The 2023 Nobel Science Prizes

October 9, 2023 10:31 AM

The 2023 Nobel Prizes have been awarded.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 was awarded this year to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and development of quantum dots. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier for extremely short pulses of light. The Prize in Economic Sciences 2023 is awarded to Claudia Goldin for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.

posted by pwnguin (15 comments total)

That Penn Medicine link is shameless about glossing over the fact that Penn worked hard to keep Karikó's work from happening at all and generally treated her horribly during her time there.

But many other scientists were turning away from the field, and her bosses at UPenn felt mRNA had shown itself to be impractical and she was wasting her time. They issued an ultimatum, if she wanted to continue working with mRNA she would lose her prestigious faculty position, and face a substantial pay cut.

”It was particularly horrible as that same week, I had just been diagnosed with cancer,” said Karikó. “I was facing two operations, and my husband, who had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card, had got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. I was really struggling, and then they told me this.”

posted by mhoye at 10:46 AM on October 9, 2023 [40 favorites]

Goldin is the first solo Prize in Econ since Angus Deaton in 2015, and the first woman to win it solo (and only third woman to win the award). Given the tenuous composition of some joint prizes in the past, her being awarded the prize solo speaks to the quality and importance of her work.
posted by dismas at 10:59 AM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Dr. Karikó's story is fascinating -- was just about to post a similar story from NYT -- and an instructive case on the dangers of the peer review process and today's academic funding model. A surprising amount of Nobel awards are given for research rejected by "top" journals, and getting funding basically requires you to prove you already know what the result will be in the grant application.
posted by pwnguin at 11:00 AM on October 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Dang, I was shut out again. Maybe next year.
posted by Hume at 11:06 AM on October 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ah, misread. Thaler was the last solo Econ price (2017), Deaton was 2015.
posted by dismas at 11:20 AM on October 9, 2023

I'm pleased to see so many women honored in fields that in the minds of most are dominated by men.
posted by hippybear at 11:42 AM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The chemistry and physics ones are very well deserved. Quantum dots are a key enabling technology for everything from drug (and novel compound) development through to electronics. I've used them to investigate the fate of environmental contaminants that are otherwise pretty intractable to a lot of analytical techniques. They're an amazing thing to have in the chemistry tool box.

And attoscond spectroscopy is just super-cool.
posted by bonehead at 12:08 PM on October 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Periodic Table of Videos on the Chemistry award, including a brief discussion of the leak, and some very drinkable gold.
posted by pwnguin at 12:10 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

That Penn Medicine link is shameless about glossing over the fact that Penn worked hard to keep Karikó's work from happening at all and generally treated her horribly during her time there.

Wow, you aren't exaggerating. How fortunate for the world that nevertheless she persisted.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:38 PM on October 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

So I linked to researcher's work pages (when available) on the theory that faculty usually have more control over them than say, Wikipedia. But probably the full story won't be there, even if you have full editorial access, for the same reasons your LinkedIn account doesn't list all the reasons you should be suing your employer.
posted by pwnguin at 3:36 PM on October 9, 2023

On the other hand, I figure "Dr. Karikó: Nobel Prize winner, adjunct professor" is pretty good contender for world's shortest novel.
posted by pwnguin at 3:44 PM on October 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

Penn is the school that tried to destroy the reputation and the academic career of student Mackenzie Fierceton when she had the temerity to testify against them in a lawsuit about the way they handled a medical emergency involving a faculty member or another student.

Something is deeply wrong there.
posted by jamjam at 4:49 PM on October 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Two Youtubes on attosecond lasers:

Sabine Hoffsteader gives a brief overview as a segment in a weekly news reel.

Sixty Symbols takes a longer look, covering the concept, researchers' contributions, mismatch between science as done and as awarded, and current applications (mostly more science). A lot less exciting visually than quantum dots, in much the same way SIGGRAPH usually gets all the public attention on CS research. Also sounded like the interviewer hinted this was somehow an end-run on Heisenberg uncertainty, but probably thats just me misunderstanding the question.
posted by pwnguin at 11:55 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Rebecca Watson covers The Gender Wage Gap & The "Nobel Prize" in Economics:

as those explainable factors came into play and were dismissed Goldin saw that unexplainable wage differences drastically increased, more than doubling [...] one of the back golden presented reams of data that
suggest one of the major drivers of this wage discrimination is the way employers reward longer continuous hours worked and punish time flexibility

posted by pwnguin at 9:28 AM on October 17, 2023

Economics Explained covers Goldin's work in "The Controversial 2023 Nobel Prize Explained":

Good economists should first look to see if it is a problem at all, and then to work out whats causing it [...] as Golden points out frequently in her work, even policy solutions with the best intentions fixing a complex problem can sometimes have the opposite effect and make things worse if it doesn't properly identify why that problem exists in the first place.

posted by pwnguin at 4:21 PM on November 5, 2023