2009
- US dollar
- science
- Tarana Burke – and #MeToo
- Charles Darwin – and evolution
- ISIS
- Broken Africa stereotype
- climate change
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Trump is entertaining delusions of grandeur about being awarded the Nobel Prize🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Added the Physics prize.
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@ Mary
If he can truly bring peace to Korea he would deserve it, but so far it does not seem he has done that. Nor does it seem likely since he seems to have the mind of a 12-year-old.
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It would be interesting to learn more about the Academy issue from the American perspective. From what I’ve read, it looks like a clash between a flirting French culture and a sexless feminism of its worst kind. Feminism is like a plague.
Yep, Englishmen leave a party without saying a good-by and Russians say a good-by without leaving a party (c)
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@abagond
The wars are usually started by those with ripe minds of mature maniacs.
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Added the Chemistry Prize.
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@ A Russian Nagpo
A mental 12-year-old can be just as dangerous if put in charge of a country, especially one with nuclear weapons. And in Donald Trump’s case, he is trying to tear down the economic and military arrangements that the US and western Europe put in place to prevent a third world war.
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@abagond
Yes, you’re right here, yet a mental condition is an extra variable to the overall situation — of which I know almost nothing. Perhaps the American society has a sufficient poka-yoke system to survive these times and heal itself, or maybe it shall share the fate of the Soviet Union. Any future is a continuum of probabilities, many of which die out long before having been uttered.
I shouldn’t have declare ‘let the balance be kept’, though, because a part of the balance, a fall-down of Soviet Empire counter-weighed by that of the USA — which would be a stupid thing to wish. In other words, a mighty neo-stalinist empire is the last thing any sane person needs.
So yes, Trump is most likely being played by Russians — and he may be even seriously believing himself doing good to the nation and the country. And, no, they are not people from Kremlin, therefore it would be a nice thing to have an interior political struggle in Russia intensified, maybe even between the current political stakeholders of the so-called political establishment.
A good rat race among enemies is almost as good to me as ‘a little glorious war’ is to them. But I would like to leave Russia before it starts, though 🙂
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@ abagond, What is the point of showing that non of them are immigrants?
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@ Michelle
Because Nobel Prize winners are often born in one country but do their work in another. It is something I have noted since 2016. So far this year there have been none, but it is not over yet.
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Added the Peace Prize.
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Watching CBS Evening News, and Dr. Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad have made me so emotional. In this harrowing week of Dr. Blasey-Ford’s testimony at the Kavanaugh’s hearings and all this conversation about sexual assault survivors and #MeToo and #Times Up, and Bill Cosby’s arrest, it been an assault on my psyche and spirit.
Dr. Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad are brave and beautiful souls that give me some hope in humanity. They are real heroes that don’t wear capes.
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Economics Prize added.
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Added the Literature Prize, which was not awarded till 2019 due to a #MeToo scandal at the Swedish Academy.
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