At the beginning of October, the Nobel Foundation began its annual tradition of conferring six distinguished awards for advances in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economics. Each year the Foundation awards individuals and organizations the prize for outstanding achievements within their field, and this year is no exception. Laureates this year were commended for their widespread achievements, from untangling the entanglement of quantum particles, to the sequencing of 40,000 year old genomes, to groups fighting against authoritarianism in eastern Europe.
The first prize to be awarded was in medicine was given to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work uncovered a link between modern humans and ancient neanderthals. Through the discovery of a 40,000 year old piece of bone, Pääbo was able to completely sequence the genome of a neanderthal, an ancient evolutionary cousin of humans. This allowed researchers to trace back the evolution of some of our genetic traits, and led Pääbo to answers regarding a shared gene between the two species. His research had initially been ignited during the pandemic, when he noticed a gene that was correlated with a more severe response to the illness. The discoveries allowed him to trace the evolution of this gene back to interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. He was awarded for this work, and also for the process developed for analyzing ancient genomes.
The next day, three men were awarded the prize in physics for their work made in quantum technology over the span of 60 years. All three were experimenting with quantum entanglement, a property that allows two particles to interact while separated. Two of the researchers laid the mathematical groundwork for the experiments, conducted by Dr. Zeilinger, who showed that quantum information can be transmitted and received at long distances, upwards of 100 kilometers. This research is helping scientists build the next generation of computers, quantum computers which will rely on the still murky properties of the microscopic. Countries are already investing in this technology for satellites, which would allow encrypted information to be transmitted even faster than already possible, and researchers are already in the process of testing the effect with low-earth orbit satellites. The foundation highlighted these scientists for their fundamental work in a rapidly expanding future technology.
The most recognizable Nobel award, the peace prize, was presented later in the week to human-rights activists and organizations in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus working to end the authoritarianism of Belarus and Russia. The Belarusian laureate, Ales Bialiatski, was commended for his life-long fight for democracy in his home country. Bialiatski has been jailed several times for his activism, most recently for his organization of protests against rigged elections designed to keep long time president of Belarus Lukashenko in power. The award also went to the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, an organization recently dedicated to documenting war crimes committed by Russia, and a longtime advocate for democracy in Ukraine. A prize was also given to a humanitarian organization on the other side of the conflict as well, Memorial. Memorial is a group long dedicated to highlighting the political oppression of the Soviet and Russian states. It was established by Gorbachev and recently dissolved by Putin, but still carries on in exile. With the recent war in Ukraine, the Nobel Foundation = thought it would be most appropriate to award peace efforts in the region.
Just as it does every year, the Nobel prize has highlighted the great achievements of humanity, allowing us a retrospective look at what we have accomplished, and a lens into what might be possible in the future.
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