Know your Nobel winners

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the scientific accolades have already been awarded. Who won what, why and how can we benefit?

THE SWEDISH chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel was an interesting man. He spoke five languages – alongside his native Swedish. He had an affair with a Viennese flower girl and wrote a four-act play about a 16th-century Italian noblewoman who bludgeoned her abusive father to death with a hammer.

But his biggest legacies to the world have been dynamite – which he invented in 1867, and which made him a mega-fortune – and the annual Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace, which he created when he signed his will on November 27th, 1895.

Given that we’re prone to winning it, we Irish are pretty well versed in the literature prize (which will be announced today). The science prizes, however, are another matter.

Here’s a beginner’s guide to this year’s winning projects.

The medicine prize

WHO WON IT?

The English biologist Robert G Edwards, father of the technique of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Or maybe that should be “grandfather”: now 85, Edwards began to study human embryos after the second World War. His dream was to help childless couples conceive by fertilising the mother’s eggs outside the body, then replacing them in the womb. His problem was that little or nothing was known about the human reproductive cycle; it was, in fact, Edwards who revealed much of what we now know about the delicate, complex process of fertilisation and cell division. He gave his first primitive demonstration of IVF in 1969; the world’s first “test tube baby”, Louise Brown, was born in 1978.

HOW WILL IT CHANGE OUR WORLD?

It already has. Unlike most scientific acronyms IVF is a household word – as well it might be, since some four million babies worldwide have been born as a result of the treatment. Louise Brown now has children of her own. If you’re in any doubt about what this means to those involved, check the congratulations section on the Nobel website (nobelprize.org), which is bursting at the seams with such messages as: “Congratulations and thank you. We welcomed our beautiful son into the world this year thanks to the process you began.”

HOW CAN I SOUND AS IF I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT?

Talk about ethics. From the beginning, the very notion of IVF has been anathema to philosophical and religious conservatives; in 1971, after a lively public debate on the subject, the UK Medical Research Council pulled the plug on Edwards’ government funding. A private donation allowed the work to continue. But that was then. This is now, and with liberals and eco-warriors beginning to get seriously concerned about the issue of over-population, it’s still a pretty hot topic. Is it a good idea to have four million extra human beings on an overcrowded planet? It’s also worth asking why it has taken so long for Edwards’ work to be recognised by the Nobel committee. As another contributor to the congratulations section commented: “About time.”

The physics prize

WHO WON IT?

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. They’ve hauled a satisfyingly bizarre two-dimensional material called graphene out of the shadowy sub-atomic realm and into the dazzling light of potential commercial applications. And they did it with sticky tape – which must have the folks struggling with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN grinding their teeth.

Graphene comes from graphite, better known to us as the “lead” in a pencil – a kind of pure carbon formed from flat, stacked layers of atoms. Scientists have been poking at graphite for centuries, but attempts to split the layers tended to produce a soot-like slurry of particles. Geim and Novoselov hit on the idea of sticking a flake of graphite onto plastic adhesive tape, folding the tape in two, and pulling it apart. Getting it thin enough to reach the sub-atomic level is the problem. A few atomic layers thick, and it’s just very thin graphite. Keep going until you get down to the thickness of an atom, and, hey presto – you’ve got graphene.

HOW WILL IT CHANGE OUR WORLD?

It won’t – yet. Sheet graphene is currently the most expensive material on the planet so, with a single crystallite costing upwards of $1,000 to produce, it won’t be turning up on catwalks for a while. However, stuff that’s just an atom thick – and bear in mind, you could fit a cool million of those little critters into the width of a human hair – turns out to have a surprising number of practical uses. Graphene is a material of extraordinary purity; the orderliness of its latticed hexagonal structure makes it both unusually strong and unusually flexible, and it’s extremely good at conducting electrons. It will probably end up in everything from smart LCD displays, through ultra-fast transistors, to quantum computers.

HOW CAN I SOUND AS IF I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT?

You could point out that graphene is really just “atomic-scale chicken wire”. Or that it’s related to those other highly fashionable carbonated molecules, nanotubes and Buckyballs. But if you really want to impress a dinner-table, you could casually observe that because the charge-carrying particles in graphene behave in a manner reminiscent of the nearly massless neutrino, it will almost certainly be used to demonstrate many of the oddball effects of quantum electrodynamics – not in a phenomenally expensive particle accelerator, but in a good old-fashioned laboratory.

The chemistry prize

WHO WON IT?

Professors Richard Heck, Ei-chi Negishi and Akira Suzuki share the prize, for their development of “palladium-catalysed cross-couplings in organic synthesis”. Working independently of one another, they came up with a new way to make carbon bonds using palladium and elements including bromine, zinc and boron.

HOW WILL IT CHANGE OUR WORLD?

Well, it might just bring about a cure for cancer. In the late 1980s, divers in the Caribbean found the marine sponge Discodermia dissoluta. This tiny creature, which lives at a depth of 100 feet, has developed complex – and highly poisonous – chemical molecules to defend itself from predators. Research showed these can function as antibiotics or anti-inflammatory medicines: early tests using discodermalide stopped cancer cells growing in test tubes. However, the sponges yielded only minute amounts of discodermalide. The new bonding process allows it to be produced synthetically, which is a much cheaper (and possibly more sustainable) method.

HOW CAN I SOUND AS IF I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT?

Well, you can now throw the words “palladium” and “discodermalide” around with impunity, without sounding like some kind of musical dinosaur. What more do you want?