Searching the Nobel Prize

By Susan Russo

There is a wealth of enjoyment in exploring Nobel Prize information online. There are videos, such as a documentary of the four 2012 Laureates’ discoveries in medical research; Mother Teresa’s and Elie Wiesel’s speeches after their awards of their Peace Prizes; and a 1994 interview with John Nash (prize in Economic Sciences), including his views of the movie A Beautiful Mind, based on his life and work. Another category, “Nobel Laureate Facts”, delivers statistics on the number of total prizes throughout the years, the number of women’s prizes “so far”, ages of the awardees, and the reasons that two awardees, Jean-Paul Sartre and Le Duc Tho, declined their prizes. Other current special features appear about Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Malala Yousafzai, and Rabindranath Tagore. There is even a section called “Educational Games”, which includes “Save the Dog” about diabetes, “Bloodtyping”, “A Drooling Game” about conditioned learning, and “All about Laser.” In another link, the Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute describes the process of nominations for the Peace Prize.

My favorite section, however, is listening to the Nobel podcasts, short interviews giving us the viewpoints of the awardees in their own words.  A recent interviewee was Rockefeller’s own Roderick MacKinnon. There are two separate interviews with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, 2013’s dual awardees in Medicine. May-Britt Moser talks about “pure joy” for herself, and “inequality in science”, while her husband Edvard speaks of the value of “partnership” and recalls “childhood memories.” Mario Molina, awardee in Chemistry in 1995, discusses “climate change” and the role of “human activity” and says, “The risks are unacceptable.”  In 2006, Roger Kornberg (Chemistry) admits that most of his “ideas are wrong.” John Mather, a NASA scientist (Physics, 2006) thinks that if there is water on Mars, there is likely to be life in some form. Elizabeth Blackburn (2009 Physiology or Medicine), whose discoveries show how telomeres transform in aging, says, “We just know so much and yet we know so little.” We hear from Randy Schekman, whose award in 2013 was in Physiology or Medicine, arguing for open access in scientific publications.  And George Smoot (Physics, 2015) lauds the fact that “science today is a truly global enterprise.”  Some Nobel Prize winners admit that they were surprised by their awards. One, John O’Keefe (2013, Physiology or Medicine), prefers being in the lab, saying, “I’m a bench scientist.” And Alice Munro, who won the prize in Literature in 2013, describes her reaction as, “Bewildering but very pleasant.” In all the podcasts I’ve heard, the awardees reflect an excitement in their work, and most display a spirited optimism for the future. All in all, “meeting” these people online is thought-provoking and inspirational, at least to this listener.