The Nobel Prizes are given every October in Sweden and Norway to those who have most benefited mankind in one of six fields: peace, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. For each prize, 10 million Swedish kronas (equal to US $1,145,429.00 or 53,000 crowns or 62 talents of silver) is split among the winners. The Nobel committees generally favour White men from Europe and North America – as were 69% of this year’s winners.
The winners for 2021
Medicine or Physiology:
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for working out how the sense of touch works, how heat, cold and being poked are turned into electrical signals sent to the brain. It all started with Prof. Julius looking at why people think hot chilli peppers are hot. It could lead to new treatments for pain.
Physics:
Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi win for creating models that can predict climate change. Manabe was doing it way back in the 1960s. He showed that carbon dioxide can lead to global warming.
Chemistry:
Benjamin List and David MacMillan for asymmetric organocatalysis, which can make molecules not only with the right atoms, but with the right orientation. Lemons and oranges, for example, have the same scent molecule, limonene, but one is the mirror image of the other. Such a difference led to the thalidomide scandal of the 1960s.
Literature:
Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” An intercontinental refugee himself (Zanzibar to the UK), he made his name with “Paradise” (1994), about growing up in East Africa in the early 1900s under British rule. It won a Booker Prize. He writes in English and is the first Black African author to win the Literature prize in a generation – the last was Wole Soyinka in 1986, a day I still remember.
Peace:
Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace” in their native Philippines and Russia, respectively. Ressa founded Rappler, fighting against President Duterte’s fake Facebook accounts that were distorting reality. She was arrested several times for her pains. Muratov founded Novaja Gazeta and has long been a champion of freedom of speech in Russia – while still breathing. Breathing is one of the Nobel Prize committee’s requirements.
Economics:
David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their use of “natural experiments” in economics. For example, economists believe that raising the minimum wage lowers employment. Card could not raise the minimum wage to see if that was true – but New Jersey unwittingly did it for him. It turned out to be untrue.
Winners listed by country of birth:
- Canada: Card
- Germany: Hasselmann, List
- Italy: Parisi
- Japan: Manabe
- Lebanon: Patapoutian
- Netherlands: Imbens
- Philippines: Ressa
- Russia: Muratov
- Tanzania: Gurnah
- UK: MacMillan
- US: Angrist
- NYC: Julius
by county of immigration:
- UK: Gurnah
- US: Patapoutian, Manabe, MacMillan, Card, Imbens
by gender:
- male: 12
- female: 1
– Abagond, 2021.
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
- crowns
- Attic units – talents and such
- science
- The White Inventor argument
- climate change
- of writing in colonial tongues:
- 2018
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No Possibly of a african or a female even white in anything of any significance
literature if your lucky or a honorary one for peace if your fighting for justice in your land esp against some the same type of people and gain international recognition.
I have a solution
how about we stop validating white european institutions and traditions
the whole hollywood/harvard/wallstreet/whitehouse global hegemony.
And the nice thing about it
it does not require a lot of marches or protests ,none in fact
or money or even knowledge
but most importantly
I specifically don’t need your acknowledgement participation nor consent
would be nice but unrealistic.
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”I have a solution
how about we stop validating white European institutions and traditions
the whole Hollywood/Harvard/Wall Street/White House global hegemony.
And the nice thing about it
it does not require a lot of marches or protests, none in fact
or money or even knowledge
but most importantly
I specifically don’t need your acknowledgment participation nor consent
would be nice but unrealistic.” – Mbeti
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The nation with the 2nd highest Nobel Prize winners per capita is the Black nation of Saint Lucia with Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Sir William Arthur Lewis,1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Does that make them the 2nd smartest people on earth?(joke)
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Curious, that such mechanisms are only being unpacked today.
Until now, if somebody asked, I would bet that they – the scientists – knew already those mechanisms, because with the widespread use of anesthesia (the control of pain) I thought that they had already a detailed model of how signals are created, transported and processed from nerve extremities to the brain. My bad, they didn’t! Until today they seem only to know better how those signals are transported and therefore, how to interrupt them, before reaching the brain (This is what anesthesia does, isn’t it?)
And with the appearance and dissemination of the novel coronavirus, a specific sub-set of nerve extremities are oft being targeted and injured in some patients, specifically the ones related to the sensations of smell and taste. God, I would like to now how those sensations are created too. Molecules of some external substances play a role for sure as the source of the signals. But how are they “mapped” to specific electrical “signals”?
P.S.:
In the world of robots, mechanisms to give them the ability to “feel”, heat/cold (=temperature), and being poked, exist already as many domestic devices/appliances testify.
One can say that here, the engineering of those processes advanced faster than the science (=the understanding) of their natural counterpart in biologic entities.
By the way, I don’t know if one can say the same regarding the “feeling” of smell in machines. But it seems not yet, because, otherwise one can not explain why until now they continue to depend on dogs to “sniff” all kind of objects when needed.
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Added the Physics prize.
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Nobel Prize for “Climate Change”.
Wow! It’s getting though for the deniers!
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Added the Chemistry prize.
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Added the Literature prize
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Added the Peace prize.
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Added the Economics prize.
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Curious that Nobel Prizes in each of the relevant areas of knowledge used to be awarded to individual people but nowadays many prizes are given to two, three or more people at once.
I’m glad that the old Syukuro Manabe could finally receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, given that at 90 years old that recognition could have escaped him.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/22/russian-nobel-peace-prize-winner-donates-medal-to-fund-refugees
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Will Obama be next? “Celebrity Net Worth reported the former president’s net worth as $70 million. According to an estimate by Analytics@American, American University’s business analytics program, however, Barack and Michelle Obama could make as much as $242.5 million post-presidency. “
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