What’s so noble about the Nobel Prize?

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Katalin Karikó thought the telephone was a joke. It was 3 a.m. connected October 2, 2023. Her hubby answered the phone. As idiosyncratic who maintains buildings, “he rather often gets calls for fixing this and that,” Karikó says. But this clip helium handed it over. “It is for you,” helium said.

Only fractional awake, Karikó heard a idiosyncratic from Sweden congratulate her: Karikó had won the Nobel Prize successful Physiology oregon Medicine.

Karikó works astatine the University of Szeged successful Hungary. She besides works astatine the University of Pennsylvania successful Philadelphia, wherever she had been dormant that time successful October. A biochemist, she has spent overmuch of her vocation studying messenger RNA. This molecule carries instructions from a cell’s DNA truthful they tin beryllium translated into proteins.

Karikó and her workfellow Drew Weissman learned however to tweak that RNA. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, their findings allowed different scientists to leap into action. In little than a year, idiosyncratic teams made a vaccine utilizing mRNA. So acknowledgment to Karikó, you whitethorn person gotten a vaccine to support you from COVID-19.

This enactment decidedly sounds worthy of a large prize. And the Nobel is the biggest subject prize of them all. Winners person a coagulated golden medal imprinted with the look of Alfred Nobel (more connected him later). They besides get a ample currency prize to divided among arsenic galore arsenic 3 scientists successful each field.

In 2024, the 11 cardinal Swedish kroner prize was valued astatine astir $1 cardinal U.S. (Karikó shared this prize with Weissmann, besides a biochemist astatine the University of Pennsylvania.) Every year, the Nobel Foundation awards prizes successful physics, chemistry, physiology oregon medicine, lit and peace. Sweden’s cardinal slope besides gives a prize successful economics.

The Nobel Prize is much than a golden paperweight and a bully chunk of money, though. It’s a motion that idiosyncratic and their enactment are precise important.

a photograph of Katalin Karikó recieving her Nobel Prize successful 2023, different Nobel laureates basal to the close and near of her

Scientists who triumph a Nobel Prize are celebrated portion they’re live — and that fame volition unrecorded connected successful past books for years after. This whitethorn pb others to attraction what the winners deliberation — adjacent successful areas wherever the scientists mightiness not beryllium experts.

But Nobel Prizes spotlight lone a constrictive portion of subject — and precise fewer scientists.

Many fields of subject don’t acceptable the prize categories. And lone 3 radical tin stock 1 prize, adjacent though hundreds whitethorn person worked connected a discovery. Most of those others extremity up unrecognized for their relation successful prize-winning work.

The Nobel Prizes besides thin to grant radical — mostly men — successful affluent countries.

Prizes tin beryllium important. They whitethorn animate young scientists. The hubbub astir these prizes tells the wide nationalist that subject matters. But the scientists who take the winners are quality and bring their ain values and biases to the process. So which scientists get celebrated — and which don’t — tin beryllium governmental and sometimes biased.