And that's a wrap
One down and two to go – for the sciences at least. Today we saw the 2017 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine go to three American researchers, Jeffrey Hall at the University of Maine, Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University, and Michael Young at the Rockefeller University, for their decades-long work on the circadian clock. Given the 5am calls they had from Stockholm, I suspect they are experiencing firsthand what happens when that clock is disturbed.
Thanks for joining us for today’s announcement. We’ll be back on Tuesday morning with our live coverage of the Nobel prize in physics. We expect to hear the winner or winners at the slightly later time of 10.45am BST. Do join us if you can.
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The Swedish news agency TT has quoted Rosbash as saying he got the call about the award just after 5 am local time. He paints a glamorous scene:
I’m still shocked. I’m sitting here in my pajamas with my wife. I hadn’t even had a thought about this. I haven’t spoken with my colleagues yet. I haven’t even had time to have a cup of coffee.
I’ve just spoken with Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, who shared the Nobel prize in 2001 for research on the cell cycle. He knows the circadian clock work well. He shared a lab for a while with Michael Rosbash in Edinburgh in the 1970s, and as a former president of Rockefeller University knows Michael Young too.
Here’s what Nurse had to say:
Circadian rhythms are common to all organisms, from very simple single-celled algae through to ourselves. It’s a basic physiological process of great importance. What we have here are three individuals, one of whom was my colleague at Rockefeller, Mike Young, who used fruit flies to identify genes that when mutated alter the circadian rhythm. With that entrée from genetics, they went on to identify biochemically the components made by those genes, the RNA and proteins, and describe their regulation to understand the mechanisms that maintain that cellular clockwork which gives rise to the circadian rhythm.
I asked Sir Paul why the work deserved the prize:
It’s important for the basic understanding of life. Every living organism on this planet responds to the sun. All plant and also animal behaviour is determined by the light-dark cycle. We on this planet are slaves to the sun. The circadian clock is embedded in our mechanisms of working, our metabolism, it’s embedded everywhere, it’s a real core feature for understanding life.
There’s a second reason. We are increasingly becoming aware that there are implications for human disease. With the modern technological age we get more and more divorced from the circadian rhythm, as we are able to travel across time zones and disturb our circadian rhythm. We can now live in light-dark regimes that are nothing to do with the circadian rhythm. This is leading to conditions like jet lag which are disturbing and may in turn also lead to other consequences that we don’t fully understand about the human condition.
There is some evidence that treatment of disease can be influenced by circadian rhythms too. People have reported that when you have surgery or when you have a drug can actually influence things. It’s still not clear, but there will almost certainly be some implications for the treatment of disease too.
I wanted to know a little about the scientists’ characters: are they artists, do they climb mountains. That sort of thing. Sir Paul said:
They are excellent scientists and like many such individuals they have certain eccentricities which are charming and interesting and make them good people to share time with.
When pushed to elaborate, Sir Paul did not.
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Here’s Michael Young, another one of today’s winners, speaking about his work at the same prize event we saw Rosbash and Hall talking at earlier:
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The winners have raised “awareness of the importance of a proper sleep hygiene” said Juleen Zierath of the Nobel academy.
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Here are two of the Nobel prize winners, Michael Rosbash and Jeffrey Hall, talking about their work on circadian rhythms after winning the 2012 Canada Gairdner International Award:
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One of the Nobel committee members has just described the scientists’ contribution as “the discovery of a fundamental mechanism underlying very important aspects of physiology: how our cells can keep time.”
This, the first Nobel prize of the week, is a triple win for the US, the country with the most Nobels under its belt.
The Nobel committee has not been able to reach Michael Young yet. Michael Rosbash replied: “You are kidding me,” when he got the call.
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The circadian clock, of course, is fundamental to our health.
Our biological clock helps to regulate sleep patterns, feeding behavior, hormone release and blood pressure #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/NgL7761AFE
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2017
Here’s what the Nobel Foundation has to say about today’s prize for understanding the body’s inner clock:
Life on Earth is adapted to the rotation of our planet. For many years we have known that living organisms, including humans, have an internal, biological clock that helps them anticipate and adapt to the regular rhythm of the day. But how does this clock actually work? Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young were able to peek inside our biological clock and elucidate its inner workings. Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions.
Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.
With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day. The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism. Our wellbeing is affected when there is a temporary mismatch between our external environment and this internal biological clock, for example when we travel across several time zones and experience “jet lag”. There are also indications that chronic misalignment between our lifestyle and the rhythm dictated by our inner timekeeper is associated with increased risk for various diseases.
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And the winners are...
BREAKING NEWS The 2017 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young. pic.twitter.com/lbwrastcDN
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2017
Here come the committee members who’ve been in a huddle at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Worth remembering that the time given for each announcement is a “no earlier than” – it gives them time to contact the winners and get them lined up for phone interview with the Foundation. It’s not unheard of for winners to be hard to reach, or even go AWOL. Let’s here who it is then!
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We’re only a few minutes away from the announcement now. At least one person will have had that all important call from Stockholm. And it probably got them out of bed.
The downsides of winning the Nobel prize
For reasons that escape me now, I once thought it’d be fun to ask Nobel laureates about the downsides of winning the prize. I expected responses along the lines of “My wallet’s too tight for my 50s” and so on. But a few winners made some good points.
Frank Wilczek, a physics Nobel laureate at MIT, had this to say:
The main downsides are temptations, that can be resisted – specifically the temptation to rest on your laurels, and the dual temptation to pontificate on grandiose questions.
Sage words indeed, especially that latter warning which does seem to be a common trap Nobel winners fall into.
I also liked this point from Wilczek about watching deserving colleagues miss out on the prize.
It can be a hard thing, emotionally, for people who think they will, or should, get it, when they don’t, year after year. And also for people who have near misses, when the prizes are announced, and the winners are somebody else. This can be painful even to watch, much less experience.
Tim Hunt at Cancer Research UK won the medicine prize in 2001 along with Paul Nurse and Leland Hartwell. He notes that it’s not something many scientists take in their stride:
I found it pretty hard to bear at first, and was extremely nervous that the Swedes would realise their mistake and rescind the prize at the last minute.
The frog-levitating Andre Geim at Manchester, who won the 2010 Nobel prize for physics with his colleague, Konstantin Novoselov, perhaps hit the nail on the head with his response to my query:
Journalists’ questions are the obvious downside in the context ;-).
The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded 107 times since 1901. Of those, 12 have gone to women, making medicine the least male-dominated of all the Nobels. The last to win the prize was Youyou Tu for her work on compounds that led to the anti-malarial drug, artemisinin.
Talking of Barry Marshall, he has gone to the pub with fellow Nobel laureate Robin Warren to watch the announcement.
Dr Warren and I are going to Old Swan Brewery to listen to the Nobel Prize in Medicine. We'll send a selfie later 😬😀👍🍷😎😎 @uwanews
— Barry Marshall (@barjammar) October 2, 2017
And here is that selfie!
Warren and Marshall “selfie” waiting for Nobel announcement (and having a 12th anniversary pint).@uwanews pic.twitter.com/IzqnUeRHWK
— Barry Marshall (@barjammar) October 2, 2017
Is that the 12th pint to celebrate their anniversary, or a pint to celebrate the 12 anniversary? Let’s assume the latter until more selfies turn up.
Predictions for 2017
There’s never a shortage of good contenders for any Nobel prize. Who is in the running for medicine this year? How about the scientists behind the gene-editing procedure known as Crispr? Unlike artemisinin, the anti-malaria drug that won a share of the 2015 Nobel prize for Youyou Tu, Crispr has yet to save lives. On that basis, it may be too soon for it to bag the prize. It could also give the committee an unwelcome headache: there are at least four people with a reasonable claim on the research, namely Emmanuel Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, George Church and Fang Zheng. The Nobel rule of three would mean someone was left out, unless the prize was somehow split between medicine and chemistry: unlikely but not impossible.
Each year, the analysts at Thomson Reuters mine the scientific literature for researchers who look worthy of the prize. They like the look of James Allison, Jeffrey Bluestone and Craig Thompson for their work on how T cells influence the immune response. Also in the running, they believe, are Gordon Freeman, Tasuku Honjo and Arlene Sharpe for work on programmed cell death, a process that has driven the latest hopes for cancer immunotherapies. Others on their radar are Michael Hall, David Sabatini and Stuart Schreiber for their work on the immune-suppressing drug, rapamycin.
Will it be any of these? There are so many contenders, the likelihood is low. We shall find out soon, when the committee emerges.
The 2016 winners
Last year, the medicine prize went to Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese scientist who discovered mechanisms for so-called autophagy, a fundamental process in cells that can be harnessed to fight cancer and dementia. It can be thought of as the body’s recycling system: it takes old components of cells, strips out the useful parts, and used them to generate energy or make new cells. It is crucial for keeping infections at bay, maintaining healthy metabolism and preventing cancerous growths.
Juleen Zierath, a member of the Nobel committee, had this to say about the award:
Every day we need to replace about 200 to 300g of protein in our bodies ... We are eating proteins every day, about 70g, but that’s not enough to take care of the requirement to make new proteins. Because of this machinery, we’re able to rely on some of our own proteins, maybe the damaged proteins or the long-lived proteins, and they are recycled with this sophisticated machinery so that we can sustain and we survive.
I don’t know why we love the Nobels so much. It is easy to wonder whether Alfred Nobel, who built his fortune on weapons and explosives, wanted to be remembered for better things when he established the prizes to honour those whose research most benefited humanity. That has surely been the effect.
The prizes paint an unrealistic picture of science. In Nobel world, singular geniuses or tiny teams crack baffling problems that in reality took tens, even hundreds of people, to solve. At times, the research is impenetrable. At times, key people are overlooked. But like The Great British Bake-Off, Strictly Come Dancing, and the Eurovision song contest, the Nobels belong to that weird breed of entertainment that refuses to be ignored.
There are good reasons to enjoy the prizes, though. They shine a light on the hard graft of science and the tenacious and imaginative characters behind the endeavour. Thanks to the 2005 medicine prize, many more of us know how Barry Marshall drank a petri dish of Helicobacter pylori to prove that it was the bugs, not stress or spicy food, that caused most peptic ulcers. Most of the winners deserve to be honoured, but not all. In 2006, a public debate at the Royal Institution voted the Nobel prize-winning “ice pick lobotomy” the worst idea anyone ever had on the mind.
The Nobel season begins
Has it only been a year? The last time the Nobel Foundation dished out its gongs the UK hadn’t told Europe it was off, the Tories hadn’t blown their parliamentary majority, and the US President wasn’t warmongering on Twitter. How long ago it seems.
But never mind the real world. This week is Nobel week, a time when secretive committees meet behind closed doors to decide who and what will be honoured with the most prestigious prizes on Earth. This year each full prize is worth 9m Swedish kronor or £823,000, although their real value is measured in kudos: a currency that allows you to work pretty much anywhere in the world.
The season kicks off today at 10.30am UK time when the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announces the winner or winners of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. The physics prize is announced at 10.45am on Tuesday and the chemistry prize at the same time on Wednesday. Both will come from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Do join us for the live announcements, explanations of the work, and reaction from the winners and others in the world of science.
