October 2018 Nobel notes

Beyond the awards, it is worth noting that the number of women awardees is even sparser than it seems at first glance

October, as always, is Nobel month. The science prizes this year are shared, (as usual), with three winners in Physics, three in Chemistry, and two in Medicine. The Chemistry Prize was shared by Frances H Arnold awarded half the money “for the directed evolution of enzymes” and the other half went jointly to George P Smith and Sir Gregory P Winter “for the phage display of peptides and antibodies”.

The Physics Prize was “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”. Half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin “for optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”, while the other half was shared by Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”.  The medicine prize was shared equally by Tasuku Honjo, and James Allison for work “on inhibiting the immune system to combat cancer”. 

Beyond the awards, it’s worth noting that Dr Strickland is only the third woman (out of 210 physics laureates) to be awarded the Physics Prize, and Dr Arnold only the fifth woman (out of 181 chemistry laureates) to win the chemistry award. Actually the number of women awardees is even sparser than it seems at first glance. 

There are just seven women laureates. Marie Curie won two Nobels, one each in physics and chemistry (her daughter, Irene, also won the chemistry Nobel). Dr Jocelyn Bell , who discovered pulsars, did not get a Nobel for her work (her tutor did), and Rosalind Franklin, who should have been a  laureate for her work on DNA, passed away before the Committee recognised the importance of that work. 

Women who have complained about gender-discrimination in STEM would have even more fodder for complaint, if you look at the careers and public profiles of the two women who won this year. Strickland is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada.  There is a pretty good chance that she will be promoted to full professor (she says she’s never steeled herself to request promotion). The online, crowd-sourced encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, refused to create a biographical page for her a few months before she won the Nobel, saying she was not worth more than “passing mention”. 

Dr Arnold, was asked to learn typing in high-school because “smart girls were taught that”. She worked as a cab-driver and waitress to put herself through Princeton, where she was the only woman studying mechanical engineering. In an interview, she explained the apparent gender-bias in science awards, “You first have to be nominated. Men often have a good network willing to do that for them. Women need to cultivate those networks and often they are not as pushy about that. We have to learn how to be pushy, or at least ask.”

The physics prize recognises two inventions in laser physics. One uses continuous, monochromatic lasers. The other uses pulsed lasers. Extremely small objects and very rapid processes can now be seen in this new light. These precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas and they could have a multitude of industrial and medical applications.

In 1970, Ashkin showed that narrow-beam lasers could be used to trap small particles. In 1986, his team created a “single-beam gradient force optical trap”,  which was named the optical tweezer. This traps tiny dielectric particles in water.  Ashkin demonstrated that optical tweezers could trap and manipulate viruses and living cells. Bio-scientists soon found other uses like manipulating subcellular components of plant cells.

Another important development in laser physics was the production of short pulses of extreme intensity and power.  In 1985, Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou invented the chirped pulse amplification technique for optical pulses. They modified an idea from radar, which uses similar short bursts.  The short pulse duration allows for massive bursts of power from “tabletop” lasers running on the local grid.  The creation of short optical pulses, with durations that match time-scales for atomic motion in molecules, has led to new research in chemistry. It allows for studying chemical reactions in real-time in extreme detail.

Arnold’s work deals with creating better enzymes — the proteins, which act as catalysts for bio-chemical reactions. More active and stable enzymes can enable greener manufacturing processes to make fuels and chemicals. Arnold deliberately induces mutations in specific enzymes. Then she tests the mutated enzymes to see if these are better than the original in some respect. This process is repeated to artificially speed up evolution and develop more efficient enzymes. 

The medicine prize goes to two scientists who identified immune system molecules that prevent the body from attacking cancer cells. In 1996, James P Allison showed that the molecule, CTLA-4, stopped immune responses that could kill tumours. Tasuku Honjo identified another molecule, PD-1, which had a braking. Removing these molecules helped the immune system combat cancer.