The Nobel Prize Committee announced on the 6th that German scientist Benjamin List and American scientist David MacMillan won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the "development of asymmetric organic catalysis". Long considered the "Prize in Science", the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was won by physicists, biologists and even mathematicians, was finally awarded to real chemists.
On the afternoon of the 4th, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was first announced, and American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were awarded for their contributions to "discovering temperature and tactile receptors".
On the 5th, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe and German scientist Klaus Hasselmann for their contributions to "physical modeling, quantitative variability and reliable prediction of global warming" of the Earth's climate, and the other half to Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi for his contributions" Discovered the interplay between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to planetary scale."
Now, let's approach these scientists together to learn about their research and their stories.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Benjamin Lister:
Obsessed with the study of organic catalysis
Lister was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1968 and is currently director of the Max Planck Coal Research Institute in Germany.
He graduated from the University of Frey Berlin in 1993 and received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1997 on the subject of his doctoral dissertation on the synthesis of vitamin B12.
Subsequently, Lister worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institute in the United States, during which time he began to work on organic catalysis. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Institute from 1999 to 2003. In 2003 he returned to Germany to work at the Max Planck Coal Institute, where he became director in July 2005.
At the Max Planck Coal Institute, his focus remains on organic catalysis.
During his more than 20 years of research, Lister has received many awards: the German Chemist Association awarded him the Karl Duisburg Memory Prize in 2003; the Otto Bavarian Prize in 2012; the Ruhr Prize for Arts and Sciences in 2013; and the Leibniz Prize in 2016.
Lister is also actively involved in international exchanges. In 2005 and 2008, he became a visiting professor at Tokyo Gakuin University in Japan and Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, respectively. Since 2004 he has been an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany. In 2018 he was elected a member of the German Society of Natural Scientists.
David Macmillan:
I used to want to be a physicist
Born in Bellhill, Scotland in 1968, Macmillan is currently a professor of chemistry at Princeton University, usa, and from 2010 to 2015, he also served as chair of the Department of Chemistry.
Macmillan received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Glasgow. In 1990, he studied for his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine. During this time, he focused on developing new reaction methods for stereocontrol control formation of bicyclic tetrahydrofurans. In 1996, he received his Doctorate.
After receiving his Ph.D., Macmillan went to Harvard University for postdoctoral research, focusing on selective catalysis, particularly the design and development of Sn(II)-derived dioxazolidin complexes.
In July 1998, Macmillan began his independent research career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he took up a position in the Department of Chemistry. He joined the Department of Chemistry at caltech in June 2000, and his team's research interests focused on new methods of enantioselective catalysis. For personal reasons, he transferred to Princeton University in September 2006.
Macmillan's team has made many advances in the field of asymmetric organic catalysis and has applied these new methods to the synthesis of a range of complex natural products.
In addition, from 2010 to 2014, Macmillan was the founding editor-in-chief of the prestigious chemical academic journal Chemical Sciences.
Over the past 20 years, Macmillan has also received many honors and awards: the Cordi-Morgan Medal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry in 2004; the Royal Society in 2012; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012; the Harrison Howe Award in 2015; the Ryoji Nomori Award in 2017; and the Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
In a previous interview, Macmillan revealed that he had hoped to be a physicist, but because the physics classroom in the place where he studied was too cold and the chemistry classroom was warmer, he changed his degree.
Nobel Prize in Physics
Makoto Shuro:
He thought he wouldn't win the Nobel Prize
Born in Japan in 1931, Makoto received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1958, worked in the Atmospheric Circulation Department of the U.S. Weather Bureau from 1958 to 1963, worked in the NOAA-GFDL Laboratory from 1963 to 1997, and was the director of the Global Warming Program at the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Japan from 1997 to 2001. Since 2002, he has been a visiting cooperative scientist at princeton University's NOAA-GFDL Laboratory.
In the early 1960s, Makoto and colleagues developed radiation-convection models of the atmosphere and explored the role of greenhouse gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone in maintaining and altering the thermal structure of the atmosphere. This is the beginning of a long-term study of global warming.
In the late 1960s, Makoto and his collaborators began developing general circulation models of coupled atmosphere-ocean-land systems, which eventually became a very powerful tool for simulating global warming. In addition, Makoto realized that the coupling model could mimic the low-frequency changes in the climate very well, so they not only used the coupling model to explore global warming, but also to study the unforced natural changes in the climate on longer scales.
Analysis of deep-sea sediments and continental ice sheets shows that Earth's climate fluctuates greatly during geological past periods. So during Makoto's research career, he asked many challenging questions and tried to answer them using climate models of various complexities.
However, when asked whether the study of climate models can be the object of the Nobel Prize, Mabu said no, saying that "my research belongs to classical physics, and I don't think I will win the Nobel Prize." It seems that the Nobel Prize was not pursued from the beginning.
Klaus Hasselmann:
I'd rather not win an award than have global warming
Klaus Hasselmann was the founder of the European Climate Forum (now the Global Climate Forum). He served as Vice-Chair and Board Member of the Global Climate Forum for many years until 2018.
Haselman is a physicist who has published extensively in the fields of oceanography, meteorology, climate, and socio-economic models of climate change. He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) in Germany and the former Scientific Director of the German Center for Climate Computing.
MPIM was founded in 1975 to conduct climate research. It has rapidly grown into a leading international climate research institute and has made significant contributions to the scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hasselman has recently been interested in socio-economic modeling of climate change, and he hopes to develop new system dynamics based on the latest models to develop and support climate policy.
On October 5, Hasselman said in an interview that global warming was posing a threat to people and the planet, preferring not to receive the Nobel Prize than global warming.
George Parisi:
Discover physical laws in disorder
Giorgio Parisi is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome, Italy, where his research focuses on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and complex systems. Parisi's father and grandfather were both construction workers. As a child, her family wanted Parrisi to become an engineer, but while reading popular science, science fiction, and math books, Parissey was drawn to the complex abstract concepts in the books and wanted to do something that involved research.
Initially, Parrissey was torn between physics and mathematics majors, but later, he was drawn to the adventurous nature of physics research and saw physics as a challenge at the highest level of intelligence.
Parisi's achievements span many areas of modern physics, even biology. He wrote many books, articles, books, articles, and ideas among them that opened up new areas of study.
Before winning the Nobel Prize, Parisi also won the 2021 Wolf Prize in Physics for being one of the most creative and influential theoretical physicists in recent decades. His work has had a great impact on various branches of the physical sciences, covering areas such as particle physics, critical phenomena, disordered systems, and optimization theory and mathematical physics.
In 1977, Parrissey, along with another scientist, discovered the evolutionary equation that accurately describes how quarks and gluons are distributed in protons and nuclei. Parrissey's work was essential to analyze the fundamental structure of matter at the smallest possible distance by scattering elementary particles at high energies. His results could help search for dark matter particles using large hadron accelerators (LHC) and help scientists plan future accelerator experiments.
In another series of seminal studies from 1979 to 1984, Parrissey introduced the concept of replicating symmetrical fracture and applied it to "spin glass models". Parisi's research on the new organization of matter has led to a paradigm shift in statistical physics and has many applications in other disordered systems such as structural glass, neural networks, and combinatorial optimization theory.
Parisi has also done highly innovative work on classical phase transitions, making it possible for other physics prizes to discover supersymmetry in condensed matter systems.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Julius:
I just tried it and it worked
Born in 1955, David Julius is a native of Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn has always been a foothold for Immigrants from Eastern Europe, whose grandparents fled Tsarist Russia and anti-Semitism to the United States, and by his generation is a third generation of immigrants.
In high school, like a tired commuter, Julius' long commute from home to school soon overwhelmed him, and he immediately decided to transfer. The new high school ends early, and julius, a literary boy, takes a train into town after school, browses museums, watches performances and listens to music. Even in 2018, Julius won the Breakthrough Award in Life Sciences, taking $3 million in prize money, which he said in an interview to support arts, music and science education.
In the blink of an eye, it's time to go to college. Julius hadn't thought much about it, when he happened to be told that if he was interested in science, he should apply to MIT. "Then try it", knowing very little about biology, he applied to MIT casually, and as a result, he went to the world's number one MIT.
Some people are so jealous that they not only appreciate the food and eat, but also be chased by God to feed the food. After entering the university, Julius gradually became more and more relaxed, plunged into the laboratory, and took the step towards the Nobel Prize.
In the second half of the 1990s, Julius was doing research on capsaicin at the University of California. For a while Julius was considering whether to clone capsaicin receptors, and one day he was standing in the supermarket, facing the rows of spices and thinking deeply, his wife Holly (also a professor at the University of California, San Francisco) came over, as if to see through his heart, and said to him, "Stop thinking about it, let's go!" ”
Later, when it came to this matter, Julius always sighed: "The kick I did the research was kicked by my wife." ”
Patapoutien:
The scientist who knows the most about horoscopes
Dr. Patapurien is of Armenian descent and grew up in Lebanon's disastrous long civil war. In 1986, at the age of 18, Partaputian fled with his brother to the United States. To attend college, he did a variety of jobs, such as delivering pizza and writing weekly astrological analysis for an Armenian newspaper.
Since 2000, he has worked at the Scripps Research Center in La Jolla, California, where he is currently a professor. Since 2014, he has also been a fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Partaputian's main research direction is the signal transduction of sensors. Patapultian made an important contribution to the recognition of new ion channels and receptors that are activated due to increased temperature, mechanical force or cell volume.
Patapurien and his son
In an interview, Patapultian said: "I fell in love with basic research and it changed the trajectory of my career... When I was in Lebanon, I didn't even know that scientists were a profession. ”
Pataptian said he was drawn to study touch and pain because the systems were so mysterious. "When you find a field that people don't know much about, it's a great opportunity to dive into," he said. ”
The Nobel Prize is a five-year-old testament established by Nobel in 1895, including: the Prize in Physics, chemistry, the Peace Prize, the Physiology or Medicine Prize, and the Literary Prize, which recognize those who have "made the greatest contribution" to humanity in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, as well as literature; and the Nobel Prize in Economics established by the Riksbank in 1968 to recognize those who have made outstanding contributions in the field of economics. The 2021 Nobel Prize will be announced from October 4 to 11.
Image source: Nobel Prize website