crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-11 15:51:04

2189) George Pearson Smith

Gist:

Life

George Smith was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in the United States. He studied at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and then at Harvard University, where he obtained a doctorate in bacteriology and immunology in 1970. After a stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he moved to the University of Missouri in Columbia. He remained there for the rest of his career, but spent time at Duke University in 1983–1984, where he began his Nobel Prize awarded work.

Work

Evolution – the adaption of species to different environments – has created an enormous diversity of life. George Smith has used the same principles – genetic change and selection – to develop proteins that solve humankind’s chemical problems. In 1985, he developed an elegant method known as phage display, where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – can be used to evolve new proteins. This method has led to new pharmaceuticals, for example.

Summary

George P. Smith (born March 10, 1941, Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American biochemist known for his development of phage display, a laboratory technique employing bacteriophages (bacteria-infecting viruses) for the investigation of protein-protein, protein-DNA, and protein-peptide interactions. Phage display proved valuable to the development of treatments for conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis and contributed to the investigation of disease-causing peptides, such as those produced by Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that causes malaria. For his discoveries, Smith was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with American chemist Frances Arnold and British-born biochemist Sir Greg Winter.

Smith carried out his undergraduate studies at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, earning an A.B. degree in biology in 1963. He later earned a Ph.D. (1970) in bacteriology and immunology from Harvard University. In 1975, after working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under British-born American scientist and later Nobelist Oliver Smithies, Smith went to the University of Missouri, joining the faculty as an assistant professor of biological sciences. Smith remained at Missouri for the duration of his career, eventually becoming Curators’ Distinguished Professor in 2000.

In 1983, while on sabbatical, Smith went to Duke University. There he developed fusion proteins by inserting foreign DNA fragments into phage gene III, which encoded a coat protein expressed on the phage virion surface. When taken up by a phage, fusion proteins generated via gene III were displayed on the virion surface. Phage display enabled purification through antibody recognition, whereby antibodies directed against the foreign amino acid sequence could be added to culture dishes to select for fusion phages, producing cultures enriched with a specific fusion phage.

Phage display was revolutionary at the time in part because it enabled researchers to clone and amplify foreign gene sequences. The technique also laid the foundation for Sir Greg Winter’s research on the directed evolution of antibodies and his use of phage display to develop novel antibody-based therapies. Adalimumab, the first human antibody therapy produced using phage display, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002 for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Smith was a recipient of the Promega Biotechnology Research Award (2007).

Details

George Pearson Smith (born 10 March 1941) is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.

Career

Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, he earned his A.B. degree from Haverford College in biology, was a high school teacher and lab technician for a year, and earned his PhD degree in bacteriology and immunology from Harvard University. He was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin (with future Nobel laureate Oliver Smithies) before moving to Columbia, Missouri and joining the University of Missouri faculty in 1975. He spent the 1983–1984 academic year at Duke University with Robert Webster where he began the work that led to him being awarded a Nobel Prize.

He is best known for phage display, a technique where a specific protein sequence is artificially inserted into the coat protein gene of a bacteriophage, causing the protein to be expressed on the outside of the bacteriophage. Smith first described the technique in 1985 when he displayed peptides on filamentous phage by fusing the peptide of interest onto gene III of filamentous phage. He was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work, sharing his prize with Greg Winter and Frances Arnold.

Human rights advocacy

Smith is an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians and Israeli Jews in their common homeland, and a strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. On the topic of religion, Smith is quoted as saying "I'm not religious or Jewish by birth. But my wife is Jewish and our sons are bar-mitzvahed, and I'm very engaged with Jewish culture and politics."

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-12 18:44:26

2190) Gregory Winter

Gist

Summary:

Life

Gregory Winter was born in Leicester in Great Britain but grew up in Ghana, where his father was a professor of French. He studied at the University of Cambridge and earned his PhD in 1977 at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he has continued his work. He has also formed companies focusing on the development of antibodies for use in pharmaceuticals.

Work

Evolution – the adaptation of species to different environments –has created an enormous diversity of life. Gregory Winter has used the same principles – genetic change and selection – for the directed evolution of antibodies. Specifically, he used phage display, a method where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – is used to evolve new proteins. Since 2002 this has led to new pharmaceuticals, such as medications to counteract autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

Gregory P. Winter (born April 14, 1951, Leicester, England) is a British biochemist known for his development of the first humanized antibodies, his research on the directed evolution of antibodies, and his application of phage display technology for the development of fully human therapeutic antibodies. Winter was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with American biochemists George P. Smith and Frances H. Arnold, for his scientific breakthroughs relating to the development of therapeutic antibodies.

Winter spent his youth in West Africa, thriving in the warm climate after a sickly infanthood in England. He later returned to England for undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, completing a degree in 1973, and in 1976 earned a Ph.D. from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. In 1981, following postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College London, and the Institute of Genetics at Cambridge, Winter joined the faculty at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He remained there for the duration of his career, eventually serving as its deputy director and, in 2014, being made professor emeritus.

In the early 1980s, after investigating relationships between gene mutation and protein function, Winter focused his research on site-directed mutagenesis in antibodies. At the time, therapeutic antibodies developed for use in humans were derived from mouse proteins, which could cause potentially dangerous immune reactions in human patients. To overcome this problem, Winter engineered so-called humanized antibodies, in which the sections of the mouse antibody that stimulated unwanted immune reactions were replaced by human antibody fragments. The breakthrough facilitated the eventual development of drugs such as trastuzumab (Herceptin), approved for the treatment of breast cancer, and bevacizumab (Avastin), approved for use against certain types of cancer and for age-related macular degeneration.

Winter later refined phage display technology, originally developed by Smith, to allow for the generation of fully human antibody proteins by fusion phages (bacteriophages) produced in the laboratory, circumventing potential limitations associated with his previously developed humanization process. Phage display technology proved critical to the process of directed evolution, whereby researchers are able to derive variant antibody proteins with improved binding affinity and high selectivity for their therapeutic targets using directed mutagenic approaches. The first fully human antibody produced using Winter’s phage display technique to be marketed for use in humans was adalimumab (Humira), which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002 for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. The drug was later approved for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, and certain other inflammatory conditions.

Over the course of Winter’s career, he founded or cofounded several biotech companies to facilitate the development of his novel therapeutic agents. Among them were Cambridge Antibody Technology in 1989, which was later purchased by AstraZeneca; Domantis in 2000, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2006; and Bicycle Therapeutics in 2009, which focused on the chemical synthesis and therapeutic development of small compounds known as bicyclic peptides. Winter received numerous awards and honours throughout his career, including the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (1995) and the Royal Medal (2011). He was a fellow of multiple organizations, including Trinity College and the Royal Society. He received a knighthood for his contributions to molecular biology in 2004, and in 2012 he was made Master of Trinity at Trinity College.

Details

Sir Gregory Paul Winter (born 14 April 1951) is a Nobel Prize-winning British molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.

He is credited with the invention of techniques to both humanize (1986) and, later, to fully humanize using phage display, antibodies for therapeutic uses. Previously, antibodies had been derived from mice, which made them difficult to use in human therapeutics because the human immune system had anti-mouse reactions to them. For these developments Winter was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with George Smith and Frances Arnold.

He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge on 2 October 2012, remaining in office until 2019. From 2006 to 2011, he was Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council, acting Director from 2007 to 2008 and Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acids Chemistry from 1994 to 2006. He was also Deputy Director of the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering from 1990 to its closure in 2010.

Education

Winter was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne. He went on to study Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1973. He was awarded a PhD degree, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, for research on the amino acid sequence of tryptophanyl tRNA synthetase from the bacterium Bacillus stearothermophilus in 1977 supervised by Brian S. Hartley. Later, Winter completed a term of post-doctoral fellowship at Imperial College London, and another at the Institute of genetics in University of Cambridge.

Career and research

Following his PhD, Winter completed postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He continued to specialise in protein and nucleic acid sequencing and became a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1981. He became interested in the idea that all antibodies have the same basic structure, with only small changes making them specific for one target. Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein had won the 1984 Nobel Prize for their work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in discovering a method to isolate and reproduce individual, or monoclonal, antibodies from among the multitude of different antibody proteins that the immune system makes to seek and destroy foreign invaders attacking the body. These monoclonal antibodies had limited application in human medicine, because mouse monoclonal antibodies are rapidly inactivated by the human immune response, which prevents them from providing long-term benefits.

Winter pioneered a technique to "humanise" mouse monoclonal antibodies; a technique used in the development of Campath-1H by the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and University of Cambridge scientists. This antibody now looks promising for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Humanized monoclonal antibodies form the majority of antibody-based drugs on the market today and include several blockbuster antibodies, such as Keytruda.

Winter founded Cambridge Antibody Technology in 1989, and Bicycle Therapeutics. He worked on the Scientific Advisory Board of Covagen, (now part of Cilag) and is also the chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for Biosceptre International Limited.

In 1989, Winter was a founder of Cambridge Antibody Technology, one of the early commercial biotech companies involved in antibody engineering. One of the most successful antibody drugs developed was HUMIRA (adalimumab), which was discovered by Cambridge Antibody Technology as D2E7, and developed and marketed by Abbott Laboratories. HUMIRA, an antibody to TNF alpha, was the world's first fully human antibody, which went on to become the world's top selling pharmaceutical with sales of over $18Bn in 2017 Cambridge Antibody Technology was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2006 for £702m.

In 2000, Winter founded Domantis to pioneer the use of domain antibodies, which use only the active portion of a full-sized antibody. Domantis was acquired by the pharmaceutical GlaxoSmithKline in December 2006 for £230 million.

Winter subsequently founded another company, Bicycle Therapeutics Limited as a start up company which is developing very small protein mimics based on a covalently bonded hydrophobic core.

Awards and honours

Winter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1990 and awarded the Royal Medal by the society in 2011 "for his pioneering work in protein engineering and therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, and his contributions as an inventor and entrepreneur". He was given the Scheele Award in 1994.

In 1995, Winter won several international awards including the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (Molecular Immunology) and in 1999, the Cancer Research Institute William B. Coley Award. Winter was formerly the Joint Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic acid Chemistry-Biotechnology, and was Deputy Director, at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, an institution funded by the UK Medical Research Council. He was also Deputy Director of the MRC's Centre for Protein Engineering until its absorption into the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. Winter was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1997 and Knight Bachelor in 2004. He served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2012 to 2019. In 2015 he received the Wilhelm Exner Medal.

Along with George Smith, Winter was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 3 October 2018 for his work on phage displays for antibodies (while Frances Arnold received the other half of the prize that same year "for the directed evolution of enzymes"). In 2020 he was featured on The Times' 'Science Power List'. In 2024 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-13 16:36:24

2191) James P. Allison

Gist:

Life

James Allison was born in Alice, Texas in the United States. He studied at the University of Texas in Austin, and he received his PhD there in 1973. He worked at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California; University of Texas System Cancer Center, Smithville, Texas; University of California, Berkeley; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York; Weill Cornell Medicine, New York; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Since 2012 he has been a professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Work

Cancer kills millions of people every year and is one of humanity’s greatest health challenges. By stimulating the inherent ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells James Allison and Tasuku Honjo have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy. In 1994–1995, Allison studied a known protein that functions as a brake on the immune system. He realized the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumors. He then developed this concept into a new approach for treating patients.

Summary

James P. Allison (born August 7, 1948, Alice, Texas, U.S.) is an American immunologist who contributed to the discovery of mechanisms underlying T-cell activation and who was a pioneer in the development of immune checkpoint therapy for cancer. For his discoveries, Allison shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Japanese immunologist Tasuku Honjo.

At age 15, Allison participated in a science-training program at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), which fueled his already developing interest in science. He later earned a B.S. degree (1969) in microbiology and a Ph.D. (1973) in biological sciences from UT Austin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation (later renamed Scripps Research Institute) in La Jolla, California. At Scripps, Allison worked primarily on amino acid sequencing but also found time to carry out experiments on immune cell function. These experiments led to his first major discovery concerning tumour recognition by the immune system.

In the mid-1970s, Allison moved to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, joining the faculty there as an assistant biochemist. His research centred on elucidating the mechanism by which T cells recognize foreign particles, or antigens. During this time, he also successfully mapped the structure of the T-cell antigen receptor. In 1985, after transitioning between positions at UT Austin, Stanford University, and MD Anderson, Allison decided to accept a full professorship in immunology at the University of California, Berkeley. In his laboratory there, he identified CD28 as a necessary costimulatory signaling molecule required for T-cell activation. He and colleagues also found that a molecule known as CTLA-4 opposed CD28 and played a critical role in the downregulation of immune responses. When injected into tumours in mice, CTLA-4 antibody, designed to block CTLA-4 activity, enhanced T-cell responses and led to tumour shrinkage. This approach to boosting immune responses subsequently became known as immune checkpoint blockade. Allison increasingly focused his research on better understanding the effects of CTLA-4 blockade.

As Allison was carrying out his work on CTLA-4 inhibition, he moved from Berkeley to Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, where, from 2006 to 2012, he also served as director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. While there, he worked with a pharmaceutical company to develop a human monoclonal antibody against CTLA-4 (ipilimumab) for use in cancer patients. In 2011, under the trade name Yervoy, the antibody became the first immune checkpoint therapy to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; it was approved for the treatment of late-stage melanoma.

In 2012, Allison returned to MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he served as the Vivian L. Smith Distinguished Chair in Immunology and as Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Allison was the recipient of numerous other awards, including the Canada Gairdner International Award (2014) and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2014). He was an elected member of multiple organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2006), and the National Academy of Medicine (2007).

Details

James Patrick Allison (born August 7, 1948) is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Allison is Regental Professor and Founding-Director of James P. Allison Institute at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

His discoveries have led to new cancer treatments for the deadliest cancers. He is also the director of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) scientific advisory council. He has a longstanding interest in mechanisms of T-cell development and activation, the development of novel strategies for tumor immunotherapy, and is recognized as one of the first people to isolate the T-cell antigen receptor complex protein.

In 2014, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences; in 2018, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tasuku Honjo.

Early life

Allison was born on August 7, 1948, in Alice, Texas, the youngest of three sons of Constance Kalula (Lynn) and Albert Murphy Allison. He was inspired by his eighth-grade math teacher to pursue a career in science, spending a summer in a National Science Foundation–funded summer science-training program at the University of Texas, Austin, and completing high-school biology by correspondence course at Alice High School. Allison earned a Bachelor of Science degree in microbiology from University of Texas, Austin, in 1969, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He earned his doctor of philosophy degree in biological science in 1973, also from UT Austin, as a student of G. Barrie Kitto.

Career

From 1974 to 1977, Allison worked as postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in California. Then he worked as assistant biochemist and assistant professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center to 1984. He was appointed a professor of immunology and director of the Cancer Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985 and was concurrently appointed professor at the University of California, San Francisco from 1997.

In 2004, he moved to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City to become the director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and the chair of the immunology program as well as the Koch chair in immunologic studies and attending immunologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was a professor of Weill Cornell Medicine and co-chair of the Department of Graduate Program in Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences from 2004 to 2012, and also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator until 2012, when he left to join the MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2012. Since 2012 he has been chair of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine), and is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is director of the Cancer Research Institute scientific advisory council. Previously, he served as president of the American Association of Immunologists. He is on the Research Advisory Board of Candel Therapeutics and Lytix Biopharma.

Allison serves as a commentator in the Cancer documentary.

Research

Allison trained at Scripps Research under tumor-immunologist Ralph Reisfeld, Ph.D., professor emeritus, researching human leukocyte antigens (HLA) and T-cells and exploring the role HLA proteins play in enabling the immune system to distinguish self from invaders. In 1977, Allison and a colleague, G. N. Callahan, reported in a letter to Nature that they had found evidence that the immune system was prevented from attacking cancer cells due to antigens’ association with additional proteins. Finding the factors that inhibited the immune attack on cancer has been key to developing checkpoint-blockade cancer immunotherapies.

In 1982, Allison first discovered the T-cell receptor. Allison's research to elucidate mechanisms of T-cell responses was conducted in the 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley. In the early 1990s, James Allison showed that CTLA-4 acts as an inhibitory molecule to restrict T-cell responses. In 1996, Allison was the first to show that antibody blockade of a T-cell inhibitory molecule (known as CTLA-4) could lead to enhanced anti-tumor immune responses and tumor rejection.

This concept of blocking T-cell inhibitory pathways as a way of unleashing anti-tumor immune responses and eliciting clinical benefit laid the foundation for the development of other drugs that target T-cell inhibitory pathways, which have been labeled as "immune checkpoint therapies". This work ultimately led to the clinical development of ipilimumab (Yervoy), which was approved in 2011 by the FDA for the treatment of metastatic melanoma.

Allison's research is in molecular immunology of the T-cell antigen receptor complex, co-stimulatory receptors, and other molecules involved in T-cell activation. He is particularly interested in finding signals that lead to differentiation of naive T-cells and also those that determine whether antigen receptor engagement will lead to functional activation or inactivation of T-cells. Once defined, the basic studies are used to develop new strategies for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and immunotherapy of cancer. Most recently he has been interested in understanding the immune responses in cancer patients who respond to immunotherapy. He established the immunotherapy platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center to study immune responses in cancer patients.

Honors

According to a quantitative analysis, Allison was the top-ranking recipient of the most prestigious international science awards in the period 2010–2019, having received 13 of the top 40 such awards in any field of science.

In 2011 Allison won the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award for Biotechnology and Medicine and was awarded the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2013 he shared the Novartis Prize for Clinical Immunology. In 2014 he shared the first Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science with Tasuku Honjo, won the 9th Annual Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research of the National Foundation for Cancer Research, received the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize,[29] the Massry Prize and the Harvey Prize of the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa. In 2015, he received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. and Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.

In 2017 he received the Wolf Prize in Medicine, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize and the Balzan Prize for Immunological Approaches in Cancer Therapy (this prize jointly with Robert D. Schreiber). In 2018 he received the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.

He, along with Tasuku Honjo, was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018 for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.

He is the subject of the 2019 documentary film "Jim Allison: Breakthrough" directed by Bill Haney. Allison received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2019.

Personal life

Allison married Malinda Bell in 1969. They have one son. They divorced in 2012. Allison met Padmanee Sharma in 2004. Allison and Sharma became collaborators and friends and married 10 years later in 2014. Allison is stepfather to her three children.

Allison's mother died of lymphoma when he was 10. His brother died of prostate cancer in 2005.

He plays the harmonica for a blues band of immunologists and oncologists called the Checkpoints. He also plays with a local band called the Checkmates.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-14 15:55:22

2192) Tasuku Honjo

Gist:

Life

Tasuku Honjo was born in Kyoto, Japan. He studied medicine at Kyoto University and received his PhD there in 1975. During the 1970s he also worked in the United States at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC, and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, with which he also was later associated as a visiting research fellow. In Japan he has worked at Tokyo University, Osaka University and Kyoto University, where he has been a professor since 1984.

Work

Cancer kills millions of people every year and is one of humanity’s greatest health challenges. By stimulating the inherent ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells Tasuku Honjo and James Allison have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy. In 1992, Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells and, after careful exploration of its function, eventually revealed that it operates as a brake on the immune system. Therapies based on his discovery proved to be strikingly effective in the fight against cancer.

Summary

Tasuku Honjo (born January 27, 1942, Kyoto, Japan) is a Japanese immunologist who contributed to the discovery of mechanisms and proteins critical to the regulation of immune responses and whose work led to the development of novel immunotherapies against cancer. Honjo was recognized for his work with the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with American immunologist James P. Allison.

Honjo studied medicine at Kyoto University, graduating with an M.D. in 1966. He later also received a Ph.D. (1975) in medical chemistry from there. While a graduate student, he received fellowships to study at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where he carried out research on the immune response. In 1974, after returning to Japan, Honjo joined the faculty of medicine at the University of Tokyo and in 1979 moved to the Osaka University School of Medicine, where he became a professor in the department of genetics. At Osaka, Honjo elucidated the mechanism of immunoglobulin class switching (class-switch recombination), whereby B cells switch their antibody production from one antibody type to another depending on the type of antigen with which they are presented.

In 1984 Honjo returned to Kyoto University, where he joined the department of medical chemistry. There, in the 1990s, he and colleagues discovered a protein called programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) on the surface of T cells. In later experiments, Honjo and colleagues deduced the function of PD-1 as a negative regulator of immune responses and found that PD-1 deficiency played a critical role in the development of lupus-like autoimmune diseases. In the early 2000s, Honjo showed that PD-1 inhibition in animal models of cancer restored the ability of T cells to target and kill cancer cells. Honjo’s findings opened the way for the development of anti-PD-1 cancer immunotherapies, including nivolumab and pembrolizumab, which were approved for the treatment of melanoma and certain other cancers. From 2005 Honjo was a professor in the immunology and genomic medicine department at Kyoto.

Honjo received numerous awards and honours during his career, including the Kyoto Prize (2016) and the Keio Medical Science Prize (2016). He was a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2001) and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (2003) and the Japan Academy (2005).

Details

Tasuku Honjo (Honjo Tasuku, born January 27, 1942) is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). He is also known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.

He was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (2001), as a member of German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina (2003), and also as a member of the Japan Academy (2005).

In 2018, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with James P. Allison. He and Allison together had won the 2014 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science for the same achievement.

Life and career

Honjo was born in Kyoto in 1942. He completed his M.D. degree in 1966 from the Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, where in 1975 he received his Ph.D. degree in Medical Chemistry under the supervision of Yasutomi Nishizuka and Osamu Hayaishi.

Honjo was a visiting fellow at the Department of Embryology at Carnegie Institution of Washington, from 1971 to 1973. He then moved to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he studied the genetic basis for the immune response at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as a fellow between 1973 and 1977, followed by many years as an NIH Fogarty Scholar in Residence starting in 1992. During part of this time, Honjo also was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, between 1974 and 1979; a professor in the Department of Genetics, Osaka University School of Medicine, between 1979 and 1984; and professor in the Department of Medical Chemistry, Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine, from 1984 to 2005. Since 2005 Honjo has been a professor in Department of Immunology and Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine.[8] He was the President of Shizuoka Prefecture Public University Corporation from 2012 to 2017.

He is a member of the Japanese Society for Immunology and served as its president between 1999 and 2000. Honjo is also an honorary member of American Association of Immunologists. In 2017 he became Deputy Director-General and Distinguished Professor of Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study (KUIAS).

COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a disputed claim that Honjo believed that the novel coronavirus had been "manufactured" by a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan was widely disseminated on the internet in many languages. The BBC Reality Check team reported that, "In a statement published on the website of Kyoto University, he said he was 'greatly saddened' that his name had been used to spread 'false accusations and misinformation'.

Contribution

Honjo has established the basic conceptual framework of class switch recombination. He presented a model explaining antibody gene rearrangement in class switch and, between 1980 and 1982, verified its validity by elucidating its DNA structure. He succeeded in cDNA clonings of IL-4 and IL-5 cytokines involved in class switching and IL-2 receptor alpha chain in 1986, and went on further to discover AID in 2000, demonstrating its importance in class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.

In 1992, Honjo first identified PD-1 as an inducible gene on activated T-lymphocytes, and this discovery significantly contributed to the establishment of cancer immunotherapy principle by PD-1 blockade.

Recognition

Honjo has received several awards and honors in his life. In 2016, he won the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences for "Discovery of the Mechanism Responsible for the Functional Diversification of Antibodies, Immunoregulatory Molecules and Clinical Applications of PD-1". In 2018, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with American immunologist James P. Allison. They previously also shared the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science in 2014.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-16 15:44:20

2193) Jim Peebles

Gist:

James Peebles was born in St. Boniface, near Winnipeg, Canada, where his father worked in the grain business. After attending the University of Manitoba, he continued his studies at Princeton University in the United States, receiving his doctorate there in 1962. He remained at Princeton University where he is now Professor Emeritus of Science.

Fundamental questions about the universe’s structure and history have always fascinated human beings. James Peebles’ theoretical framework, developed since the mid-1960s, is the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe. The cosmic background radiation is a remaining trace of the formation of the universe. Using his theoretical tools and calculations, James Peebles was able to interpret these traces from the infancy of the universe and discover new physical processes. The results showed us a universe in which just five per cent of its content is known matter. The rest, 95 per cent, is unknown dark matter and dark energy.

Summary

James Peebles (born April 25, 1935, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) is a Canadian-born American physicist who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on physical cosmology. He received one half of the prize; the other half was awarded to Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.

Peebles received a bachelor’s degree in 1958 from the University of Manitoba and a doctorate in 1962 from Princeton University. He remained at Princeton for the remainder of his career, becoming an assistant professor in 1965 and a full professor in 1972. He became the Albert Einstein Professor of Science in 1984 and a professor emeritus in 2000.

In 1965 Peebles was part of a group at Princeton headed by physicist Robert Dickinson that was interested in physical evidence of the big bang theory. Peebles figured that the big bang had left behind a cosmic microwave background (CMB). However, before Peebles, Dickinson, and their collaborators began efforts to observe the CMB, American physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson contacted them with their observations of what Peebles and his team would identify as the CMB. (Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.)

With the discovery of the CMB, the origin and evolution of the universe became a subject not of idle theory but of fruitful scientific inquiry. In 1965 Peebles wrote a paper positing that galaxies would not have been able to form until the universe had expanded enough and thus cooled enough for gravity to overcome the counteracting effect of the hot thermal blackbody radiation that filled the universe. The next year he showed that the temperature of the universe had a great effect on the amount of helium produced. At some point the temperature would drop so that deuterium would no longer be converted into helium, and thus elements heavier than helium would not form. (Prior to this work, astronomers believed that the heavier chemical elements could have been made in the big bang.)

In 1970 Peebles and graduate student Jer Yu considered the CMB’s angular power spectrum and how it would change based on the matter density of the universe. Peebles and Yu calculated what the observed power spectrum would look like and prefigured the later satellite observations of the CMB such as those from Planck and WMAP.

Peebles in 1982 was one of the first cosmologists to consider cold dark matter as crucial to the formation of structures such as galaxy clusters and galaxies. Most matter in the universe is dark matter that only interacts with other matter through gravity. The dark matter is called cold because it moves at speeds much slower than light.

Peebles wrote Physical Cosmology (1971), The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe (1980), and Principles of Physical Cosmology (1993). He also wrote a textbook, Quantum Mechanics (1992), and edited (with Lyman Page and Bruce Partridge) a compilation of reminiscences by cosmologists, Finding the Big Bang (2009).

Details

Phillip James Edwin Peebles (born April 25, 1935) is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who was Albert Einstein Professor in Science, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.

Peebles was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019 for his theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. He shared the prize with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. While much of his work relates to the development of the universe from its first few seconds, he is more skeptical about what we can know about the very beginning, and stated, "It's very unfortunate that one thinks of the beginning whereas in fact, we have no good theory of such a thing as the beginning."

Peebles has described himself as a convinced agnostic.

Early life

Peebles was born on April 25, 1935, in St. Vital in present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the son of Ada Marion (Green), a homemaker, and Andrew Charles Peebles, who worked for the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.[9] He completed his Bachelor of Science at the University of Manitoba. He then went on to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics in 1962, completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Observational Tests and Theoretical Problems Relating to the Conjecture That the Strength of the Electromagnetic Interaction May Be Variable" under the supervision of Robert Dickinson. He remained at Princeton for his whole career. Peebles was a Member in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study during the academic year 1977–78; he made subsequent visits during 1990–91 and 1998–99.

Academic career

Most of Peebles' work since 1964 has been in the field of physical cosmology to determine the origins of the universe. In 1964, there was very little interest in this field and it was considered a "dead end" but Peebles remained committed to studying it. Peebles has made many important contributions to the Big Bang model. With Dickinson and others (nearly two decades after George Gamow, Ralph A. Alpher and Robert C. Herman), Peebles predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation. Along with making major contributions to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, dark matter, and dark energy, he was the leading pioneer in the theory of cosmic structure formation in the 1970s. Long before it was considered a serious, quantitative branch of physics, Peebles was studying physical cosmology and has done much to establish its respectability. Peebles said, "It was not a single step, some critical discovery that suddenly made cosmology relevant but the field gradually emerged through a number of experimental observations. Clearly one of the most important during my career was the detection of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation that immediately attracted attention [...] both experimentalists interested in measuring the properties of this radiation and theorists, who joined in analyzing the implications". His Shaw Prize citation states "He laid the foundations for almost all modern investigations in cosmology, both theoretical and observational, transforming a highly speculative field into a precision science."

Peebles has a long record of innovating the basic ideas, which would be extensively studied later by other scientists. For instance, in 1987, he proposed the primordial isocurvature baryon model for the development of the early universe. Similarly, Peebles contributed to establishing the dark matter problem in the early 1970s. Peebles is also known for the Ostriker–Peebles criterion, relating to the stability of galactic formation.

Peebles' body of work was recognized with him being named a 2019 Nobel Laureate in Physics, "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology"; Peebles shared half the prize with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz who had been the first to discover an exoplanet around a main sequence star.

Peebles was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1988.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-17 15:43:56

2194) Michel Mayor

Gist

Michel Mayor was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. After studying at the University of Lausanne, he attended the Geneva Observatory, which is affiliated with the University of Geneva. He earned his doctorate in astronomy in 1971 and became a professor in 1988. He has worked for periods at the University of Cambridge, the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the University of Hawaii.

Fundamental questions about the universe’s structure and history have always fascinated human beings. In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Using custom-made instruments, they were able to see planet 51 Pegasi b, in the Pegasus constellation. Since then over 4,000 exoplanets have been found in the Milky Way. Eventually, we may find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there.

Summary

Michel Mayor (born 1942, Lausanne, Switzerland) is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Mayor and Queloz received one half of the prize; the other half was awarded to Canadian-born American physicist James Peebles.

Mayor received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Lausanne in 1966 and a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Geneva in 1971. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Geneva, becoming a professor in 1988 and director of the Geneva Observatory in 1998. He became a professor emeritus in 2007.

Mayor’s early research focused on binary stars, open and globular clusters, and the structure and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy. In 1994 he and graduate student Didier Queloz began observing 142 stars at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. They were using a new spectrograph called ELODIE that would provide accurate measurements of a star’s radial velocity (that is, its velocity toward or away from the observer). When a planet orbits a star, the planet and the star orbit around their common centre of mass, and the star’s motion around the centre of mass can be seen as a shift in the star’s spectral lines. ELODIE could detect changes in a star’s radial velocity of 13 metres per second, which is about the same amount of radial velocity change that the Sun is moved by its largest planet, Jupiter. Because Jupiter takes nearly 12 Earth years to orbit the Sun, Mayor and Queloz were not expecting quick results.

Observations of the star 51 Pegasi began that September. In January 1995 Mayor and Queloz detected a planet, 51 Pegasi b, with a mass about half that of Jupiter and a period of 4.23 days, which they confirmed and announced later that year. The existence of 51 Pegasi b, a planet unlike any in the solar system, surprised astronomers, and its discovery opened up a new field of astronomy, the study of extrasolar planets. Over more than two decades after Mayor and Queloz discovered 51 Pegasi b, thousands of extrasolar planets became known.

Mayor and Queloz collaborated on further searches for extrasolar planets. Beginning in 1998, they used the CORALIE spectrograph at La Silla Observatory in Chile to search for planets around 1,647 nearby stars. The CORALIE project has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates. Mayor was the principal investigator of the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) project, which used a spectrometer at La Silla to observe radial velocity changes of 30 cm per second. HARPS began observations in 2003 and has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates, including several “super-Earths,” rocky planets that are more massive than Earth.

Details

Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor (born 12 January 1942) is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.

Together with Didier Queloz in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this achievement, they were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star" resulting in "contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos".[8] Related to the discovery, Mayor noted that humans will never migrate to such exoplanets since they are "much, much too far away ... [and would take] hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today". However, due to discoveries by Mayor, searching for extraterrestrial communications from exoplanets may now be a more practical consideration than thought earlier.

Education and career

Mayor obtained an MS degree in Physics from the University of Lausanne (1966) and a PhD in Astronomy from the Geneva Observatory in 1971. He was a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in 1971. Subsequently, he spent sabbatical semesters at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in northern Chile and at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi System.

From 1971 to 1984, Mayor worked as a research associate at the Observatory of Geneva, which is home to the astronomy department of the University of Geneva. He became an associate professor at the university in 1984. In 1988, the university named him a full professor, a position he held until his retirement in 2007. Mayor was director of the Observatory of Geneva from 1998 to 2004. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Geneva.

Research

Mayor's research interests include extrasolar planets (also known as exoplanets), instrumentation, statistical properties of double stars, globular cluster dynamics, galactic structure and kinematics. Mayor's doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva was devoted to the spiral structure of galaxies.

During his time as a research associate, there had been strong interest in developing photoelectric-based Doppler spectrometers to obtain more accurate measurements of radial velocities of stellar objects compared to existing photographic methods. Following preliminary work by Roger Griffin in 1967 to show the feasibility of photoelectric measurements of radial velocities, Mayor worked with André Baranne at the Marseille Observatory to develop CORAVEL, a photoelectric spectrometer capable of highly accurate radial velocity measurements, which allow measurement of star movements, orbital periods of binary stars, and even the rotational speed of stars.

This research led to various fields of interest, including the study of statistical characteristics of solar-type binary stars. With fellow researcher Antoine Duquennoy, they examined the radial velocities of several systems believed to be binary stars in 1991. Their results found that a subset of these may in fact be single star systems with substellar secondary objects. Desiring more accurate radial velocity measurements, Mayor, along with Baranne at Marseille, and with graduate student Didier Queloz, developed ELODIE, a new spectrograph based on the work of CORAVEL, which was estimated to have an accuracy of 15 m/s for bright stars, improving upon the 1 km/s from CORAVEL. ELODIE was developed with the specific intent to determine if the substellar secondary objects were brown dwarf stars or potentially giant planets.

By 1994, ELODIE was operational at Geneva and Mayor and Queloz began their survey of Sun-like systems with suspected substellar secondary objects. In July 1995, the pair's survey of 51 Pegasi affirmed that there was an exoplanet orbiting it, identified as 51 Pegasi b, which was later classified as a hot-Jupiter–type planet. This was the first exoplanet to be found orbiting a main-sequence star, as opposed to planets that orbited the remains of a star. Mayor's and Queloz's discovery of an exoplanet launched great interest is searching for other exoplanets since. On 21 March 2022, the 5000th exoplanet beyond our solar system was confirmed.

Mayor's work focused more on improving instrumentation for radial velocity measurements to improve detecting exoplanets and measuring their properties. Mayor led a team to further improve ELODIE to increase velocity measurement accuracy to 1 m/s via the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) installed on the ESO 3.6 m Telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile by 2003. Mayor led the team that used HARPS to seek out other exoplanets. In 2007, Mayor was one of 11 European scientists who discovered Gliese 581c, the first extrasolar planet in a star's habitable zone, from the ESO telescope. In 2009, Mayor and his team discovered the lightest exoplanet ever detected around a main sequence star: Gliese 581e. Nonetheless, Mayor noted that humans will never migrate to such exoplanets since they are "much, much too far away ... [and would take] hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today". However, due to discoveries by Mayor, searching for extraterrestrial communications from exoplanets may now be a more practical consideration than thought earlier.

Awards and distinctions

In 1998, Mayor was awarded the Swiss Marcel Benoist Prize in recognition of his work and its significance for human life. As of 2003, he was a member of the board of trustees. He received the Prix Jules Janssen from the Société astronomique de France (French Astronomical Society) in 1998.

In 2000, he was awarded the Balzan Prize. Four years later, he was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal. In 2005, he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, along with American astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy.[24] Mayor was made a knight of the French Legion d'Honneur in 2004.

In collaboration with Pierre-Yves Frei, Mayor wrote a book in French called Les Nouveaux mondes du Cosmos (Seuil, 260 pages), which was awarded the Livre de l'astronomie 2001 prize by the 17th Astronomy Festival Haute Maurienne.

Mayor has received honorary doctorate degrees from eight universities: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), 2001; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne, Switzerland) (2002); Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), 2006; Uppsala University (Sweden), 2007; Paris Observatory (France), 2008; Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), 2009; University of Provence (Marseille, France), 2011, and Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble, France), 2014.

Mayor has received the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award of Basic Sciences (together with his former student Didier Queloz) for developing new astronomical instruments and experimental techniques that led to the first observation of planets around Sun-like stars. Asteroid 125076 Michelmayor, discovered by Swiss amateur astronomer Michel Ory at the Jura Observatory in 2001, was named in his honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 21 August 2013 (M.P.C. 84674).

In 2015, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences. In 2017, he received the Wolf Prize in Physics. He and Didier Queloz (also from Switzerland) were awarded one half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-18 15:36:43

2195) Didier Queloz

Gist:

Didier Queloz was born in Switzerland and studied at the University of Geneva. He also received a doctorate there in 1995. His supervisor was Michel Mayor, and their work led to the discovery for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Queloz has been a professor at the University of Geneva since 2008 and since 2012 also at the University of Cambridge.

Fundamental questions about the universe’s structure and history have always fascinated human beings. In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Using custom-made instruments, they were able to see planet 51 Pegasi b, in the Pegasus constellation. Since then over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way. Eventually, we may find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there.

Summary:

Didier Queloz (born February 23, 1966) is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Queloz and Mayor received one half of the prize; the other half was awarded to Canadian-born American physicist James Peebles.

Queloz received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Geneva in 1990 and a doctorate from the same university in 1995. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Geneva from 1996 to 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He returned to Geneva in 2000 and became a professor there in 2008. In 2013 Queloz became a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, while continuing to be a professor at Geneva.

In 1994 Queloz and Mayor, who was his advisor, began observing 142 stars at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. They were using a new spectrograph called ELODIE that would provide accurate measurements of a star’s radial velocity (that is, its velocity toward or away from the observer). When a planet orbits a star, the planet and the star orbit around their common centre of mass, and the star’s motion around the centre of mass can be seen as a shift in the star’s spectral lines. ELODIE could detect changes in a star’s radial velocity of 13 metres per second, which is about the same amount of radial velocity change that the Sun is moved by its largest planet, Jupiter. Because Jupiter takes nearly 12 Earth years to orbit the Sun, Queloz and Mayor were not expecting quick results.

Observations of the star 51 Pegasi began that September. In January 1995 Queloz and Mayor detected a planet, 51 Pegasi b, with a mass about half that of Jupiter and a period of 4.23 days, which they confirmed and announced later that year. The existence of 51 Pegasi b, a planet unlike any in the solar system, surprised astronomers, and its discovery opened up a new field of astronomy, the study of extrasolar planets. Over more than two decades after Queloz and Mayor discovered 51 Pegasi b, thousands of extrasolar planets became known.

Queloz and Mayor collaborated on further searches for extrasolar planets. Beginning in 1998, they used the CORALIE spectrograph at La Silla Observatory in Chile to search for planets around 1,647 nearby stars. The CORALIE project has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates. They also collaborated on the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) project, which used a spectrometer at La Silla to observe radial velocity changes of 30 cm per second. HARPS began observations in 2003 and has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates, including several “super-Earths,” rocky planets that are more massive than Earth.

Details

Didier Patrick Queloz (born 23 February 1966) is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.

Early life and education

Queloz was born in Switzerland, on 23 February 1966.

Queloz studied at the University of Geneva where he subsequently obtained a MSc degree in physics in 1990, a DEA in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1992, and a PhD degree in 1995 with Swiss astrophysicist Michel Mayor as his doctoral advisor.

In the area of religion The Daily Telegraph reports him as saying, "although not a believer himself, “Science inherited a lot from religions”".

Career and research

Didier Queloz is at the origin of the “exoplanet revolution” in astrophysics when as part of his PhD at the University of Geneva, with his supervisor, they discovered the first exoplanet around a main sequence star. In 1995 with Michel Mayor announced a giant planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi; the planet was identified as 51 Pegasi b and determined to be of a Hot Jupiter. The planet was detected by the measurement of small periodic changes in stellar radial velocity produced by the orbiting planet. Detecting this small variability by the Doppler effect had been possible thanks to the development of a new type of spectrograph, ELODIE, installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory, combined creative approach to measuring precise stellar radial velocity. For this achievement, they were awarded half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star" resulting in “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”

This seminal discovery has spawned a revolution in astronomy and kickstarted the research field of exoplanets. Over the next 25 years, Didier Queloz's main scientific contributions have essentially been focused to expand our detection and measurement capabilities of these systems to retrieve information on their physical structure. The goal is to better understand their formation and evolution by comparison with the Solar System. In the course of his career, he developed new astronomical equipment, novel observational approaches, and detection algorithms. He participated and conducted programs leading to the detection of hundred planets, including breakthrough results.

Early in his career, he identified stellar activity as a potential limitation for planet detection. He published a reference paper describing how to disentangle stellar activity from a planetary signal using proxies, including new algorithms that have become standard practice in all planet publications based on precise Doppler spectroscopy data. With this work he set the foundation to optimize measurements of stellar radial velocity that is still in use today.

Queloz received the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award of Basic Sciences (co-winner with Mayor) for developing new astronomical instruments and experimental techniques that led to the first observation of planets outside the solar system.

Shortly after the start of the ELODIE planet survey at OHP, he led the installation of an improved version (CORALIE), on the Swiss 1.2-metre Leonhard Euler Telescope. Very quickly this new facility started to detect exoplanets on stars visible in the southern hemisphere. In 2000, he took the responsibility, as a project scientist, in the development of HARPS, a new type of spectrograph for the ESO 3.6m telescope. This instrument commissioned in 2003 was about to become a reference in the business of precise Doppler spectroscopy. HARPS performances, allied with the development of a new analysis software inherited from all past experiences gathered with ELODIE and CORALIE, would considerably improve the precision of the Doppler technique. Eventually, it would deliver spectacular detections of smaller exoplanets in the realm of Neptune, super-Earth systems before Kepler would massively detect them and establish their statistic occurrence.

After the announcement of the detection of the first transiting planet (in 1999), Didier Queloz's research interest got broader with the objective to combine capabilities offered by transiting planets and follow-up Doppler spectroscopy measurements. In 2000 he achieved the first spectroscopic transit detection of an exoplanet using the so-called Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. This type of measurement essentially tells us about the projected angle between the stellar angular momentum vector and the planet orbital angular momentum vector. The pinnacle of this program would be reached 10 years later, after he led a significant upgrade of CORALIE, and established a collaboration with the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) consortium in the UK. With his Ph.D. student they demonstrated a significant number of the planets were surprisingly misaligned or in a retrograde orbit, providing a new insight about their formation process. In 2017 he received the Wolf Prize in Physics 2017 for that work and all the planet discoveries he had made.

The special geometry of transiting planets combined with precise Doppler spectroscopic observations allow us to measure the mass and radius of planets and to compute their bulk densities to get insights about their physical structure. In 2003 Didier Queloz, recently appointed at a faculty position, with his research team pioneered and established the combination of these techniques by first measuring bulk density of OGLE transiting planets. They also looked for transit opportunities on known radial velocity planets and they found the first transiting Neptune-size planet Gliese 436 b. In the course of this program and a collaboration with his Colleague S. Zucker from Tel-Aviv University, they developed the mathematical foundation to compute residual noise they encountered during the analysis of transit they were trying to model. They established statistical metric to address pink noise in the data. Today this concept is widely used in the field to estimate systematics in light-curves and transit modelling.

In 2007 Didier Queloz became associate professor. Over the next 5 years following his nomination his research program based on the combination of spectroscopy and transit detection intensified. He took the lead in the spectroscopic follow-up effort of the WASP consortium and the CoRoT space mission.[16] The combination of WASP and Corot data with follow-up observations using EulerCam (CCD imager ), CORALIE spectrograph, HARPS spectrograph, and other main ESO facilities was amazingly successful. It led to more than 100 publications, some of them breakthroughs providing new insights on the formation and nature of hot Jupiter-type planets. Further, in the same period, the detection of COROT-7b combined with an intensive follow-up campaign established the first planet detection with a bulk density similar to a rocky planet.

All follow-up expertise he developed naturally extended to the Kepler space telescope era with HARPS-N consortium confirming the Earth-like bulk density of Kepler-10. On the ground-based transit programs, Didier Queloz was deeply involved in the design and installation of a new generation of survey telescope: the NGTS Observatory. His role was decisive during system tests in Europe and to establish the facility at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

At the time Didier Queloz moved to the University of Cambridge, he essentially focused his activity to set up a comprehensive research activity directed to the detection of Earth-like planets and life in the Universe, and to further develop the exoplanet community in UK. When he left Switzerland, he was co-directing a major national initiative which eventually got funded. At Cambridge with the help of his colleagues of the IoA and DAMTP he established the Cambridge Exoplanet Research Centre[18] to stimulate joint coordinated efforts and collaborations between departments. In UK he organized the first “Exoplanet community meeting” and installed the idea of a regular yearly “community” workshop. In the European context, he is leading at Geneva (through his joint Professor appointment) the development of the ground segment CHEOPS space mission and he chairs the science team.

His most recent research highlights are related to the search for transiting Earth-like planets on low mass stars and Universal life. This program, carried out in collaboration with M. Gillon from the University of Liège, is at the origins of the detection of TRAPPIST-1, a planetary system potentially interesting to further search for atmosphere and life signature. Another successful avenue of research is the characterization of the rocky surface or atmosphere of hot small planets with the work on 55 Cancri e. The recent extension of this program towards “Life in the Universe” is carried out in the context of an international research initiative supported by the Simons Foundation. The highlight result of this collaboration is the definition – combining chemistry and astrophysical constraints – of minimum conditions for the origins of RNA precursors on exoplanets (“abiogenesis zone”).

Discoveries of exoplanets attract a lot of attention from the public and media. In parallel to his research and teaching activities, Didier Queloz has participated in numerous documentaries, movies, articles, and TV and radio interviews to share the excitement, and to explain results and promote interest in science in general.

He was also a visiting scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in 2019.

In October 2019, related to his work in astronomy and exoplanet discoveries, Queloz predicted humans will discover extraterrestrial life in the next 30 years, stating, "I can't believe we are the only living entity in the universe. There are just way [too] many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal. The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere. So I am a strong believer that there must be life elsewhere."

In December 2019, Queloz took issue with those who are not supportive of helping to limit climate change, stating, “I think this is just irresponsible, because the stars are so far away I think we should not have any serious hope to escape the Earth [...] Also keep in mind that we are a species that has evolved and developed for this planet. We’re not built to survive on any other planet than this one [...] We’d better spend our time and energy trying to fix it.”

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-19 16:28:00

2196) John B. Goodenough

Gist:

Life

John Goodenough was born to American parents in Jena, Germany. After studying mathematics at Yale University, he served during the Second World War as a meteorologist in the US Army. He then studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a doctorate in physics there in 1952. He subsequently worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University in Great Britain. Since 1986 he has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Work

Storing electrical energy in batteries is a key factor in solving the world's energy supply. The element lithium is useful in batteries since it willingly releases electrons. In 1980 John Goodenough developed a lithium battery with a cathode of cobalt oxide, which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house lithium ions. This cathode gave a higher voltage than earlier batteries. Goodenough's contributions were crucial for the development of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in for example mobile phones and electric cars.

Summary

John B. Goodenough (born July 25, 1922, Jena, Germany—died June 25, 2023, Austin, Texas, U.S.) was an American physicist who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on developing lithium-ion batteries. He shared the prize with British-born American chemist M. Stanley Whittingham and Japanese chemist Yoshino Akira. Goodenough was the oldest person to win a Nobel Prize.

Goodenough received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yale University (1943) while serving in the United States Army Air Forces as a meteorologist. After the end of World War II, he did his graduate studies in physics at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s (1951) and a doctorate (1952).

In 1952 Goodenough became a research scientist at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There one of Goodenough’s first projects was developing the SAGE air defense computer’s memory cores, which were the first random access memory (RAM).

Goodenough became a professor at the University of Oxford in 1976 and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. That same year, M. Stanley Whittingham had developed the first lithium-ion battery with an anode of metallic lithium and a cathode of lithium ions in between layers of titanium disulfide. Goodenough knew the battery would have a higher voltage if the cathode was a metal oxide rather than a metal sulfide. In 1979 Goodenough and his collaborators developed a battery with a cathode of lithium ions between layers of cobalt oxide. This battery had a potential of 4 volts, while the Whittingham battery had a potential of only 2.5 volts.

Goodenough became a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986 in the departments of mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering. He has been honoured with the National Medal of Science (2011), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2014), and the Copley Medal (2019). He wrote Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963), Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Technology: Principles, Performance and Operations (2009, with Kevin Huang), and an autobiography, Witness to Grace (2008).

Details

John Bannister Goodenough (July 25, 1922 – June 25, 2023) was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1986 he was a professor of Materials Science, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.

Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, to American parents. During and after graduating from Yale University, Goodenough served as a U.S. military meteorologist in World War II. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago, became a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and later the head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford.

Goodenough was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Copley Medal, the Fermi Award, the Draper Prize, and the Japan Prize. The John B. Goodenough Award in materials science is named for him. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino; at 97 years old, he became the oldest Nobel laureate in history. From August 27, 2021, until his death, he was the oldest living Nobel Prize laureate.

Personal life and education

John Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, to American parents, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (1893–1965) and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. He came from an academic family. His father, a graduate student at Oxford when John was born, eventually became a professor of religious history at Yale. His brother Ward became an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. John also had two half-siblings from his father's second marriage: Ursula Goodenough, emeritus professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis; and Daniel Goodenough, emeritus professor of biology at Harvard Medical School.

In his school years Goodenough suffered from dyslexia. At the time, dyslexia was poorly understood by the medical community, and Goodenough's condition went undiagnosed and untreated. Although his primary schools considered him "a backward student," he taught himself to write so that he could take the entrance exam for Groton School, the boarding school where his older brother was studying at the time. He was awarded a full scholarship. At Groton, his grades improved and he eventually graduated at the top of his class in 1940. He also developed an interest in exploring nature, plants, and animals. Although he was raised an atheist, he converted to Protestant Christianity in high school.

After Groton, Goodenough graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He completed his coursework in early 1943 (after just two and a half years) and received his degree in 1944, covering his expenses by tutoring and grading exams. He had initially sought to enlist in the military following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but his mathematics professor convinced him to stay at Yale for another year so that he could finish his coursework, which qualified him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps' meteorology department.

After World War II ended, Goodenough obtained a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, the latter in 1952. His doctoral supervisor was Clarence Zener, a theorist in electrical breakdown; he also worked and studied with physicists, including Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson. While at Chicago, he met Canadian history graduate student Irene Wiseman. They married in 1951. The couple had no children. Irene died in 2016.

Goodenough turned 100 on July 25, 2022. He died at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas, on June 25, 2023, one month shy of what would have been his 101st birthday.

Career and research

Over his career, Goodenough authored more than 550 articles, 85 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963) and Les oxydes des metaux de transition (1973).

MIT Lincoln Laboratory

After his studies, Goodenough was a research scientist and team leader at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 24 years. At MIT, he was part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing random access magnetic memory. His research focused on magnetism and on the metal–insulator transition behavior in transition-metal oxides. His research efforts on RAM led him to develop the concepts of cooperative orbital ordering, also known as a cooperative Jahn–Teller distortion, in oxide materials. They subsequently led him to develop (with Junjiro Kanamori) the Goodenough–Kanamori rules, a set of semi-empirical rules to predict the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials; superexchange is a core property for high-temperature superconductivity.

University of Oxford

The U.S. government eventually terminated Goodenough's research funding, so during the late 1970s and early 1980s, he left the United States and continued his career as head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. Among the highlights of his work at Oxford, Goodenough is credited with significant research essential to the development of commercial lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Goodenough was able to expand upon previous work from M. Stanley Whittingham on battery materials, and found in 1980 that by using LixCoO2 as a lightweight, high energy density cathode material, he could double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.

Although Goodenough saw a commercial potential of batteries with his LiCoO2 and LiNiO2 cathodes and approached the University of Oxford with a request to patent this invention, it refused. Unable to afford the patenting expenses with his academic salary, Goodenough turned to UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, which accepted his offer, but under the terms, which provided zero royalty payment to the inventors John B. Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima. In 1990, the AERE licensed Goodenough's patents to Sony Corporation, which was followed by other battery manufacturers. It was estimated, that the AERE made over 10 mln. British pounds from this licensing.

The work at Sony on further improvements to Goodenough's invention was led by Akira Yoshino, who had developed a scaled up design of the battery and manufacturing process. Goodenough received the Japan Prize in 2001 for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight high energy density rechargeable lithium batteries, and he, Whittingham, and Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research in lithium-ion batteries.

University of Texas

From 1986, Goodenough was a professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the math School of Engineering departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. During his tenure there, he continued his research on ionic conducting solids and electrochemical devices; he continued to study improved materials for batteries, aiming to promote the development of electric vehicles and to help reduce human dependency on fossil fuels. Arumugam Manthiram and Goodenough discovered the polyanion class of cathodes. They showed that positive electrodes containing polyanions, e.g., sulfates, produce higher voltages than oxides due to the inductive effect of the polyanion. The polyanion class includes materials such as lithium-iron phosphates that are used for smaller devices like power tools. His group also identified various promising electrode and electrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells. He held the Virginia H. math Centennial Chair in Engineering.

Goodenough still worked at the university at age 98 as of 2021, hoping to find another breakthrough in battery technology.

On February 28, 2017, Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of a glass battery, a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life with a high volumetric energy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge. Instead of liquid electrolytes, the battery uses glass electrolytes that enable the use of an alkali-metal anode without the formation of dendrites. However, this paper was met with widespread skepticism by the battery research community and remains controversial after several follow-up works. The work was criticized for a lack of comprehensive data, spurious interpretations of the data obtained, and that the proposed mechanism of battery operation would violate the first law of thermodynamics.

In April 2020, a patent was filed for the glass battery on behalf of Portugal's National Laboratory of Energy and Geology (LNEG), the University of Porto, Portugal, and the University of Texas.

Advisory work

In 2010, Goodenough joined the technical advisory board of Enevate, a silicon-dominant Li-ion battery technology startup based in Irvine, California. Goodenough also served as an adviser to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a collaboration led by Argonne National Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy. From 2016, Goodenough also worked as an adviser for Battery500, a national consortium led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Distinctions and awards

Goodenough was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 for his work designing materials for electronic components and clarifying the relationships between the properties, structures, and chemistry of substances. He was also a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and its French, Spanish, and Indian counterparts. In 2010, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. The Royal Society of Chemistry grants a John B. Goodenough Award in his honor. The Electrochemical Society awards a biannual John B. Goodenough Award of The Electrochemical Society.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-20 16:31:20

2197) M. Stanley Whittingham

Gist:

Stanley Whittingham was born in Nottingham in Great Britain. He studied at Oxford University and completed his doctorate there in 1968. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the United States, he worked for the Exxon and Schlumberger oil companies before becoming a professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1988.

Storing electrical energy in batteries is a key factor in solving the world's energy supply. The element lithium is useful in batteries since it willingly releases electrons. In the 1970s, Stanley Whittingham developed an innovative cathode in a lithium battery. This was made from titanium disulphide which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house lithium ions. Whittingham's contributions were crucial for the development of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in for example mobile phones and electric cars.

Summary

M. Stanley Whittingham (born December 1941, Nottingham, England) is a British-born American chemist who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in developing lithium-ion batteries. He shared the prize with American chemist John Goodenough and Japanese chemist Yoshino Akira.

Whittingham received a bachelor’s degree (1964), a master’s degree (1967), and a doctorate (1968) in chemistry from the University of Oxford. He was a research associate at Stanford University from 1968 to 1972. He then joined Exxon Research and Development Company in Linden, New Jersey, and rose to division manager.

During Whittingham’s years at Exxon, he studied titanium disulfide and its superconductive properties. Titanium disulfide has a layered structure, and Whittingham used intercalation—that is, inserting atoms or molecules between the layers—to create materials with new properties. He created the first lithium-ion battery in 1976 with metallic lithium at the anode and titanium disulfide intercalated with lithium ions at the cathode. The battery had an electromotive force of 2.5 volts.

In 1984 Whittingham became director of physical sciences at Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a company focused on developing technology for the petroleum industry. He then joined Binghamton University in New York in 1988 as a professor of chemistry and materials sciences and engineering.

Details

Sir Michael Stanley Whittingham (born 22 December 1941) is a British-American chemist. He is a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.

Whittingham is a key figure in the history of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles. He discovered intercalation electrodes and thoroughly described intercalation reactions in rechargeable batteries in the 1970s. He holds the patents on the concept of using intercalation chemistry in high power-density, highly reversible lithium-ion batteries. He also invented the first rechargeable lithium metal battery (LMB), patented in 1977 and assigned to Exxon for commercialization in small devices and electric vehicles. Whittingham's rechargeable lithium metal battery is based on a LiAl anode and an intercalation-type TiS2 cathode. His work on lithium batteries laid the foundation for others' developments, so he is called the founding father of lithium-ion batteries.

Education and career

Whittingham was born in the Carlton suburb of Nottingham, England, on 22 December 1941. His father was a civil engineer, the first in the family to go to college. His mother Dorothy Mary (née Findley) was a chemist before marriage. He was educated at Stamford School from 1951 to 1960, before going up to New College, Oxford to read chemistry. At the University of Oxford, he took his BA (1964), MA (1967), and DPhil (1968). After completing his graduate studies, Whittingham became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He worked 16 years for Exxon Research & Engineering Company and four years working for Schlumberger prior to becoming a professor at Binghamton University.

From 1994 to 2000, he served as the university's vice provost for research. He also served as vice-chair of the Research Foundation of the State University of New York for six years. He is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at Binghamton University.[9] Whittingham was named Chief Scientific Officer of NAATBatt International in 2017.

Whittingham co-chaired the DOE study of Chemical Energy Storage in 2007, and is a director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a U.S. Department of Energy Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) at Binghamton. In 2014, NECCES was awarded $12.8 million, from the U.S. Department of Energy to help accelerate scientific breakthroughs needed to build the 21st-century economy. In 2018, NECCES was granted another $3 million by the Department of Energy to continue its research on batteries. The NECCES team is using the funding to improve energy-storage materials and to develop new materials that are "cheaper, environmentally friendly, and able to store more energy than current materials can".

Research

Whittingham conceived the intercalation electrode. Exxon manufactured Whittingham's lithium-ion battery in the 1970s, based on a titanium disulfide cathode and a lithium-aluminum anode. The battery had high energy density and the diffusion of lithium ions into the titanium disulfide cathode was reversible, making the battery rechargeable. In addition, titanium disulfide has a particularly fast rate of lithium ion diffusion into the crystal lattice. Exxon threw its resources behind the commercialization of a Li/LiClO4/ TiS2 battery. However, safety concerns led Exxon to end the project. Whittingham and his team continued to publish their work in academic journals of electrochemistry and solid-state physics. He left Exxon in 1984 and spent four years at Schlumberger as a manager. In 1988, he became Professor at the Chemistry Department, Binghamton University, U.S. to pursue his academic interests.

"All these batteries are called intercalation batteries. It’s like putting jam in a sandwich. In the chemical terms, it means you have a crystal structure, and we can put lithium ions in, take them out, and the structure’s exactly the same afterwards," Whittingham said. "We retain the crystal structure. That’s what makes these lithium batteries so good, allows them to cycle for so long."

Lithium batteries have limited capacity because less than one lithium-ion/electron is reversibly intercalated per transition metal redox center. To achieve higher energy densities, one approach is to go beyond the one-electron redox intercalation reactions. Whittingham's research has advanced to multi-electron intercalation reactions, which can increase the storage capacity by intercalating multiple lithium ions. A few multi-electron intercalation materials have been successfully developed by Whittingham, like LiVOPO4/VOPO4. The multivalent vanadium cation (V3+<->V5+) plays an important role to accomplish the multi-electron reactions. These promising materials shine lights on the battery industry to increase energy density rapidly.

Whittingham received the Young Author Award from The Electrochemical Society in 1971, the Battery Research Award in 2003, and was elected a Fellow in 2004. In 2010, he was listed as one of the Top 40 innovators for contributions to advancing green technology by Greentech Media. In 2012, Whittingham received the IBA Yeager Award for Lifetime Contribution to Lithium Battery Materials Research, and he was elected a Fellow of Materials Research Society in 2013. He was listed along with John B. Goodenough, for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery on a list of Clarivate Citation Laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Thomson Reuters in 2015. In 2018, Whittingham was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "for pioneering the application of intercalation chemistry for energy storage materials."

In 2019, Whittingham, along with John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of lithium-ion batteries."

Personal life

Stanley is married to Dr. Georgina Whittingham, a professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Oswego. He has two children, Michael Whittingham and Jenniffer Whittingham-Bras.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-21 16:15:52

2198) Akira Yoshino

Gist:

Life

Akira Yoshino was born in Suita, Japan. After studying technology at Kyoto University, he began working at the Asahi Kasei chemical company in 1972, with which he has been associated throughout his non-academic career. Since 2005 he has headed his own laboratory at Asahi Kasei. Yoshino received his doctorate at Osaka University in 2005 and has been a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya since 2017.

Work

Storing electrical energy in batteries is a key factor in solving the world's energy supply. The element lithium is useful in batteries since it willingly releases electrons. In 1985 Akira Yoshino developed a battery with an anode of petroleum coke, a carbon material which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house lithium ions. This was the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery. Such batteries are widely used in electrical equipment, for example mobile phones and electric cars.

Summary

Yoshino Akira (born January 30, 1948, Suita, Japan) is a Japanese chemist who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in developing batterieslithium-ion . He shared the prize with American physicist John B. Goodenough and British-born American chemist M. Stanley Whittingham.

Yoshino received bachelor’s (1970) and master’s degrees (1972) in petrochemistry from Kyoto University. He then went to work at the chemical company Asahi Chemical (now Asahi Kasei Corporation).

Japanese electronic companies required rechargeable lightweight batteries for their devices. Yoshino improved on Goodenough’s lithium-ion battery, which had an anode of metallic lithium and a cathode of cobalt oxide with lithium ions intercalated (that is, inserted) between its layers. To avoid using metallic lithium at the anode, Yoshino and his collaborators made an anode of petroleum coke, which is a carbon-rich byproduct of oil refining. Charging the coke with electrons draws lithium ions into the anode. With the lithium ions intercalated in both the anode and the cathode, the lithium-ion battery has a long lifetime, because it is not a battery in which chemical reactions occur that slowly change the anode and cathode. Yoshino filed a patent on the battery in 1985, and the first lithium-ion battery was released commercially by Sony Corporation in 1991.

In 2005 Yoshino received a doctorate in engineering from Ōsaka University. He became president of the Lithium Ion Battery Technology and Evaluation Center in 2010. He also held positions as a professor at Meijo University, a visiting professor at Kyushu University, and an honorary fellow at Asahi Kasei. He won the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2014.

Details

Akira Yoshino (Yoshino Akira, born 30 January 1948) is a Japanese chemist. He is a fellow of Asahi Kasei Corporation and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya. He created the first safe, production-viable lithium-ion battery, which became used widely in cellular phones and notebook computers. Yoshino was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and John B. Goodenough.

Early life and education

Yoshino was born in Suita, Japan, on 30 January 1948. He graduated from Kitano High School in Osaka City (1966). He earned a B.S. in 1970 and an M.S. degree in 1972, both in engineering from Kyoto University, and a Dr.Eng. degree from Osaka University in 2005.

During his time in elementary school, one of his teachers suggested that he read The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday, and this sparked a multitude of questions for Yoshino regarding chemistry, a subject he had not been interested in prior to reading the book.

During his college years, Yoshino had attended a course taught by Japanese chemist Kenichi Fukui, the first recipient of East Asian ancestry to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Career

Yoshino spent his entire non-academic career at Asahi Kasei Corporation. Immediately after graduating with his master's degree in 1972, Yoshino began working at Asahi Kasei. He joined the Exploratory Research Team at Asahi Kasei Corporation in the early 1970s to explore new general-purpose materials, initially exploring practical applications for polyacetylene but turned to experimenting with using polyacetylene as an anode material once Japan's electronics industry attempted to create new lightweight and compact rechargeable battery to power their mobile devices.

He began work in the Kawasaki Laboratory in 1982 and was promoted to manager of product development for ion batteries in 1992.[9] In 1994, he became manager of technical development for the LIB manufacturer A&T Battery Corp.,[9] a joint venture company of Asahi Kasei and Toshiba. Asahi Kasei made him a fellow in 2003 and, in 2005, general manager of his own laboratory.[9] Since 2017, he has been a professor at Meijo University and his status at Asahi Kasei has changed to honorary fellow.

Research

In 1981 Yoshino started doing research on rechargeable batteries using polyacetylene. Polyacetylene is the electroconductive polymer discovered by Hideki Shirakawa, who later (in 2000) would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its discovery.

In 1983 Yoshino fabricated a prototype rechargeable battery using lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2) (discovered in 1979 by Godshall et al. at Stanford University, and John Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima at Oxford University) as cathode and polyacetylene as anode. This prototype, in which the anode material itself contains no lithium, and lithium ions migrate from the LiCoO2 cathode into the anode during charging, was the direct precursor to the modern lithium-ion battery (LIB).

Polyacetylene had low real density which meant high capacity required large battery volume, and also had problems with instability, so Yoshino switched to carbonaceous material as anode and in 1985 fabricated the first prototype of the LIB and received the basic patent.

This was the birth of the current lithium-ion battery.

The LIB in this configuration was commercialized by Sony in 1991 and by A&T Battery in 1992. Yoshino described challenges and history of the invention process in a book chapter from 2014.

Yoshino discovered that carbonaceous material with a certain crystalline structure was suitable as anode material, and this is the anode material that was used in the first generation of commercial LIBs. Yoshino developed the aluminum foil current collector which formed a passivation layer to enable high cell voltage at low cost, and developed the functional separator membrane and the use of a positive temperature coefficient (PTC) device for additional safety.

The LIB's coil-wound structure was conceived by Yoshino to provide large electrode surface area and enable high current discharge despite the low conductivity of the organic electrolyte.

In 1986 Yoshino commissioned the manufacture of a batch of LIB prototypes. Based on safety test data from those prototypes, the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a letter stating that the batteries were different from the metallic lithium battery.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-22 16:12:28

2199) William Kaelin Jr.

Gist:

William Kaelin was born in New York City. He studied chemistry and mathematics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and received his doctor of medicine degree there in 1982. He then did his residency at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2002 he became a professor at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Animals need oxygen for the conversion of food into useful energy. The importance of oxygen has been understood for centuries, but how cells adapt to changes in levels of oxygen has long been unknown. William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe, and Gregg Semenza discovered how cells can sense and adapt to changing oxygen availability. During the 1990s they identified a molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen. The discoveries may lead to new treatments of anemia, cancer and many other diseases.

Summary

William G. Kaelin, Jr. (born 1957, New York City, New York) is an American scientist known for his studies of tumour suppressor genes and proteins and for his role in identifying the molecular mechanisms that allow cells to sense and adapt to changes in oxygen levels. His discoveries concerning cellular oxygen-sensing mechanisms earned him a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with British physician and scientist Peter J. Ratcliffe and American physician and scientist Gregg L. Semenza).

Kaelin earned bachelor’s degrees (1979) in mathematics and chemistry from Duke University and subsequently attended medical school there, earning a medical degree in 1982. The following year, he began an internship and residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In 1987 Kaelin moved to Boston, where he served as a fellow in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and in 1991 became an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Kaelin remained at Harvard, later becoming a professor of medicine and serving as associate director of basic science at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. In 2018 he was made Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

In 1992, when Kaelin set up his own research laboratory, he became interested in the gene underlying a rare familial cancer known as von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) syndrome, which is caused by mutations in the VHL gene. Persons with VHL develop tumours in different parts of the body, including the central nervous system, the kidneys, and the pancreas, usually beginning in young adulthood. Kaelin observed that tumour growth in VHL often was accompanied by increased blood vessel growth, which he suspected was linked to changes in oxygen availability to tumour tissue. He subsequently contributed, along with Ratcliffe, to the discovery that a chemical modification known as prolyl hydroxylation in the VHL protein facilitates cellular responses to changing oxygen availability. In the presence of oxygen, the modified VHL protein binds to another protein, known as hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF), which stimulates cell proliferation when oxygen is scarce. At normal oxygen levels, VHL binding marks HIF protein for degradation. When oxygen availability is low, however, VHL no longer undergoes modification and therefore cannot bind to HIF, which allows HIF activation, and hence cell proliferation, to persist.

The realization that persistent HIF activity enables tumour cells to grow despite a lack of oxygen was critical to furthering scientists’ understanding of tumour growth and behaviour, since tumour cells, especially those deep within tumour masses, typically are starved of oxygen. The findings gave impetus to the development of anticancer drugs that block HIF activity; particularly successful were new treatments for kidney cancer. Kaelin also carried out research on other tumour suppressor proteins, including the retinoblastoma tumour suppressor protein, mutation of which contributes to retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer that arises in childhood,

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Kaelin was the recipient of numerous other awards and honours throughout his career, including the Canada Gairdner International Award (2010) and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2016). He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1987) and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2010).

Details

William G. Kaelin Jr. (born November 23, 1957) is an American Nobel laureate physician-scientist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory studies tumor suppressor proteins. In 2016, Kaelin received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019 along with Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.

Early life and education

Kaelin was born in New York City on November 23, 1957, to William George and Nancy Priscilla (Horn) Kaelin. Kaelin earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry at Duke University, and stayed to attain an MD, graduating in 1982. He did his residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his fellowship in oncology at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). After deciding as an undergraduate that research was not a strength of his, at DFCI he did research in the lab of David Livingston, where he found success in the study of retinoblastoma. In 1992, he set up his own lab at DFCI down the hall from Livingston's where he investigated hereditary forms of cancer such as von Hippel–Lindau disease. He became a professor at Harvard Medical School in 2002.

Career

He became assistant director of Basic Science at the Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in 2008. His research at Dana–Farber has focused on understanding the role of mutations in tumor suppressor genes in cancer development. His major work has been on the retinoblastoma, von Hippel–Lindau, and p53 tumor suppressor genes.

His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and others.

He serves as vice-chair of Scientific Programs on the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Board of Directors and Chair of the Damon Runyon Physician-Scientist Training Award selection committee and is a member of the board of directors at Eli Lilly and the Stand Up to Cancer scientific advisory committee.

Research

Following his post-doctorate, Kaelin set up a laboratory at Dana-Farber in 1993 to continue his research on tumor suppression. He had become interested in Von Hippel–Lindau disease (VHL). VHL tumors, caused by gene mutation, were known to be angiogenic, creating blood vessels that secreted erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone known to be part of the body's mechanic to react to hypoxia, or low oxygen levels in the blood. Kaelin hypothesized that there may be a connection between the formation of VHL tumors and the deficiency of the body to detect oxygen. Kaelin's research found that in VHL subjects, there are genes that express the formation of a protein critical in the EPO process, but which the mutation suppressed. Kaelin's work aligned with that of Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza who separately had identified a two-part protein, hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) that was essential to EPO production and which was triggered by oxygen levels in the blood. Kaelin's work found that the VHL protein would help regulate the HIF, and in subjects where the VHL proteins were not present, the HIF would overproduce EPO and lead to cancer. The combined work of Kaelin, Ratcliffe, and Semenza identified the pathway of how cells detect and react to oxygen levels in the blood, and have led to the development of drugs to help patients with anaemia and kidney failure.

Personal life

He was married to breast cancer surgeon Carolyn Kaelin from 1988 until her death from glioblastoma in 2015. They have two children.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-23 15:56:04

2200) Peter J. Ratcliffe

Gist:

Peter Ratcliffe was born in Lancashire in Great Britain. He studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and completed medical school at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. After additional studies at the universities in Oxford and Cambridge, he completed his doctorate in Cambridge in 1987. He has since worked at the University of Oxford and since 2016 also at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Animals need oxygen for the conversion of food into useful energy. The importance of oxygen has been understood for centuries, but how cells adapt to changes in levels of oxygen has long been unknown. William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe, and Gregg Semenza discovered how cells can sense and adapt to changing oxygen availability. During the 1990s they identified a molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen. The discoveries may lead to new treatments of anemia, cancer and many other diseases.

Summary

Peter J. Ratcliffe (born May 14, 1954, Lancashire, England) is a British physician and scientist known for his research into the regulation of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production in response to low blood oxygen levels, and for his research into the mechanisms cells use to sense oxygen. His discoveries pertaining to cellular oxygen-sensing mechanisms earned him a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with American scientists William G. Kaelin, Jr., and Gregg L. Semenza).

Ratcliffe attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School from 1965 to 1971 and later studied medicine at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. In 1978 he completed bachelor’s degrees in medicine and surgery at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and in 1987 he graduated from Cambridge with a medical degree. He subsequently went to the University of Oxford to study renal medicine with a particular interest in oxygen delivery to renal tissues. In 1989 he established a laboratory at Oxford in order to focus his research specifically on cellular oxygen-sensing pathways and erythropoietin regulation. From 2004 to 2016 he served as head of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford. In 2016 he was appointed director of Oxford’s Target Discovery Institute and clinical research director at the Francis Crick Institute, London.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ratcliffe was starting his research, it was known that erythropoeitin is produced by kidney cells when blood oxygen levels are reduced. However, Ratcliffe’s investigations of erythropoeitin production led to the realization that cells in multiple other organs, including the brain and the liver, also are equipped with oxygen-sensing abilties. He also found that cellular responses to oxygen availability affect other processes in cells, such as differentiation and metabolism. In particular, Ratcliffe and Kaelin, working independently, discovered that a chemical modification known as prolyl hydroxylation on a molecule called hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) dictates how cells respond to changes in oxygen levels. When the modification is present, HIF is marked for degradation. When absent, HIF persists, and key cellular processes are altered to facilitate adaptation to hypoxic conditions, thereby enabling cells to continue to grow and replicate. The findings were especially significant for their impact on scientists’ understanding of cancer: tumours often thrive under hypoxic conditions, which is in large part due to elevated HIF activity.

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Ratcliffe was honoured with various other awards during his career. In 2010 he received the Canada Gairdner International Award, and in 2016 he shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Kaelin and Semenza. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2002 and was knighted in 2014.

Details

Sir Peter John Ratcliffe, (born 14 May 1954) is a British physician-scientist who is trained as a nephrologist. He was a practising clinician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2016. He has been a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 2004. In 2016 he became Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute, retaining a position at Oxford as a member of the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and director of the Target Discovery Institute, University of Oxford.

Ratcliffe is best known for his work on cellular reactions to hypoxia, for which he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with William Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza.

Education and training

Ratcliffe was born in Lancashire on 14 May 1954, to William Ratcliffe, a lawyer, and Alice Margaret Ratcliffe. He attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School from 1965 to 1972.

He won an open scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1972 to study Medicine at the University of Cambridge and then completed his MB BChir medical degree with distinction at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in 1978.

Ratcliffe then trained in renal medicine at Oxford University, focusing on renal oxygenation. He earned a higher MD degree from University of Cambridge in 1987.

Career

In 1990, Ratcliffe received a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship to study cellular responses to hypoxia from low oxygen levels in the blood. From 1992 to 2004 he was senior research fellow in clinical medicine at Jesus College, Oxford. In 2002, Ratcliffe was accepted into the Academy of Medical Sciences and was appointed the following year the Nuffield Professor and head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford.

Research

In 1989, Ratcliffe established a laboratory in Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Medicine to explore the regulation of erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone released by the kidneys and responsible for stimulating the production of red blood cells. EPO was known to be produced by the kidneys in response to low oxygen levels, and Ratcliffe's work looked to understand the mechanisms of how the kidneys detected hypoxia (low oxygen levels in the blood) to trigger EPO production. From his studies, Ratcliffe discovered that the mRNA from kidneys that were part of the EPO production pathway that were capable of detecting hypoxia was also present in several other organs, both human and animal, including the spleen, brain, and testes. His group found that cells from these organs could switch on EPO production when deprived of oxygen. Further, Ratcliffe was able to modify other cells using the identified mRNA to give these cells oxygen-sensing capabilities.

Building on these discoveries, the Ratcliffe group, along with joint studies with William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza, helped to uncover a detailed molecular chain of events that cells use to sense oxygen. A specific step identified was the binding of proteins expressed by the Von Hippel–Lindau tumor suppressor gene (VHL) to hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF), a transcription factor which trans-activates the EPO gene. Ratcliffe found that the VHL protein can bind a hydroxylated residues of HIF when oxygen is present at acceptable levels; the VHL protein then ubiquitylates the HIF protein which ultimately leads to the HIF protein's destruction. When oxygen levels fall, oxygen-requiring HIF hydroxylase enzymes, PHD1, 2 and 3 no longer act and VHL does not bind HIF, allowing HIF to remain and activate the EPO gene. This is a process that takes minutes to complete allowing the body to react quickly to hypoxia.

This same pathway is also switched on in many cancer tumours, allowing them to create new blood vessels to sustain their growth. Much of the current understanding of hypoxia has emerged from the laboratory of Ratcliffe. The understanding of the molecular pathway of EPO production from hypoxia has led to the development of drugs that block VHL from binding with HIF to help treat patients with anaemia and kidney failure.

Personal life

Ratcliffe married Fiona Mary MacDougall in 1983.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-24 16:29:51

2201) Gregg L. Semenza

Gist:

Gregg Semenza was born in New York City. After studying medical genetics at Harvard University, he pursued doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, receiving his doctorate there in 1984. After completing his pediatric training, he began working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is still active.

Animals need oxygen for the conversion of food into useful energy. The importance of oxygen has been understood for centuries, but how cells adapt to changes in levels of oxygen has long been unknown. William Kaelin, Peter Ratcliffe, and Gregg Semenza discovered how cells can sense and adapt to changing oxygen availability. During the 1990s they identified a molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen. The discoveries may lead to new treatments of anemia, cancer and many other diseases

Summary

Gregg L. Semenza (born 1956, New York City, New York) is an American physician and scientist known for his investigations of how cells use and regulate oxygen and for his discovery of hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF), a molecule that is activated by reduced oxygen availability in cells and that plays a critical role in enabling cells to survive in certain disease states. Semenza’s research opened a door for the investigation and development of novel treatments for diseases such as cancer and ischemic cardiovascular disease, in which reduced oxygen availability is a major feature of disease. For his discoveries he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with American scientist William G. Kaelin, Jr., and British scientist Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe).

Semenza attended Harvard University, where he studied pediatric genetics, focusing primarily on chromosomal alterations in Down syndrome, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1978. He continued his education at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1984 with medical and doctorate degrees. In 1986, having completed an internship and a residency in pediatrics at Duke University, Semenza pursued postdoctoral studies in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He remained at Johns Hopkins for the duration of his career, joining the faculty in 1990 and establishing his own laboratory there. He later served as director of the Vascular Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.

In the late 1980s Semenza became curious about the mechanisms underlying cellular responses to changes in oxygen availability. Although researchers understood that a hormone known as erythropoietin was produced by cells in response to hypoxia (low-oxygen conditions), virtually nothing was known about the genetic mechanisms controlling this response. Semenza’s search for genetic factors that control how cells react to low oxygen levels led him to discover HIF. He and colleagues found that HIF directs a wide array of cellular responses to oxygen availability and, in particular, dictates responses to hypoxic conditions. Semenza observed that HIF levels increase significantly under hypoxia, whereas HIF expression is decreased under normal oxygen conditions. He subsequently investigated the role of HIF in cancer, where elevated HIF expression enables tumour cells to thrive and proliferate under hypoxic conditions, and investigated novel therapies for ischemic cardiovascular disease, which is characterized by reduced blood flow, and hence reduced oxygen delivery, to the heart.

Semenza was recognized for his work with multiple awards throughout his career. He shared the 2010 Canada Gairdner International Award and the 2016 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Kaelin and Ratcliffe. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2008) and the National Academy of Medicine (2012).

Details

Gregg Leonard Semenza (born July 12, 1956) is an American pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had thirteen research papers retracted due to falsified data.

Early life

Semenza was born on July 12, 1956, in Flushing, New York City; he and his four siblings grew up in Westchester County, New York. His father's family was of Italian descent whereas his mother’s family was of German-English-Irish descent.

Education and career

Semenza grew up in Westchester County, New York and attended Washington Irving Intermediate School in Tarrytown, New York. He then attended Sleepy Hollow High School where he was a mid-fielder on the soccer team and graduated in 1974. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he studied medical genetics and mapped genes on chromosome 21. For his MD-PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, he sequenced genes linked to the recessive genetic disorder, beta-thalassemia. Semenza subsequently completed his Pediatrics residency at Duke University before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.[7] Semenza became the founding director of the Vascular Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering following his post-doctorate.

Research

While a post-doctorate researcher at Johns Hopkins, Semenza evaluated gene expression in transgenic animals to determine how this affected the production of erythropoietin (EPO), known to be part of the means for the body to react to hypoxia, or low oxygen levels in the blood. Semenza identified the gene sequences that expressed hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) proteins. Semenza's work showed that the HIF proteins consisted of two parts; HIF-1β, a stable base to most conditions, and HIF-1α that deteriorated when nominal oxygen levels were present. HIF-1α was further found essential to the EPO production process, as test subjects modified to be deficient in HIF-1α were found to have malformed blood vessels and decreased EPO levels. These HIF proteins were found across multiple test animals. Semenza further found that HIF-1α overproduction could lead to cancer in other subjects.

Semenza's research overlapped with that of William Kaelin and Peter J. Ratcliffe on determining the mechanism of oxygen detection in cells, and how EPO production is regulated by HIF and other factors. This has led to the development of drugs that help regulate these processes for patients with anaemia and kidney failure.

Retractions

In 2011 Semenza retracted from Biochemical Journal one paper coauthored with Naoki Mori (and other collaborators), and in 2022 retracted four papers from PNAS according to Retraction Watch. As of 2022, concerns about the integrity of images in 52 articles coauthored by Semenza have been raised on PubPeer. This has led to investigations by the journals where these articles appeared, resulting in many corrections, retractions and expressions of concern.

In 2023, additional papers in PNAS and Oncogene were retracted.

As of 2024, Semenza has had 13 of his research papers retracted due to data falsification via improper manipulation and/or duplication of images.

Personal life

Semenza is married to Laura Kasch-Semenza, whom he had met while at Johns Hopkins, and who currently operates one of the university's genotyping facilities.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-25 16:55:07

2202) Roger Penrose

Gist:

Work

A black hole is a supermassive compact object with a gravitational force so large that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. In 1964, Roger Penrose proposed critical mathematical tools to describe black holes. He showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity means the formation of black holes must be seen as a natural process in the development of the universe. He was also able to describe black holes in detail: at their farthest depths is a singularity where all known laws of nature dissolve.

Summary

Roger Penrose (born August 8, 1931, Colchester, Essex, England) is a British mathematician and relativist who in the 1960s calculated many of the basic features of black holes. For his work on black holes, he was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics. He shared the prize with American astronomer Andrea Ghez and German astronomer Reinhard Genzel.

After obtaining a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from the University of Cambridge in 1957, Penrose held temporary posts at a number of universities in both England and the United States. From 1964 to 1973 he served as reader and eventually professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College, London. From 1973 he held the Rouse-Ball Chair of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He was knighted for his services to science in 1994.

In 1969, with Stephen Hawking, Penrose proved that all matter within a black hole collapses to a singularity, a geometric point in space where mass is compressed to infinite density and zero volume. Penrose also developed a method of mapping the regions of space-time surrounding a black hole. (Space-time is a four-dimensional continuum comprising three dimensions of space and one of time.) Such a map, which is called a Penrose diagram, allows one to visualize the effects of gravitation upon an entity approaching a black hole. He also discovered Penrose tiling, in which a set of shapes can be used to cover a plane without using a repeating pattern.

Penrose became interested in the problem of defining consciousness and wrote two books in which he argued that quantum mechanics is needed to explain the conscious mind—The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) and Shadows of the Mind (1994). He also wrote The Road to Reality (2004), an extensive overview of mathematics and physics. In Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (2010), Penrose posited his theory of conformal cyclic cosmology, formulating the Big Bang as an endlessly recurring event. He received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 2008.

Details

Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.

Penrose has contributed to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity".

Early life and education

Born in Colchester, Essex, Roger Penrose is a son of physician Margaret (née Leathes) and psychiatrist and geneticist Lionel Penrose. His paternal grandparents were J. Doyle Penrose, an Irish-born artist, and The Hon. Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, daughter of Alexander Peckover, 1st Baron Peckover; his maternal grandparents were physiologist John Beresford Leathes and Sonia Marie Natanson, a Russian Jew. His uncle was artist Sir Roland Penrose, whose son with American photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of physicist Oliver Penrose, of geneticist Shirley Hodgson and of chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Their stepfather was the mathematician and computer scientist Max Newman.

Penrose spent World War II as a child in Canada where his father worked in London, Ontario at the Ontario Hospital and Western University. Penrose studied at University College School. He then attended University College London, where he obtained a BSc degree with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1952.

In 1955, while a doctoral student, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse, after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar in 1951. Having started research under the professor of geometry and astronomy, Sir W. V. D. Hodge, Penrose received his PhD in algebraic geometry at St John's College, Cambridge in 1957, with his thesis titled "Tensor Methods in Algebraic Geometry" supervised by algebraist and geometer John A. Todd.[24] He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s in collaboration with his father, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form", and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose.

As reviewer Manjit Kumar puts it:

As a student in 1954, Penrose was attending a conference in Amsterdam when by chance he came across an exhibition of Escher's work. Soon he was trying to conjure up impossible figures of his own and discovered the tribar – a triangle that looks like a real, solid three-dimensional object, but isn't. Together with his father, a physicist and mathematician, Penrose went on to design a staircase that simultaneously loops up and down. An article followed and a copy was sent to Escher. Completing a cyclical flow of creativity, the Dutch master of geometrical illusions was inspired to produce his two masterpieces.

Research and career

Penrose spent the academic year 1956–57 as an assistant lecturer at Bedford College (now Royal Holloway, University of London) and was then a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. During that three-year post, he married Joan Isabel Wedge, in 1959. Before the fellowship ended Penrose won a NATO Research Fellowship for 1959–61, first at Princeton and then at Syracuse University. Returning to the University of London, Penrose spent 1961–63 as a researcher at King's College, London, before returning to the United States to spend 1963–64 as a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He later held visiting positions at Yeshiva University, Princeton and Cornell during 1966–67 and 1969.

In 1964, while a reader at Birkbeck College, London, (and having had his attention drawn from pure mathematics to astrophysics by the cosmologist Dennis Sciama, then at Cambridge) in the words of Kip Thorne of Caltech, "Roger Penrose revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime". Until then, work on the curved geometry of general relativity had been confined to configurations with sufficiently high symmetry for Einstein's equations to be solvable explicitly, and there was doubt about whether such cases were typical. One approach to this issue was by the use of perturbation theory, as developed under the leadership of John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. The other, and more radically innovative, approach initiated by Penrose was to overlook the detailed geometrical structure of spacetime and instead concentrate attention just on the topology of the space, or at most its conformal structure, since it is the latter – as determined by the lay of the lightcones – that determines the trajectories of lightlike geodesics, and hence their causal relationships. The importance of Penrose's epoch-making paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" (summarised roughly as that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form some kind of singularity) was not its only result. It also showed a way to obtain similarly general conclusions in other contexts, notably that of the cosmological Big Bang, which he dealt with in collaboration with Sciama's most famous student, Stephen Hawking.

It was in the local context of gravitational collapse that the contribution of Penrose was most decisive, starting with his 1969 cosmic censorship conjecture, to the effect that any ensuing singularities would be confined within a well-behaved event horizon surrounding a hidden space-time region for which Wheeler coined the term black hole, leaving a visible exterior region with strong but finite curvature, from which some of the gravitational energy may be extractable by what is known as the Penrose process, while accretion of surrounding matter may release further energy that can account for astrophysical phenomena such as quasars.

Following up his "weak cosmic censorship hypothesis", Penrose went on, in 1979, to formulate a stronger version called the "strong censorship hypothesis". Together with the Belinski–Khalatnikov–math conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in general relativity. Also from 1979, dates Penrose's influential Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the universe and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose and James Terrell independently realised that objects travelling near the speed of light will appear to undergo a peculiar skewing or rotation. This effect has come to be called the Terrell rotation or Penrose–Terrell rotation.

In 1967, Penrose invented the twistor theory, which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2).

Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. In 1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams).

In 1983, Penrose was invited to teach at Rice University in Houston, by the then provost Bill Gordon. He worked there from 1983 to 1987.[49] His doctoral students have included, among others, Andrew Hodges,[50] Lane Hughston, Richard Jozsa, Claude LeBrun, John McNamara, Tristan Needham, Tim Poston, Asghar Qadir, and Richard S. Ward.

In 2004, Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page comprehensive guide to the Laws of Physics that includes an explanation of his own theory. The Penrose Interpretation predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference of space-time curvature attains a significant level.

Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-26 16:15:28

2203) Reinhard Genzel

Gist:

Work

A black hole is a supermassive compact object with a gravitational force so large that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Since nothing, not even light, can escape black holes, they can only be observed by the radiation and the movement of nearby objects. Since the 1990s, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a super massive black hole.

Summary

Reinhard Genzel (born March 24, 1952, Bad Homburg, West Germany) is a German astronomer who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. He shared the prize with British mathematician Roger Penrose and American astronomer Andrea Ghez.

Genzel received a diploma in physics from the University of Bonn in 1975 and a doctorate in physics and astronomy from the same institution in 1978. From 1978 to 1980 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1981 he became an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and he became a full professor there in 1985. From 1986 he divided his time between Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, where he was director.

Genzel and his collaborators began studying the galactic centre in 1992 with the New Technology Telescope in Chile. They used a camera that worked near the diffraction limit of the telescope to study how stars near the centre of the Galaxy changed their positions over years. By measuring the velocity of these stars’ orbits, they found that the centre of the Galaxy was a point source, not an extended source such as a stellar cluster. (Ghez and her collaborators performed similar observations at the same time, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.) Beginning in 2002, Genzel and his collaborators used adaptive optics (in which the telescope mirror changes shape to remove the effects of atmospheric distortion) at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. By measuring the orbit of a particular star, which went around the galactic centre every 15.2 years and came within 17 light-hours of the centre at its closest approach, the team found that the central source had a mass about four million times that of the Sun and thus was a supermassive black hole.

Details

Reinhard Genzel (born 24 March 1952) is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel [de]; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.

Life and career

Genzel was born in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany, the son of Eva-Maria Genzel and Ludwig Genzel, a professor of solid state physics (1922–2003). He studied physics at the University of Freiburg and the University of Bonn, graduating in 1978 with a PhD in radioastronomy which he prepared at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.[6] Subsequently he worked at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a Miller Fellow from 1980 until 1982, and also Associate and finally Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981. In 1986, he left Berkeley to become a director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching and Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. During that time he also lectured at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he has been Honorary Professor since 1988. From 1999 to 2016, he also had a part-time joint appointment as Full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Additional activities include sitting on the selection committee for the Shaw Prize in astronomy.

Work

Reinhard Genzel studies infrared- and submillimetre astronomy. He and his group are active in developing ground- and space-based instruments for astronomy. They used these to track the motions of stars at the centre of the Milky Way, around Sagittarius A*, and show that they were orbiting a very massive object, now known to be a black hole. Genzel is also active in studies of the formation and evolution of galaxies.

In July 2018, Reinhard Genzel et al. reported that star S2 orbiting Sgr A* had been recorded at 7,650 km/s or 2.55% the speed of light leading up to the pericentre approach in May 2018 at about 120 AU ≈ 1400 Schwarzschild radii from Sgr A*. This allowed them to test the redshift predicted by general relativity at relativistic velocities, finding additional confirmation of the theory.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-03-31 22:57:39

2204) Andrea M. Ghez

Gist:

Work

A black hole is a supermassive compact object with a gravitational force so large that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Since nothing, not even light, can escape black holes, they can only be observed by the radiation and the movement of nearby objects. Since the 1990s, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a super massive black hole.

Summary

Andrea Ghez (born June 16, 1965, New York, New York) is an American astronomer who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. She shared the prize with British mathematician Roger Penrose and German astronomer Reinhard Genzel. She was the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, after Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).

Ghez received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and a doctorate in the same subject from the California Institute of Technology in 1992. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona from 1992 to 1993, and she then became an assistant professor in physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994. She became a full professor in 2000.

Ghez began her career in astronomy studying young binary stars using the technique of infrared speckle imaging, which removes the blurring Earth’s atmosphere imposes on astronomical images by taking many pictures with very short exposure times and adding them together. Beginning in 1995, Ghez and her collaborators began using speckle imaging and later adaptive optics (which moves the telescope mirror to compensate for atmospheric distortion) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study stars near the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. (Genzel and his collaborators performed similar observations at the same time with the New Technology Telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile.) With the improved resolution, they could identify individual stars and follow their orbits around the galactic centre. They found that the centre of the galaxy was coincident with the bright radio source, Sagittarius A*. The dark central object has a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun and is too small to be an extended source like a stellar cluster. Sagittarius A*, the centre of the galaxy, is thus a supermassive black hole.

Details

Andrea Mia Ghez (born June 16, 1965) is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

In 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing one half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel (the other half being awarded to Roger Penrose). The Nobel Prize was awarded to Ghez and Genzel for their discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole, in the Milky Way's Galactic Center.

Early life

Ghez was born in New York City. She is the daughter of Susanne (née Gayton) and Gilbert Ghez. Her father, of Jewish heritage, was born in Rome, Italy, to a family originally from Tunisia and Frankfurt, Germany. Her mother was from an Irish Catholic family from North Attleborough, Massachusetts.

In 1969, her father completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University and accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where as the child of a faculty member Ghez was able to attend the Laboratory School. The Apollo program Moon landings inspired Ghez to aspire to be the first female astronaut, and her mother encouraged that goal by purchasing a telescope. Her most influential female role model was her high school chemistry teacher.

She began college by majoring in mathematics, then changed to physics. She received a BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. While there, she was a member of the fraternity of St. Anthony Hall. She received a PhD under the direction of Gerry Neugebauer at the California Institute of Technology in 1992.

Career

Ghez's research employs high spatial resolution imaging techniques, such as the adaptive optics system at the Keck telescopes, to study star-forming regions and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*. She uses the kinematics of stars near the center of the Milky Way as a probe to investigate this region. The high resolution of the Keck telescopes gave a significant improvement over the first major study of galactic center kinematics by Reinhard Genzel's group.

In 2004, Ghez was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2012, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[25][26] In 2019, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Ghez has appeared in many television documentaries produced by networks such as the BBC, Discovery Channel, and The History Channel. In 2006 she was in an episode of the PBS series Nova. She was identified as a Science Hero by The My Hero Project. In 2000, Discover magazine listed Ghez as one of 20 promising young American scientists in their respective fields.

Black hole at the Galactic Center (Sgr A*)

By imaging the Galactic Center at infrared wavelengths, Ghez and her colleagues have been able to peer through heavy dust that blocks visible light, to reveal images of the center of the Milky Way. Thanks to the 10-meter aperture of the W.M. Keck Telescope and the use of adaptive optics to correct for the turbulence of the atmosphere, these images of the Galactic Center are at very high spatial resolution and have made it possible to follow the orbits of stars around the black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The partial orbits of many stars orbiting the black hole at the Galactic Center have been observed. One of the stars, S2, has made a complete elliptical orbit since detailed observations began in 1995. Several decades more will be required to completely document the orbits of some of these stars. These measurements may provide a test of the theory of general relativity. In October 2012, a second star, S0-102, was identified by her team at UCLA, orbiting the Galactic Center. Using Kepler's third law, Ghez's team used the orbital motion to show that the mass of Sgr A* is 4.1±0.6 million solar masses. Because the Galactic Center where Sgr A* is located, is one hundred times closer than M31 where the next nearest supermassive black hole (M31*) is, it is one of the best demonstrated cases for a supermassive black hole.

In 2020, Ghez shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel, for their discoveries relating to black holes. Ghez and Genzel were awarded one half of the prize for their discovery that a supermassive black hole most likely governs the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way. Ghez was the fourth woman to win the physics Nobel since its inception, being preceded by Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-01 17:19:01

2205) Emmanuelle Charpentier

Gist:

Work

The life processes of organisms are controlled by genes made up of sections of DNA. In 2012, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna developed a method for high-precision genome editing. They used the immune system of a bacterium, which disables viruses by cutting their DNA up with a type of genetic scissors. By extracting and simplifying the genetic scissors' molecular components, they made it generally applicable. The CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors can lead to new scientific discoveries, better crops and new weapons in the fight against cancer and genetic diseases.

Summary

Emmanuelle Charpentier (born December 11, 1968, Juvisy-sur-Orge, France) is a French scientist who discovered, with American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, a molecular tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9. Their discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 in 2012 laid the foundation for gene editing, whereby researchers are able to make very specific changes to DNA sequences. CRISPR-Cas9 was far simpler and more efficient than earlier tools to modify genetic sequences. For their discoveries, Charpentier and Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Charpentier grew up near Paris and had diverse interests as a youth. She attended the Pierre and Marie Curie University (later part of Sorbonne University) for undergraduate studies, earning a degree in biochemistry in 1992. Her graduate studies were carried out at the Pasteur Institute, where she investigated segments of bacterial DNA that move around the genome and transfer drug resistance between cells. In 1995 she completed a doctorate in microbiology and remained at the Pasteur Institute for the next year, working as a postdoctoral researcher. She continued her postdoctoral studies at Rockefeller University in New York. After working as an assistant research scientist at New York University Medical Center, she became a research associate at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis and subsequently the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in New York.

In 2002 Charpentier returned to Europe, taking a research position at the University of Vienna. There she discovered a regulatory RNA molecule that controls virulence factors in Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. With the help of molecular microbiologist Jörg Vogel at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Charpentier identified small novel RNAs in the S. pyogenes genome and started investigating the bacteria’s CRISPR system, which the organism uses as part of its defense against viruses. She discovered that the S. pyogenes CRISPR system consists of three components, tracrRNA (trans-activating CRISPR RNA), CRISPR RNA, and Cas9 protein—a far simpler organization than she had anticipated.

In 2009 Charpentier continued her investigation of the CRISPR system at Umeå Centre for Microbial Research in Sweden. With the assistance of Elitza Deltcheva, who had been a graduate student in Charpentier’s laboratory in Vienna, Charpentier showed how the CRISPR system could cut and modify DNA at specific locations in the genome. In particular, Deltcheva provided evidence that tracrRNA and CRISPR RNA interact to guide Cas9 to specific DNA sequences. Charpentier, Vogel, and Deltcheva reported their discoveries in 2010. The following year Charpentier met Doudna. The two researchers quickly set to work on a collaboration that culminated in their discovery in 2012 of the mechanism by which Cas9 cleaves DNA. The system subsequently was used with great success to target and modify specific sequences in the genomes of various organisms.

In 2013 Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics, a company that employed CRISPR methodology for gene therapy in humans, with operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. Charpentier was a member of the company’s scientific advisory board. In 2015, after a two-year stint at Hannover Medical School in Germany, Charpentier moved her laboratory to the Max Planck Institute.

Charpentier was recognized with numerous honours and awards, including the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016) and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (2018). She was an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2015) and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2018).

Details

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (born 11 December 1968) is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing" (through CRISPR). This was the first science Nobel Prize ever won by two women only.

Early life and education

Born in 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge in France, Charpentier studied biochemistry, microbiology, and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (which became the Faculty of Science of Sorbonne University) in Paris. She was a graduate student at the Institut Pasteur from 1992 to 1995 and was awarded a research doctorate. Charpentier's PhD work investigated molecular mechanisms involved in antibiotic resistance. Her paternal grandfather, surnamed Sinanian, was an Armenian who escaped to France during the Armenian Genocide and met his wife in Marseille.

Career and research

Charpentier worked as a university teaching assistant at Pierre and Marie Curie University from 1993 to 1995 and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur from 1995 to 1996. She moved to the US and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York from 1996 to 1997. During this time, Charpentier worked in the lab of microbiologist Elaine Tuomanen. Tuomanen's lab investigated how the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae utilizes mobile genetic elements to alter its genome. Charpentier also helped to demonstrate how S. pneumoniae develops vancomycin resistance.

Charpentier was an assistant research scientist at the New York University Medical Center from 1997 to 1999. She worked in the lab of Pamela Cowin, a skin-cell biologist interested in mammalian gene manipulation. Charpentier published a paper exploring the regulation of hair growth in mice. She held the position of Research Associate at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in New York from 1999 to 2002.

After five years in the United States, Charpentier returned to Europe and became the lab head and a guest professor at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Vienna, from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, Charpentier published her discovery of an RNA molecule involved in the regulation of virulence-factor synthesis in Streptococcus pyogenes. From 2004 to 2006 she was lab head and an assistant professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology. In 2006 she became a privatdozentin (Microbiology) and received her habilitation at the Centre of Molecular Biology. From 2006 to 2009 she worked as lab head and associate professor at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories.

Charpentier moved to Sweden and became lab head and associate professor at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), at Umeå University. She held the position of group leader from 2008 to 2013 and was visiting professor from 2014 to 2017. She moved to Germany to act as department head and W3 Professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig and the Hannover Medical School from 2013 until 2015. In 2014 she became an Alexander von Humboldt Professor.

In 2015 Charpentier accepted an offer from the German Max Planck Society to become a scientific member of the society and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. Since 2016, she has been an Honorary Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin; since 2018, she is the Founding and acting director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. Charpentier retained her position as visiting professor at Umeå University until the end of 2017 when a new donation from the Kempe Foundations and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation allowed her to offer more young researchers positions within research groups of the MIMS Laboratory.

CRISPR/Cas9

Charpentier is best known for her Nobel-winning work of deciphering the molecular mechanisms of a bacterial immune system, called CRISPR/Cas9, and repurposing it into a tool for genome editing. In particular, she uncovered a novel mechanism for the maturation of a non-coding RNA which is pivotal in the function of CRISPR/Cas9. Specifically, Charpentier demonstrated that a small RNA called tracrRNA is essential for the maturation of crRNA.

In 2011, Charpentier met Jennifer Doudna at a research conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and they began a collaboration. Working with Doudna's laboratory, Charpentier's laboratory showed that Cas9 could be used to make cuts in any DNA sequence desired. The method they developed involved the combination of Cas9 with easily created synthetic "guide RNA" molecules. Synthetic guide RNA is a chimera of crRNA and tracrRNA; therefore, this discovery demonstrated that the CRISPR-Cas9 technology could be used to edit the genome with relative ease. Researchers worldwide have employed this method successfully to edit the DNA sequences of plants, animals, and laboratory cell lines. Since its discovery, CRISPR has revolutionized genetics by allowing scientists to edit genes to probe their role in health and disease and to develop genetic therapies with the hope that it will prove safer and more effective than the first generation of gene therapies.

In 2013, Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics along with Shaun Foy and Rodger Novak.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-02 15:54:04

2206) Jennifer Doudna

Gist:

Work

The life processes of organisms are controlled by genes made up of sections of DNA. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier developed a method for high-precision genome editing. They used the immune system of a bacterium, which disables viruses by cutting their DNA up with a type of genetic scissors. By extracting and simplifying the genetic scissors' molecular components, they made it generally applicable. The CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors can lead to new scientific discoveries, better crops and new weapons in the fight against cancer and genetic diseases.

Summary

Jennifer Doudna (born February 19, 1964, Washington, D.C.) is an American biochemist best known for her discovery, with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, of a molecular tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9. The discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, made in 2012, provided the foundation for gene editing, enabling researchers to make specific changes to DNA sequences in a way that was far more efficient and technically simpler than earlier methods. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 system, scientists were able to alter DNA to correct genetic defects in animals and modify DNA sequences in embryonic stem cells, an advance that opened the path to germ-line (sperm and egg) genome modification in humans. Doudna and Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery and development of gene editing technologies.

Doudna spent much of her youth in Hilo, Hawaii. After earning a degree in chemistry in 1985 from Pomona College in California, she went to Harvard University. There she worked in the laboratory of English-born American biochemist and geneticist Jack W. Szostak (who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine) and in 1989 completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry. In 1994, following postdoctoral studies at the University of Colorado under the direction of American biochemist and molecular biologist Thomas R. Cech (who received a share of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry), she joined the faculty at Yale University. In 2002 she moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Early in her career Doudna worked to deduce the three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules, which provided insight on RNA catalytic activity. She later investigated the control of genetic information by certain small RNAs and became interested in CRISPR. CRISPR is part of the bacterial immune system. It originates with RNA sequences from invading viruses that become incorporated into bacterial genomes. The viral sequences reside as DNA in the spacers between short repeating blocks of bacterial DNA sequences. The next time the virus invades the bacterial cell, the spacer DNA is converted to RNA. The Cas9 enzyme and a second RNA molecule attach to the newly coded RNA, which then seeks out matching strands of viral DNA. When encountered, Cas9 cuts the viral DNA, preventing the virus’s replication. Doudna and Charpentier found that the guide RNA sequence could be changed to direct Cas9 to a precise DNA sequence. Their discovery quickly transformed the landscape of genome engineering, creating new opportunities for the treatment of human disease.

Genome engineering in humans was an inevitable result of rapid advances in genetic engineering technologies. However, little was known about its safety, and its use to edit human DNA renewed ethical concerns, particularly about whether genetic engineering technologies should be used to modify nondisease traits, such as intelligence. In early 2015 Doudna organized an effort that called for a moratorium on human genome editing, and in April of that year she and colleagues laid out a framework for immediate actions to safeguard the genomes of human embryos against modification. Despite the precautionary effort, however, in April 2015 Chinese scientists reported having altered human embryo genomes via CRISPR-Cas9.

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Doudna received numerous honours and awards for her research, including the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), both shared with Charpentier. Doudna was an elected member of multiple academies and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (from 1997).

Details

Jennifer Anne Doudna (born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.

In 2012, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were the first to propose that CRISPR-Cas9 (enzymes from bacteria that control microbial immunity) could be used for programmable editing of genomes, which has been called one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology. Since then, Doudna has been a leading figure in what is referred to as the "CRISPR revolution" for her fundamental work and leadership in developing CRISPR-mediated genome editing.

Doudna's awards and fellowships include the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her research on the structure of a ribozyme, as determined by X-ray crystallography and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, with Charpentier. She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), and the Japan Prize (2017). She was named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015, and in 2023 was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2020, Jennifer Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Emmanuelle Charpentier for the development of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, which has revolutionized molecular biology and holds immense potential for treating genetic diseases.

Early life and education

Jennifer Doudna was born February 19, 1964, in Washington, D.C., as the daughter of Dorothy Jane (Williams) and Martin Kirk Doudna. Her father received his PhD in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother held a master's degree in education. When Doudna was seven years old, the family moved to Hawaii so her father could accept a teaching position in American literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college.

Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its flora and fauna. Nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the underlying biological mechanisms of life. This was coupled with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit that her parents encouraged at home. Her father enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with many books on popular science. When Doudna was in the sixth grade, he gave her a copy of James Watson's 1968 book on the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix, which was a major inspiration. Doudna also developed her interest in science and mathematics in school. Even though Doudna was told that "Women don't go into science," she knew that she wanted to be a scientist no matter what. Nothing said to her made her doubt it, Doudna said, "When someone tells me I can't do something and I know that I can, it just makes me more resolved to do it."

While she attended Hilo High School, Doudna's interest in science was nurtured by her 10th-grade chemistry teacher, Jeanette Wong, whom she has routinely cited as a significant influence in sparking her nascent scientific curiosity. A visiting lecturer on cancer cells further encouraged her pursuit of science as a career choice. She spent a summer working in the University of Hawaii at Hilo lab of noted mycologist Don Hemmes and graduated from Hilo High School in 1981.

Doudna was an undergraduate student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she studied biochemistry. During her freshman year, while taking a course in general chemistry, she questioned her own ability to pursue a career in science, and considered switching her major to French as a sophomore. However, her French teacher suggested she stick with science. Chemistry professors Fred Grieman and Corwin Hansch at Pomona had a major impact on her. She started her first scientific research in the lab of professor Sharon Panasenko. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry in 1985. She chose Harvard Medical School for her doctoral study and earned a PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1989. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on a system that increased the efficiency of a self-replicating catalytic RNA and was supervised by Jack W. Szostak.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-03 17:06:43

2207) Harvey J. Alter

Gist:

Harvey James Alter, along with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Alter is a co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus.

Harvey Alter, M.D., is an NIH physician scientist and virologist best known for his work that led to the discovery of hepatitis B and C. For the latter work, on hepatitis C, he was awarded the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Alter came to the NIH in 1961 as a Clinical Associate. He left in 1964 to pursue residency and fellowship opportunities but returned to the NIH 1969 as in investigator in the Clinical Center’s Department of Transfusion Medicine. He became Chief of the Clinical Studies Section and, in 1987, Associate Director of Research in the Department of Transfusion Medicine.

Summary

Harvey J. Alter (born September 12, 1935, New York, New York) is an American physician and virologist known for his discoveries pertaining to viruses that cause hepatitis, particularly his contributions to the discovery and isolation of hepatitis C virus (HCV). His research laid the basis for the development of blood donor screening programs to prevent the transmission of hepatitis via blood transfusion. For his discovery of HCV, he was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with British-born virologist Michael Houghton and American virologist Charles M. Rice.

Alter was born to Jewish parents and was raised in New York City. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1956) and a medical degree (1960) from the University of Rochester. He remained there at Strong Memorial Hospital as a resident before transferring to Bethesda, Maryland, to work in the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Following a yearlong residency (1964–65) at the University of Washington in Seattle, Alter worked as a fellow in hematology (1965–66) at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He subsequently served as director of hematology research (1966–69) at Georgetown. In 1969 Alter returned to the NIH, joining the Department of Transfusion Medicine as a senior investigator, a position he held for the remainder of his career. In 1972 he became chief of the infectious diseases section and in 1987 associate director for research at the NIH Clinical Center, posts that he also maintained for the duration of his career.

Alter’s first major breakthrough came in the early 1960s while working at NIH, when he and American research physician Baruch S. Blumberg discovered the so-called Australia antigen. The researchers observed the antigen in the blood from an Australian aborigine and detected it in about 11 percent of American leukemia patients and in only a very small percentage of healthy Americans. The protein was subsequently identified as a surface antigen of hepatitis B virus (HBV). Alter helped develop an assay to detect the antigen, named HBsAg, in donor blood. The later development of a highly sensitive method of HBsAg detection in donor blood led to a dramatic decrease in transfusion-associated hepatitis (TAH).

In 1970s Alter and colleagues, during investigations of patients who developed TAH found that some patients were not positive for antigens to HBV, hepatitis A virus (HAV), or other viruses associated with the condition. Further studies, in which chimpanzees inoculated with non-A, non-B human plasma or serum developed hepatitis, led the researchers to conclude that a third transmissible agent was capable of causing TAH. In the mid-1980s Alter urged blood banks to test donor blood for hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc), which served as a surrogate marker for non-A, non-B hepatitis virus. Subsequent introduction of anti-HBc testing was associated with a further decline in TAH incidence to about 4 percent.

In 1989 Houghton and colleagues reported the isolation of a complementary DNA clone derived from the RNA genome of the non-A, non-B hepatitis agent. Later that year Alter and Houghton jointly reported the detection of HCV in transfusion patients who developed non-A, non-B hepatitis. In 1990 an assay for anti-HCV testing of donor blood was introduced, further reducing TAH incidence to just 1 percent. The later development of more sensitive assays led to the near elimination of TAH.

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Alter received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research (2000; shared with Houghton) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2013; shared with American virologist Daniel W. Bradley). Alter was an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2002) and the National Academy of Medicine (2002).

Details

Harvey James Alter (born September 12, 1935) is an American medical researcher, virologist, physician and Nobel Prize laureate, who is best known for his work that led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Alter is the former chief of the infectious disease section and the associate director for research of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. In the mid-1970s, Alter and his research team demonstrated that most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or hepatitis B viruses. Working independently, Alter and Edward Tabor, a scientist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proved through transmission studies in chimpanzees that a new form of hepatitis, initially called "non-A, non-B hepatitis" caused the infections, and that the causative agent was probably a virus. This work eventually led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus in 1988, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2020 along with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice.

Alter has received recognition for the research leading to the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award conferred to civilians in United States government public health service, and the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

Early life and education

Alter was born in New York City in a Jewish family. He attended the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956. In 1960, Alter obtained a medical degree from University of Rochester and began a residency at Strong Memorial. Alter's post-graduate training includes a rotation as a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from December 1961 to June 1964; a year of residency in medicine at University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, from July 1964 to June 1965; and work as a hematology fellow at Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, D.C., from July 1965 to June 1966.

Career

Alter has a medical license issued by the District of Columbia. Additionally he holds certification by the American Board of Pathology blood banking subspecialty and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians. Clinical appointments include: director, hematology research at Georgetown University Hospital from July 1966 to June 1969; senior investigator in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the NIH from July 1969 to present; chief of infectious diseases section at the department of transfusion medicine in the Clinical Center NIH from December 1972 to present; associate director for research at the department of transfusion medicine at the Clinical Center at NIH from January 1987 to present.

Alter's academic appointments include: clinical associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University Hospital; adjunct professor at Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, TX; clinical professor of medicine at Georgetown University Hospital; and a faculty position at Clinical Research Training Program at the NIH.

Alter came to the NIH Clinical Center as a senior investigator in 1969. He remains at the NIH as a chief of the infectious diseases section and associate director of research in the department of transfusion medicine.

Medical research

As a young research fellow in 1964, Alter co-discovered the Australia antigen with Baruch Blumberg. This work was a major factor in isolating the hepatitis B virus. Later, Alter led a Clinical Center project to store blood samples used to uncover the causes and reduce the risk of transfusion-associated hepatitis. Based on his work, the United States started blood and donor screening programs that lowered the cause of hepatitis due to this risk from 30 percent in 1970 to nearly 0.

In the mid-1970s, Alter and his research team demonstrated that most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A and hepatitis B viruses. Work by Alter, in collaboration with Bob Purcell, and work by Edward Tabor working simultaneously in another laboratory, proved through transmission studies in chimpanzees that a new form of hepatitis, initially called "non-A, non-B hepatitis" caused the infections. This work eventually led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. In 1988 the new hepatitis virus was confirmed by Alter's group by verifying its presence in their stored panel of NANBH specimens. In April 1989, the discovery of the non-A, non-B virus, renamed hepatitis C virus, was published in two articles in Science.

Honors and awards

Alter has received recognition for his research including the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for his work leading to the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C. Alter and his co-awardee Michael Houghton were recognized for the development of blood screening methods that essentially eliminated the risk of transfusion-associated hepatitis in the U.S. Other honors for his medical research include the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award conferred to civilians in United States government public health service. Alter has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. In 2002 he received The International Society of Blood Transfusion Presidential Award. In 2005, he received the American College of Physicians Award for Outstanding Work in Science as Related to Medicine, and the First International Prize of Inserm (the French equivalent of NIH). And in 2019, he's nominated for T. Washington Fellows.

Speaking of Alter's long research career at the time of the 2000 Lasker Award, Harvey Klein, chief of the Clinical Center Transfusion Medicine Department noted, "As a young research fellow, Dr. Alter co-discovered the Australia antigen, a key to detecting Hepatitis B virus. For many investigators that would be the highlight of a career. For Dr. Alter it was only an auspicious beginning."

Alter was awarded Grand Hamdan International Award - Gastroenterology by Hamdan Medical Award in 2016.

Alter was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice for "discoveries that led to the identification of [the] Hepatitis C virus."

Personal life

He married Barbara Bailey; they have two children, Mark, also an MD, and Stacey, a teacher. He is currently married to Diane Dowling and has two step children, Lydia Rodin and Erinn Torres, and nine grandchildren.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-04 17:08:34

2208) Michael Houghton

Gist:

Work

Hepatitis is a group of diseases that cause inflammation of the liver. It can be caused by different viruses that are transmitted through blood. After Harvey Alter had demonstrated that a previously unknown virus transmitted the disease, Michael Houghton and his colleagues were able to isolate the virus’s genome in 1989. The virus turned out to be an RNA virus from the Flavivirus family and was given the name the hepatitis C virus. The finding was an important step in developing blood tests and new medications that have saved millions of lives.

Summary

Michael Houghton (born 1949, United Kingdom) is a British-born virologist known for his contributions to the discovery of hepatitis C virus (HCV). The identification of HCV facilitated the development of improved blood screening tests and diagnostic methods for the detection of hepatitis caused specifically by HCV. For his breakthrough, Houghton was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with American virologists Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice.

Houghton was born into a working-class family; his father was a truck driver. After successfully passing exams, Houghton was admitted to a private high school. He later won a scholarship to study at the University of East Anglia, where he completed a degree in biological sciences in 1972. He then attended King’s College London for graduate studies. His research focused on elucidating the human beta interferon gene; interferons produced by the body’s cells are a key defense response against viruses. In 1977 Houghton graduated from King’s College, earning a doctoral degree in biochemistry.

Houghton subsequently moved to the United States. After a short period at the pharmaceutical manufacturer G.D. Searle & Company (later G.D. Searle, LLC, a subsidiary of Pfizer), he joined the California-based biotechnology firm Chiron Corporation. At Chiron, Houghton worked closely on investigations of non-A, non-B hepatitis with fellow Chiron scientists George Ching-Hung Kuo and Qui-Lim Choo and American virologist Daniel W. Bradley, who was based at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Using a complementary DNA library developed from blood plasma containing a non-A, non-B hepatitis virus, the researchers successfully identified a DNA clone derived from the HCV RNA genome. Houghton and colleagues subsequently developed an assay to screen for HCV in blood samples. The breakthrough facilitated the development of highly effective blood screening tests to prevent the transmission of HCV via blood transfusion. While at Chiron, Houghton also contributed to the discovery of the hepatitis D virus genome.

In 2007 Houghton left Chiron to join Epiphany Biosciences, where he was the chief scientific officer. Two years later he moved to Canada, having accepted the position of Li Ka Shing Professor of Virology at the University of Alberta. His later research focused on the development of an HCV vaccine.

Houghton received various honours and awards during his career, including the Robert Koch Prize (1993) and the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award (2000, shared with Alter). He declined the Canada Gairdner International Award (2013) because of its exclusion of his colleagues who helped identify HCV. In 2021 Houghton was made a knight.

Details

Sir Michael Houghton (born 1949) is a British scientist and Nobel Prize laureate. Along with Qui-Lim Choo, George Kuo and Daniel W. Bradley, he co-discovered Hepatitis C in 1989. He also co-discovered the Hepatitis D genome in 1986. The discovery of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) led to the rapid development of diagnostic reagents to detect HCV in blood supplies, which has reduced the risk of acquiring HCV through blood transfusion from one in three to about one in two million. It is estimated that antibody testing has prevented at least 40,000 new infections per year in the US alone and many more worldwide.

Houghton is currently Canada Excellence Research Chair in Virology and Li Ka Shing Professor of Virology at the University of Alberta, where he is also director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute. He was the co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice.

Early life and education

Born in the London in 1949 to Leonard George and Elsie Cressy Houghton, he was raised in a working-class family along with elder brother Graham. His father was a truck driver and union official.[6] He received his primary education at Lyndhurst Grove School, and then won a scholarship to Alleyn's School in Dulwich, London, where he went on to specialise in physics, chemistry and maths. He won a scholarship to study at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a lower second class honours degree in biological sciences in 1972, and subsequently completed a PhD in biochemistry from King's College London in 1977.

Career

Houghton joined G. D. Searle & Company before moving to Chiron Corporation in 1982. It was at Chiron that Houghton together with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, and Daniel W. Bradley from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, first discovered evidence for HCV.

Houghton was co-author of a series of seminal studies published in 1989 and 1990 that identified hepatitis C antibodies in blood, particularly among patients at higher risk of contracting the disease, including those who had received blood transfusions. This work led to the development of a blood screening test in 1990; widespread blood screening that began in 1992 with the development of a more sensitive test has since virtually eliminated hepatitis C contamination of donated blood supplies in Canada. In other studies published during the same period, Houghton and collaborators linked hepatitis C with liver cancer.

In 2013, Houghton's team at the University of Alberta showed that a vaccine derived from a single strain of Hepatitis C was effective against all strains of the virus. As of 2020, the vaccine was in pre-clinical trials.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-05 16:14:10

2209) Charles M. Rice

Gist:

Work

Hepatitis is a group of diseases that cause inflammation of the liver. It can be caused by different viruses that are transmitted through blood. After a previously unknown virus, the hepatitis C virus, had been found in hepatitis patients evidence was needed to demonstrate that this virus was alone in causing hepatitis C. In 1997, Charles Rice and other research teams succeeded with this when they were able to show that a region in the virus’s genome was crucial in causing hepatitis. The finding was an important step in developing blood tests and new medications that have saved millions of lives.

Summary

Charles M. Rice (born August 25, 1952, Sacramento, California) is an American virologist who was known for his contributions to the development of highly effective treatments for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. His work to generate a version of HCV that could be grown and studied in the laboratory enabled the development of new antiviral drugs capable of reducing HCV to undetectable levels in infected persons, essentially curing chronic infection. For this breakthrough, Rice was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with American virologist Harvey J. Alter and British-born scientist Michael Houghton.

Pursuing an early interest in veterinary medicine, Rice attended the University of California, Davis, where he graduated in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology. However, after studying for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Rice changed his focus to biology and basic research. At the California Institute of Technology, he studied biochemistry in the laboratory of American virologist James Strauss. Rice focused his graduate research on RNA viruses, particularly Sindbis virus, which is carried by mosquitoes and causes fever and joint pain in humans. Rice’s work to elucidate the genetic sequence of structural proteins of Sindbis virus laid the foundation for his work with other infectious viruses. After earning a doctoral degree in 1981, Rice remained at Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow. His deduction of the genome of the virus that causes yellow fever led to the establishment of the flavivirus family, which later included viruses that cause West Nile fever and dengue. The research also facilitated the development of a yellow fever vaccine.

In 1986 Rice joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In the late 1980s he shifted his focus to the development of a vaccine for hepatitis C, and in 1989, after Alter and Houghton reported the identification of a DNA clone of the HCV RNA genome, Rice became interested in studying HCV in the laboratory. The virus, however, eluded laboratory culture. Rice later discovered that a portion of the HCV genome necessary for viral replication was missing in the laboratory HCV clone reported in 1989, and he subsequently generated a culturable version of the virus. In 1996 he provided a description of the complete HCV genome and the following year demonstrated the infectious nature of the cultured virus.

In 2001 Rice moved to Rockefeller University, where he continued his studies of HCV and made several other key findings, among them the discovery of multiple proteins required for HCV entry into liver cells. In addition, his laboratory designed assays to test for drugs capable of blocking HCV replication, which led to the discovery of new therapeutic agents for hepatitis C. The first of these drugs was approved in 2013 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in human patients.

Rice was a recipient of the Robert Koch Prize (2015) and the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2016; shared with scientists Ralf F.W. Bartenschlager and Michael J. Sofia). He was an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004) and the National Academy of Sciences (2005).

Details

Charles Moen Rice (born August 25 , 1952) is an American virologist and Nobel Prize laureate whose main area of research is the hepatitis C virus. He is a professor of virology at the Rockefeller University in New York City and an adjunct professor at Cornell University and Washington University School of Medicine. At the time of the award he was a faculty at Rockefeller.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences and was president of the American Society for Virology from 2002 to 2003. He received the 2016 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, jointly with Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager and Michael J. Sofia. Along with Michael Houghton and Harvey J. Alter, he was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus."

Early life and education

Charles Moen Rice was born on August 25, 1952, in Sacramento, California.

Rice graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.S. in zoology from University of California, Davis, in 1974. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where he studied RNA viruses in the laboratory of James Strauss. He remained at Caltech for four years to do postdoctoral research.

Career

After his postdoctoral work, Rice moved with his research group to the Washington University School of Medicine in 1986, where he remained until 2001.

Rice has been the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor at Rockefeller University since 2001. He is also an adjunct professor at Washington University School of Medicine and Cornell University. He has served on committees for the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and World Health Organization.

He was the editor of Journal of Experimental Medicine from 2003 to 2007, Journal of Virology from 2003 to 2008, and PLoS Pathogens from 2005 to present. He has been an author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications.

Research

While at Caltech, he was involved in researching the genome of Sindbis virus and the establishment of flaviviruses as their own family of viruses. The strain of yellow fever virus he used for this work was eventually used for the development of the yellow fever vaccine. While exploring Sindbis virus at Washington University in St. Louis, Rice described how he produced infectious flavivirus RNA in the laboratory in a 1989 paper published in The New Biologist. The paper attracted the attention of Stephen Feinstone who was studying hepatitis C virus and suggested that Rice use the technique to develop a vaccine for hepatitis C. In 1997, Rice cultured the first infectious clone of hepatitis C virus for use in studies on chimpanzees in whom the virus was also endemic. In 2005, Rice was also part of a team that showed that a strain of an acute form of the virus identified in a human patient can be forced to replicate in a laboratory setting. Rice's contribution to hepatitis C research has earned him many awards.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-06 15:50:48

2210) Giorgio Parisi

Gist:

Work

Our world is full of complex systems characterised by randomness and disorder. Around 1980, Giorgio Parisi discovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials. His discoveries are among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems. They make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena, not only in physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

Summary

Giorgio Parisi (born August 4, 1948, Rome, Italy) is an Italian physicist who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on spin glasses, which proved widely applicable in the study of complex systems. He shared the prize with Japanese American meteorologist Syukuro Manabe and German oceanographer Klaus Hasselmann.

Parisi graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in physics in 1970, and from 1971 to 1981 he was a researcher at the National Laboratory of Frascati. He became a professor at the University of Rome in 1981.

Spin glasses are crystalline materials into which a few magnetic atoms are introduced. In a situation in which the magnetic atoms align themselves in the opposite way with respect to their neighbours (one atom points up and a second points down), a third atom would not be able to align itself opposite its two neighbours. Such a system is called “frustrated,” and its configuration was very difficult to calculate in the late 1970s when Parisi became interested in spin glasses as a result of his work on the theory of particle physics. He was interested in the “replica trick,” which used many replicas, or copies, of a physical system and then averaged them. The replica trick, however, gave unphysical results when applied to spin glasses. Parisi realized that spin glasses must have an infinite number of possible states, and he modified the replica trick by adding a new parameter that described how much two replicas resembled each other.

Parisi’s mathematical technique proved widely applicable to many other fields, including the famous graph theory problem of the traveling salesman, and the physics of granular materials such as sand. His books included Spin Glass Theory and Beyond: An Introduction to the Replica Method and Its Applications (1987; written with Marc Mézard and Miguel Ángel Virasoro), Statistical Field Theory (1988), Quantum Mechanics (2009; written with Gennaro Auletta and Mauro Fortunato), and Theory of Simple Glasses: Exact Solutions in Infinite Dimensions (2020; written with Pierfrancesco Urbani and Francesco Zamponi).

Details

Giorgio Parisi (born 4 August 1948) is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".

Early life and education

Giorgio Parisi received his degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970 under the supervision of Nicola Cabibbo.

Career

He was a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (1971–1981) and a visiting scientist at the Columbia University (1973–1974), Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (1976–1977), and École Normale Supérieure (1977–1978). From 1981 until 1992 he was a full professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and he is now professor of Quantum Theories at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was a member of the Simons Collaboration "Cracking the Glass Problem". From 2018 until 2021 he was the president of the Accademia dei Lincei and in 2023 he was elected Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences.

Research

Parisi's research interests are broad and cover statistical physics, field theory, dynamical systems, mathematical physics and condensed matter physics, where he is particularly known for his work on spin glasses and related statistical mechanics models originating in optimization theory and biology. In particular, he made significant contributions in terms of systematic applications of the replica method to disordered systems, even though the replica method itself was originally discovered in 1971 by Sir Sam Edwards.

He has also contributed to the field of elementary particle physics, in particular to quantum chromodynamics and string theory. Together with Guido Altarelli, he introduced the so-called math–Gribov–Lipatov–Altarelli–Parisi equations. In the field of fluid dynamics he is known for having introduced, together with Uriel Frisch, multifractal models to describe the phenomenon of intermittency in turbulent flows. He is also known for the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation modelling stochastic aggregation. From the point of view of complex systems, he worked on the collective motion of animals (such as swarms and flocks). He also introduced, together with other Italian physicists, the concept of stochastic resonance in the study of climate change.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-08 16:37:11

2211) Klaus Hasselmann

Gist:

Work

Our world is full of complex systems characterised by randomness and disorder. One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate. In the 1970s, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed methods for identifying specific signals that both natural phenomena and human activities imprint in the climate. An important result is that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

Summary

Klaus Hasselmann (born October 25, 1931, Hamburg, Germany) is a German oceanographer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 for the foundational progress he and Japanese-born American meteorologist Syukuro Manabe made in developing scientific models of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and predicting global warming. Hasselmann and Manabe shared the prize with Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi.

In 1934 Hasselmann and his family emigrated from Hamburg to England, where he spent his childhood in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. They returned to Hamburg after World War II. Hasselmann studied physics and mathematics at the University of Hamburg and graduated in 1955, after completing a thesis on isotropic turbulence. He continued his work in physics and fluid dynamics at the University of Göttingen and at the Max Planck Institute of Fluid Dynamics, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1957.

He served as a research assistant at the Institute of Naval Architecture at the University of Hamburg from 1957 to 1961 before accepting a professorship at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, from 1961 to 1964. He then returned to the University of Hamburg, where he would spend the majority of his career. After a short visiting professorship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts from 1970 to 1972, Hasselmann earned the rank of full professor for theoretical geophysics and served as managing director at the university’s Institute of Geophysics until 1975, when he became the founding director for the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he served as director until 1999. He also served as the scientific director at the German Climate Computing Centre, also in Hamburg, from 1988 to 1999.

Hasselmann’s seminal work in 1976 involved the creation of a stochastic climate model that shows how weather disturbances could be integrated into larger, more stable atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns to produce changes in climate. In other words, he showed how weather that appears as noise and that can change rapidly and chaotically can be incorporated into a model to frame longer-term climate changes. This model led him to consider how warming signals generated by human activities, such as those produced from greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on temperature, could be separated from the background noise of natural climate variability. In 1979 he published statistical techniques that allowed climate scientists to identify the presence and relative strength of these warming signals. This work became the basis for attribution studies—which seek to explain the links between human activities that contribute to climate change and specific weather and climate events, such as tropical cyclones (hurricanes), droughts, extreme rainfall events, and the pattern of rising global average temperatures—that appear frequently in national and global climate risk assessments that help to guide climate policy.

Among Hasselmann’s many accolades, he is the recipient of the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society (1971), the Symons Memorial Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society (1997), and the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geophysical Society (2002). Hasselmann has either authored or co-authored more than 175 scientific publications and has contributed to six books, including Ocean Wave Modeling (1985) and Reframing the Problem of Climate Change: From Zero Sum Game to Win-Win Solutions (2012).

Details

Klaus Ferdinand Hasselmann (born 25 October 1931) is a German oceanographer and climate modeller. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hamburg and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi.

Hasselmann grew up in Welwyn Garden City, England and returned to Hamburg in 1949 to attend university. Throughout his career he has mainly been affiliated with the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, which he founded. He also spent five years in the United States as a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a year as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge.

He is best known for developing the Hasselmann model of climate variability, where a system with a long memory (the ocean) integrates stochastic forcing, thereby transforming a white-noise signal into a red-noise one, thus explaining (without special assumptions) the ubiquitous red-noise signals seen in the climate.

Background

Hasselmann was born in Hamburg, Germany (Weimar Republic). His father Erwin Hasselmann [de] was an economist, journalist, and publisher, who was politically active for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDPG) from the 1920s. Due to his father's activity in the SDPG, the family emigrated to the United Kingdom in mid-1934 at the beginning of the Nazi era to escape the repressive regime and persecution of social democrats, and Klaus Hasselmann grew up in the U.K. from age 2. They lived in Welwyn Garden City north of London and his father worked as a journalist in the U.K. Although the Hasselmanns themselves were not Jewish, they lived in a close-knit community of mostly Jewish German emigrants and received assistance from the English Quakers when they arrived in the country. Klaus Hasselmann attended Elementary and Grammar School in Welwyn Garden City, and passed his A-levels (Cambridge Higher School Certificate) in 1949. Hasselmann has said that "I felt very happy in England" and that English is his first language. His parents returned to Hamburg in 1948, but Klaus remained in England to finish his A-levels. In August 1949, at the age of nearly eighteen, he followed his parents to Hamburg in the then divided Germany to attend higher education. After attending a practical course in mechanical engineering from 1949 to 1950, he enrolled at the University of Hamburg in 1950 to study physics and mathematics.

Klaus Hasselmann has been married to the mathematician Susanne Hasselmann (née Barthe) since 1957 and they have also worked closely professionally; his wife was a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. They have three children.

Professional background and climate research

Hasselmann graduated in physics and mathematics at the University of Hamburg in 1955 with a thesis on isotropic turbulence. He earned his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen and Max Planck Institute of Fluid Dynamics from 1955 to 1957. The subject of his PhD thesis was a method for determining the reflection and refraction of shock fronts and of arbitrary waves of small wavelength at the interface of two media. In 1963 he earned his Habilitation in physics.

He was an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg from 1957 to 1961 and an assistant professor and associate professor at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla from 1961 to 1964. He was Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of Hamburg from 1966. He was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the Doherty Professor at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts from 1970 to 1972. In 1972 he became Professor of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Hamburg, where he also became Director of the Institute for Geophysics.

From February 1975 to November 1999, Hasselmann was Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. Between January 1988 and November 1999 he was also Scientific Director at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum), Hamburg. He has been vice-chairman and board member of the European Climate Forum (today Global Climate Forum) for many years until 2018. The European Climate Forum has been founded in 2001 by Carlo Jaeger and Hasselmann.

Hasselmann has published papers on climate dynamics, stochastic processes, ocean waves, remote sensing, and integrated assessment studies. His reputation in oceanography was primarily founded on a set of papers on non-linear interactions in ocean waves. In these he adapted Feynman diagram formalism to classical random wave fields. He later discovered plasma physicists were applying similar techniques to plasma waves, and that he had rediscovered some results of Rudolf Peierls explaining the diffusion of heat in solids by non-linear phonon interactions. This led him to review the field of plasma physics, rekindling an earlier interest in quantum field theory.

Hasselmann has stated that "it was really an eye-opener to realize how specialized we are in our fields, and that we need to know much more about what was going on in other fields. Through this experience I became interested in particle physics and quantum field theory. So I entered quantum field theory through the back door, through working with real wave fields rather than with particles."

In the field of climate change, Hasselmann pioneered a mathematical description of the stochastic forcing of the climate by the fluctuating weather. The idea is that climate variability need not come about merely by changes in external forcing (such as solar radiation or greenhouse gases), but even under fixed conditions the climate experiences noisy forces due to the randomly developing weather patterns. This is analogous to the motion of a heavy particle (the climate) being bombarded by randomly moving small particles (the forces exerted by the weather), but translated to a much more complicated high-dimensional nonlinear system. Knowledge of the short-term fluctuations of the weather then allows to predict the stochastic variability of the climate.

Hasselmann later suggested how to extract 'fingerprints' of anthropogenic climate change. The challenge is to recover in an optimal fashion the signal of systematic climate change in the presence of strong climate variability. He applied the theory of optimal linear filters to this multivariate, space-time dependent complex problem in order to give a prescription of how to extract these fingerprints.

Both the theory of stochastic climate forcing and the development of the fingerprint method are key contributions to climate science. Hasselmann has won a number of awards over his career. He received the 2009 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change; in January 1971 the Sverdrup Medal of the American Meteorological Society; in May 1997 he was awarded the Symons Memorial Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society; in April 2002 he was awarded the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geophysical Society. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi for groundbreaking contributions to the "physical modeling of earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and "understanding of complex systems".

On climate change Hasselmann has said that "the main obstacle is that the politicians and the public are not aware of the fact that problem is quite solvable. We have the technologies and there is a question of investing in these technologies (…) I think it is quite possible to respond to and solve the climate problem without a major impact in our way of life."

Mojib Latif was one of his PhD students.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-09 16:10:16

2212) Syukuro Manabe

Gist:

Work:

Our world is full of complex systems characterised by randomness and disorder. One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.

Summary

Manabe Syukuro (born September 21, 1931, Shingu, Ehime prefecture, Japan) is a meteorologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 for the foundational progress he and German oceanographer Klaus Hasselmann made in modeling Earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and predicting global warming. Manabe and Hasselmann shared the prize with Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi. Manabe holds dual citizenship in Japan and the United States.

Manabe received a bachelor’s degree in meteorology in 1953 from the University of Tokyo. He went on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees in meteorology from the same institution. After earning a Ph.D. in 1958, he became a research meteorologist at the U.S. Weather Bureau (later the National Weather Service), where he explored the use of physics in developing weather models. Manabe joined the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a national research laboratory, in 1963. The GFDL began its collaboration with Princeton University in 1967 as part of the university’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Manabe relocated to help lead the program that year, and in 1968 he joined the faculty at Princeton, where he served as a lecturer until 1997. He became the university’s senior meteorologist in 2005.

Manabe developed the world’s first credible three-dimensional climate model of the atmosphere in 1967. Two years later he and American oceanographer Kirk Bryan produced the first general circulation model that coupled the ocean and atmosphere. Values of several environmental variables (such as temperature, salinity, density, and the growth and retreat of pack ice) were calculated for grid points spaced 500 km (about 310 miles) apart at nine different levels in the atmosphere over a 60-year model run. The model was not complex by modern standards—it simplified the atmosphere into a single vertical column and made broad assumptions about topography and cloud cover—yet it became a useful tool for examining seasonal climate variability and global warming scenarios, including the relationships between insolation and the vertical movement of air masses and between rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and temperature.

Manabe’s general circulation model was used to gauge the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations in 1975 in a paper he authored with American meteorologist Richard Wetherald. It predicted that doubling atmospheric carbon concentrations from 300 to 600 parts per million would result in an average temperature increase in the troposphere of between 2.3 and 2.93 °C (4.1 and 5.3 °F). These results compared well to later, more-complex general circulation models—which forecast temperature increases of between 2.5 and 4 °C (4.5 and 7.2 °F) under similar circumstances—suggesting that the simplicity of Manabe’s model did not hold it back from being an effective predictive tool.

Manabe is the recipient of the Blue Planet Prize (1992), the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal (1993), and the Crafoord Prize (2018), awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Manabe also authored the book Beyond Global Warming (2020) with American atmospheric scientist Anthony Broccoli.

Details

Syukuro Manabe (Manabe Shukurō, born 21 September 1931) is a Japanese–American physicist, meteorologist, and climatologist, who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change and natural climate variations. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, for his contributions to the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying its variability, and predictions of climate change.

Early life and education

Born in 1931 in Shinritsu Village, Uma District, Ehime Prefecture, Japan. Both his grandfather and his father were physicians, who operated the only clinic in the village. A classmate recalled that, even in elementary school, he was already "interested in the weather, making comments such as 'If Japan didn't have typhoons, we wouldn't have so much rain.'" Manabe attended Ehime Prefectural Mishima High School. When he was accepted into the University of Tokyo, his family expected him to study medicine, but "whenever there's an emergency, the blood rushes to my head, so I would not have made a good doctor. Furthermore, "I had a horrible memory and I was clumsy with my hands. I thought that my only good trait was to gaze at the sky and get lost in my thoughts." He joined the research team of Shigekata Shono (1911–1969), and majored in meteorology. Manabe received a BA degree in 1953, an MA degree in 1955, and a DSc degree in 1958, all from the University of Tokyo.

Career

After finishing his doctorate, Manabe went to the United States to work at the General Circulation Research Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA, continuing until 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he worked at the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Japan serving as Director of the Global Warming Research Division. In 2002 he returned to the United States as a visiting research collaborator at the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, Princeton University. He currently serves as senior meteorologist at the university. He also engaged as a specially invited professor at Nagoya University from December 2007 to March 2014.

Scientific accomplishments

Working at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, first in Washington, DC and later in Princeton, New Jersey, Manabe worked with director Joseph Smagorinsky to develop three-dimensional models of the atmosphere. As the first step, Manabe and Wetherald (1967) developed one-dimensional, single-column model of the atmosphere in radiative-convective equilibrium with positive feedback effect of water vapor. Using the model, they found that, in response to the change in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the temperature increases at the Earth's surface and in the troposphere, whereas it decreases in the stratosphere.

The development of the radiative-convective model was a critically important step towards the development of comprehensive general circulation model of the atmosphere (Manabe et al. 1965). They used the model to simulate for the first time the three-dimensional response of temperature and the hydrologic cycle to increased carbon dioxide (Manabe and Wetherald, 1975). In 1969, Manabe and Bryan published the first simulations of the climate by a coupled ocean-atmosphere models, in which the general circulation model of the atmosphere is combined with that of ocean.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Manabe's research group published seminal papers using the coupled atmosphere ocean models to investigate the time-dependent response of climate to changing greenhouse gas concentrations of the atmosphere (Stouffer et al., 1989; Manabe et al., 1991 & 1992). They also applied the model to the study of past climate change, including the role of freshwater input to the North Atlantic Ocean as a potential cause of the so-called, abrupt climate change evident in the paleoclimatic record (Manabe and Stouffer, 1995 & 2000).

Awards and honors

Manabe is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, and a foreign member of Japan Academy, Academia Europaea and the Royal Society of Canada.

In 1992, Manabe was the first recipient of the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation. In 1995, he received the Asahi Prize from Asahi News-Cultural Foundation. In 1997 Manabe was awarded the Volvo Environmental Prize from the Volvo Foundation. In 2015 he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal of Franklin Institute.

Manabe has also been honored with the American Meteorological Society's Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, the Second Half Century Award, and the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award. In addition, he is honored with the American Geophysical Union's William Bowie Medal and Revelle Medal, and in 1998 received the Milutin Milankovic Medal from the European Geophysical Society.

Manabe and Bryan's work in the development of the first global climate models has been selected as one of the Top Ten Breakthroughs to have occurred in NOAA's first 200 years. In honor of his retirement from NOAA / GFDL, a three-day scientific meeting was held in Princeton, New Jersey in March 1998. "Understanding Climate Change: A Symposium in honor of Syukuro Manabe". The 2005 annual meeting of American Meteorological Society included a special Suki Manabe Symposium.

Jointly Manabe with climatologist James Hansen received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category in the ninth edition (2016) of the awards. The two laureates were separately responsible for constructing the first computational models with the power to simulate climate behavior. Decades ago, they correctly predicted how much Earth's temperature would rise due to increasing atmospheric CO2. The scores of models currently in use to chart climate evolution are heirs to those developed by Manabe and Hansen.

In 2018, Manabe received the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences jointly with Susan Solomon "for fundamental contributions to understanding the role of atmospheric trace gases in Earth's climate system".

In 2021, he received the Order of Culture.

In 2022, Manabe was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Awards.

Jai Ganesh · 2025-04-10 16:31:43

2213) Benjamin List

Gist:

Since 2000, asymmetric organocatalysis has been a key part of pharmaceutical research and production. The methods pioneered by List and MacMillan have allowed synthesis of important molecules without the intensive use of environmentally damaging heavy metals. In the case of molecules that have two forms, one being the mirror image of the other but sometimes having undesirable effects, asymmetric organocatalysis can be used to produce the preferred form, whereas previous methods of synthesis would produce both.

Summary

Benjamin List (born January 11, 1968, Frankfurt am Main, West Germany [now in Germany]) is a German chemist who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on asymmetric organocatalysis. He shared the prize with British chemist David MacMillan.

List received a degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin in 1993 and a doctorate in the same subject from the Goethe University of Frankfurt in 1997. That year he started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He became an assistant professor there in 1998. He returned to Germany in 2003 to become a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, and in 2005 he became director of the institute.

During List’s time at Scripps, he was researching catalytic antibodies, which are antibodies that, instead of fighting off infection, are used to drive chemical reactions (that is, act as a catalyst). List considered that enzymes also drive chemical reactions but were not metals as other catalysts were and that only a few amino acids in an enzyme would be involved in the chemical reaction. In 2000 he and his colleagues published work describing how they used one amino acid, proline, to drive an aldol reaction (a reaction in which a bond is formed between two carbon atoms) between acetone and several aromatic aldehydes. (MacMillan and his colleagues were doing similar work independently at the same time.)

Since 2000, asymmetric organocatalysis has been a key part of pharmaceutical research and production. The methods pioneered by List and MacMillan have allowed synthesis of important molecules without the intensive use of environmentally damaging heavy metals. In the case of molecules that have two forms, one being the mirror image of the other but sometimes having undesirable effects, asymmetric organocatalysis can be used to produce the preferred form, whereas previous methods of synthesis would produce both.

Details

Benjamin List (born 11 January 1968) is a German chemist who is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne. He co-developed organocatalysis, a method of accelerating chemical reactions and making them more efficient. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis".

Background

Born to an upper-middle-class family of scientists and artists in Frankfurt, List is a great-grandson of the cardiologist Franz Volhard and a 2nd great-grandson of the chemist Jacob Volhard. His aunt, the 1995 Nobel laureate in medicine Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, is the sister of his mother, architect Heidi List. At age three, his parents divorced.

Career and research

List obtained his Diplom (M.Sc.) degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin in 1993, and his PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1997. His doctoral dissertation was titled Synthese eines Vitamin B 12 Semicorrins (Synthesis of a Vitamin B 12 Semicorrin), and was advised by Johann Mulzer. List worked at the Scripps Research Institute Department of Molecular Biology in La Jolla, US as a postdoctoral researcher in Carlos F. Barbas III and Richard Lerner's research groups from 1997 to 1998 with a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and as an assistant professor from 1999 to 2003.

In 2003 he returned to Germany to become group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, and in 2005 he became one of the institute's directors, heading the Homogeneous Catalysis Department. He served as the institute's managing director from 2012 to 2014. He has held a part-time position as an honorary professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne since 2004. List is also a principal investigator at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery, Hokkaido University since 2018. He is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Synlett. As of 2021, he has an h-index of 95 according to Google Scholar and of 86 according to Scopus.

List is considered to be one of the founders of organocatalysis, which uses non-metal and non-enzyme catalysts. In particular, while still an assistant professor he discovered the possibility of using the amino acid proline as an efficient chiral catalyst. This takes place in intermolecular aldol reactions, in which carbon atoms from two different molecules are bonded together, induced by proline. The development is based on the Hajos–Parrish–Eder–Sauer–Wiechert reaction. Subsequently, he developed the first proline-catalyzed Mannich, Michael, and α-amination reactions. He found asymmetric catalysis (especially Asymmetric counteranion directed catalysis, ACDC). He developed also new methods of textile organic catalysis, in which soluble organic catalysts and textiles are bound. These methods could, for example, help to treat water where there is no fresh water. Asymmetric organocatalysis is particularly important in bioactive organic compounds, where the chirality of the compounds is important, for example in drug production.

On 6 October 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis." The development has great influence on pharmaceutical research and the drug production and "made chemistry greener".

Personal life

List married Sabine List in La Jolla in 1999 and they have two sons, Theo and Paul.[31][32][33] They all survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

List's parents sought to raise their children with an anti-authoritarian parenting style; he has admitted occasionally using the approach with his own children, stating that "you may only be 12, but if you think it will do you good to eat ten chocolate bars, then go ahead and do it. I have faith in you. But my advice is: I wouldn't do it."

Math Is Fun Forum

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Re: crème de la crème

#1745 2025-04-04 17:08:34

Re: crème de la crème

#1746 2025-04-05 16:14:10

Re: crème de la crème

#1747 2025-04-06 15:50:48

Re: crème de la crème

#1748 2025-04-08 16:37:11

Re: crème de la crème

#1749 2025-04-09 16:10:16

Re: crème de la crème

#1750 2025-04-10 16:31:43

Re: crème de la crème

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