The Nobel Prize Committee announced on the 6th that German scientist Benjamin List (Benjamin List) and American scientist David MacMillan (David MacMillan) have contributed to the "development of asymmetric organic catalysis". Won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry , which has long been considered the "Science Comprehensive Prize" by physicists, biologists and even mathematicians, was finally awarded to real chemists.
On the afternoon of the 4th, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the first to be announced. American scientists David Julius (David Julius) and Ardem Patapoutian (Ardem Patapoutian) Awarded for his contribution to "discovering temperature and tactile receptors".
On the 5th, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe (Syukuro Manabe) and German scientist Klaus Hasselmann (Klaus Hasselmann) In recognition of their contribution to “physical modeling of the earth’s climate, quantitative variability and reliable prediction of global warming”, and the other half awarded to Italian scientist George Parisi (Giorgio Parisi) for his “discovery from The interaction between disorder and fluctuation in physical systems on the atomic to planetary scale."
Now, let's approach these scientists together to learn about their research and their stories.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Benjamin Lister:
Dedicated to the research of organic catalysis
Lister was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1968,He is currently the director of the Max Planck Coal Research Institute in Germany.
He graduated from Frey University Berlin in 1993 and received his PhD from Frankfurt University in 1997. The subject of his doctoral dissertation is the synthesis of vitamin B12 .
Subsequently, Lister engaged in postdoctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute in the United States. During this period, he began to engage in organic catalysis research. He served as an assistant professor in the molecular biology department of the Scripps Research Institute from 1999 to 2003. In 2003, he returned to Germany and worked at the Max Planck Coal Research Institute in Germany, and in July 2005 served as the director of the institute.
At Max Planck Coal Research Institute, his focus is still on organic catalysis.
In more than 20 years of research career, Lister has won many awards: the German Chemists Association awarded him the Karl Duisburg Memory Prize in 2003; he won the Otto Bavarian Prize in 2012; Art and Science Prize; In 2016, he won the Leibniz Prize.
Lister also actively participates in international exchanges. In 2005 and 2008, he became the visiting professor at the Tokyo Gakuin University in Japan and the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. Since 2004, he has been an emeritus professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany. In 2018, he was elected as a member of the German Society of Natural Scientists.
David Macmillan:
Ever wanted to be a physicist
Macmillan was born in Belhill, Scotland in 1968 and is currently Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, USA, 2010-2015 In 1988, he also served as the head of the chemistry department.
Macmillan received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at University of Glasgow .In 1990, he studied for a doctorate at the University of California, Irvine. During this period, he focused on developing new reaction methods for the stereo-controlled formation of bicyclic tetrahydrofuran. In 1996, he received his doctorate.
After receiving his Ph.D., Macmillan went to Harvard University to do post-doctoral research, mainly engaged in the research of selective catalysis, especially the design and development of Sn(II)-derived bisoxazoline complexes.
In July 1998, Macmillan started his independent research career at University of California, Berkeley and worked in the Department of Chemistry. He joined California Institute of Technology Department of Chemistry in June 2000. His team's research interests are focused on new methods of enantioselective catalysis. For personal reasons, he transferred to Princeton University in September 2006.
Macmillan's team has made many advances in the field of asymmetric organocatalysis and applied these new methods to the synthesis of a series of complex natural products.
In addition, from 2010 to 2014, Macmillan was the founding editor-in-chief of the famous chemistry academic journal "Chemical Science".
In the past 20 years, Macmillan has also received many honors and awards: In 2004, he was awarded the Cordy-Morgan Medal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry; in 2012, he was elected as a member of the Royal Society ; in 2012, he was elected as a member of the American Art. Member of the Academy of Sciences; received the Harrison Howe Award in 2015; received the Ryoji Nomori Award in 2017; and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
In a previous interview, Macmillan revealed that he had hoped to be a physicist, but because the physics classroom where he studied was too cold and the chemistry classroom was warmer, he changed his degree.
Nobel Prize in Physics
Manabe Shuro:
thought that he would not win the Nobel Prize
Manabe Shuro was born in Japan in 1931,Obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo in 1958, worked in the Atmospheric Circulation Department of the US Weather Bureau from 1958 to 1963, worked in the NOAA-GFDL laboratory from 1963 to 1997, and worked in Japan’s Frontier Research System for Global Change from 1997 to 2001. The director of the project, he has been a visiting co-scientist in the NOAA-GFDL laboratory of Princeton University since 2002.
In the early 1960s, Shuro Manabe and his colleagues developed a radiation-convection model of the atmosphere, and explored the role of water vapor, carbon dioxide and ozone in maintaining and changing the thermal structure of the atmosphere. This is the beginning of a long-term study of global warming.
In the late 1960s, Shuro Manabe and his collaborators began to develop a general circulation model of the atmosphere-ocean-land coupling system, which eventually became a very powerful tool for simulating global warming. In addition, Shuro Manabe realized that the coupled model can simulate the low-frequency changes of climate well, so they not only used the coupled model to explore global warming, but also studied the unforced natural changes of the climate on a longer time scale.
Analysis of deep-sea sediments and continental ice sheets shows that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated greatly during the geological past. Therefore, during the research career of Manabe Shuro, he asked many challenging questions and tried to answer these questions using climate models of various complexity.
However, when asked whether "climate model research can be the object of the Nobel Prize", Shuro Manabe expressed his denial, saying "My research belongs to classical physics, and I don't think I will win the Nobel Prize." It seems that he did not pursue the Nobel Prize from the beginning.
Klaus Hasselman:
I would rather have no prizes than global warming
Klaus Hasselman is the European Climate Forum (now Global Climate Forum) Founder. He has been the vice chairman and board member of the Global Climate Forum for many years.Until 2018.
Hasselman is a physicist who has published numerous articles in the fields of oceanography, meteorology, climate, and socioeconomic models of climate change. He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) in Germany and the former scientific director of the German Climate Computing Center.
MPIM was established in 1975 to conduct climate research. It quickly developed into a leading international climate research institute and made significant contributions to the scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hasselman has recently been interested in the socio-economic modeling of climate change. He hopes to develop new system dynamics and formulate and support climate policies based on the latest models.
Regarding global warming is a threat to mankind and the planet, on October 5, Hasselman said in an interview that he would rather not get the Nobel Prize than global warming.
George Parisi:
Discovering the laws of physics in disorder
George Parisi is professor theoretical physics at the University of Rome, Italy. His research focuses on quantum Field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. Parisi’s father and grandfather were both construction workers. When I was young, the family wanted Parisi to become an engineer, but Parisi was attracted by the complex abstract concepts in the books when reading popular science, science fiction and mathematics books, and wanted to do something involving research.
At first, Parisi was in a dilemma between physics and mathematics, but later, he was attracted by the adventurous nature of physics research and regarded physics as the highest intellectual challenge.
Parisi's achievements span many fields of modern physics, even biology. He has written many books and articles, and these books, articles, and their ideas have opened up new research fields.
Before winning the Nobel Prize,Parisi also won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2021 because he is one of the most creative and influential theoretical physicists in recent decades. His work has had a huge impact on all branches of the physical sciences, covering areas such as particle physics, critical phenomena, disordered systems, optimization theory, and mathematical physics.
In 1977, Parisi and another scientist discovered an evolutionary equation that can accurately describe the distribution of quark and gluon in protons and nuclei. Parisi's work is essential for analyzing the basic structure of matter at the smallest possible distance through high-energy scattering elementary particles . His results will help to use the Large Hadron Accelerator (LHC) to search for dark matter particles, and also help scientists plan future accelerator experiments.
In another series of groundbreaking studies from 1979 to 1984, Parisi introduced the concept of replication symmetry fracture and applied it to the "spin glass model". Parisi's research on the new organization of matter has led to a paradigm shift in statistical physics , and has found many applications in other disordered systems such as structural glass, neural networks, and combinatorial optimization theory.
Parisi has also carried out highly innovative work in the study of classical phase transitions, making it possible for other physics awards to find supersymmetry in condensed matter systems.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Julius:
I just tried it and succeeded
David Julius, born in 1955, is a native of Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn has always been the foothold of Eastern European immigrants. His grandparents escaped from Tsarist Russia and anti-Semitism and came to the United States. His generation is already the third generation of immigrants.
In high school, like tired office workers, the long commute from home to school quickly became too much for Julius, so he made a decisive decision to transfer. The new high school is very early after school. After school, Julius, a literary boy, takes a train into the city, visits museums, watches performances and listens to music. Even in 2018, Julius won the Life Science Breakthrough Award and took a prize of 3 million US dollars. In an interview, he said that he would use the prize money to support art, music, and science education.
It's time to go to university in a blink of an eye. Julius didn't think about this thing carefully. He happened to be told that if he was interested in science, he should apply for MIT . "Then try it." With little knowledge of biology, he casually applied for MIT . As a result, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is ranked number one in the world.
Some people are so jealous that they not only give food to God, but they are also chased by God. After entering the university, Julius gradually became more and more relaxed, plunged into the laboratory, and moved towards the Nobel Prize.
In the second half of the 1990s, Julius did research on capsaicin at the University of California. For a while, Julius was considering whether to clone the capsaicin receptor. One day, he stood in the supermarket, facing rows of spices in deep thought. His wife Holly (also a professor at University of California, San Francisco) walked away. He came over, as if he could see through his thoughts, and said to him, "Stop thinking about it, go now!"
After mentioning this matter, Julius always sighed: "I'm the one who did research. It's my wife. Kicked.”
Pataptian:
The scientist who knows the best horoscope
Dr. Pataptian is Armenian and grew up in the catastrophic long-term civil war of Lebanon. In 1986, 18-year-old Pataptian fled to the United States with his brother. In order to go to university,He has done various tasks such as delivering pizza and writing weekly astrological analysis for a Armenian newspaper.
Since 2000, he has worked at the Scripps Research Center in La Jolla, California, where he is currently a professor. Since 2014, he has also been a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Pataptian’s main research direction is sensor signal transduction. Pataptian has made important contributions to the recognition of new ion channels and receptors that are activated due to temperature, mechanical force, or cell volume increase.
Pataptian and his son
Pataptian said in an interview: "I fell in love with basic research, which changed my career trajectory... When I was in Lebanon, I didn’t even Knowing that a scientist is a profession.”
Pataptian said that he is attracted to study touch and pain because these systems are very mysterious. He said: "When you find a field that people know little about, this is a good opportunity to study."
The Nobel Prize is based on Nobel's 1895 will and set up five awards, including: Physics Prize , Chemistry Award, Peace Award, Physiology or Medicine Award and Literature Award, which are designed to recognize those who have made the greatest contribution to mankind in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, and literature; and Sweden The Nobel Prize in Economics established by the Central Bank in 1968 is used to recognize people who have made outstanding contributions in the field of economics. The 2021 Nobel Prize will be announced successively from October 4th to 11th.
Picture source: Nobel Prize website
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