Nobel Prize Week Deciphered

And What It Means for You

This week’s Nobel Prize announcements by the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee included winners in the categories of chemistry, physics and medicine. Lofty news that can seem hard to understand and tempting to ignore.  Yet, on closer look, the awards showcase groundbreaking advances and life-saving inventions that have great significance for our everyday lives. They're worth thinking about. They're probably going to make our future a whole lot brighter.

Here’s what the prizes were for and why they’re important:

Chemistry

On Wednesday, three scientists, Stefan Hell, William Moerner and Eric Betzig won the chemistry prize for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.” What does this mean and what does it mean for us?

This has to do with groundbreaking work in the development of powerful new microscopes. Together, the winners discovered a way to overcome all known barriers to optical resolution, making it possible to see tissues at the level of a single molecule. With this discovery, there is now no

structure too small to be studied. Researchers will now be able to peer inside living nerve cells, even view the process of DNA being transferred from one place to another.

Super-resolution microscopy will allow scientists to watch our brains firing when we’re creating memories or learning. We’ll now be able to study and track protein formation in degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And, we’ll be able to study in real-time the molecular development of the human embryo.

This has huge ramifications for just about everything.

Physics

On Tuesday, Inventor Shuji Nakamura and Professors Isamu Akasake and Hiroshi Amano shared the physics prize for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy=saving white light sources.”

While red and green LEDs have been around for a long time (think laptops), the discovery of the blue LED has made white light sources (think LED household light bulb) available, offering high-efficiency and longer bulb life span to consumers. Currently the world uses over 20 percent of its electricity for lighting. With the adoption of LED lamps, this number should drop to just 4 percent.

Additionally, due to their low energy requirements, LED lamps can be powered by cheap local solar power, bringing light to more than a billion people around the world who are currently without.

Medicine

On Monday, the British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the prize for medicine “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

Our brains allow us to position ourselves in space and to navigate our environment. These discoveries identified the cells behind this process. It turns out that certain cells are capable of forming a coordinate system much like a GPS to help us determine our location and to memorize our surroundings.

The scientists identified “place cells”

in the brains of rats that were activated when they moved from place to place, suggesting they were recording their movement in their memories. Further research revealed the existence of “grid cells” that essentially created a coordinate system similar to a GPS.

Why is this important? The researchers were able to show similar processes occurring in the human brain. The discovery of this human GPS has opened new pathways into our understanding of memory, thinking and planning. It will also make it easier in the future to understand the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, whose first symptoms often involve the inability to recognize and map their surroundings.

Lofty ideas, yes, but all great news for the advancement of mankind.

Posted by Carole Funger