2022 Nobel Prizes

[Greg]

Here is the menu for the 2022 Nobel Prize Banquet:

Seaweed baked pike-perch and tomato stuffed with marinated pike-perch, parsley emulsion,
kohlrabi and bread spices with dill seed pearls and flower crisp

Swedish venison filled with morel and sage, golden beetroot with cold-pressed rapeseed oil and mustard seed, Jerusalem artichoke and thyme emulsion, accompanied by potato terrine and wild game gravy with star anise

Baked cheesecake and plum compote, flavoured with star anise, plum creme,
mirabelle meringues and oat crisp, accompanied by mirabelle sorbet flavoured with ginger

[Greg]

"Russian Nobel Peace laureate slams Putin’s ‘insane and criminal war’ on Ukraine:"

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/europe/r ... index.html

[Heksagon]

Barry Sharpless won the Chemistry Prize once before, in 2001, making his the fifth person to win two Nobel Prizes. I'm not 100% sure but I think that Ben Bernanke is the first Central Banker to win a Nobel Prize.

[Greg]

I have two things to say about the Economics Prize.

1: It is not actually a Nobel Prize. The awards in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology And Medicine, Literature, and Peace all began in 1901. They were established in Alfred Nobel's will, selected by the criteria Nobel stated, and, are payed for from the estate Nobel left in his will. The Economics Prize began in 1969. It was established by the Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden; and, the Riksbank pays for and selects this award. There has been much criticism that the Riksbank is hiding behind the prestige of the Nobel organization so that the prejudices of central bankers would have in deciding an award would be less evident.

2: Apparently, the work of the three, including Bernanke, rests on the assumption the banks simply act as intermediaries between depositors and savers, rather than cerate money when they issue loans; however, Bernanke said something that contradicted this when he was interviewed on 60 Minutes during the financial crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiCs_YHlKSI

[Greg]

"The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2022 [is] awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, Philip H. Dybvig 'for research on banks and financial crises.'"

[Greg]

"The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties."

[Greg]

"The Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 [is] awarded to Annie Ernaux 'for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.'"

[Greg]

"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 [is] awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless 'for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.'"

[Greg]

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 [is] awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger 'for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.'"

I have some thoughts about the Physiology or Medicine award. It is not entirely clear to me what the Nobel Foundation considers to qualify as Physiology or Medicine. From yesterday's award, evolution, at least to some extent, could qualify. I have read that some people thought evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who was once married to astronomer Carl Sagan, would win this award had she not died of a stroke. Her work centered on symbiosis (cooperation) in evolution, as opposed to competition. E. O. Wilson, who did similar work and lived to be 92, did not receive this award.

There is some confusion as to whether work would be placed in Physiology or Medicine or in Chemistry. The discovery of the structure of DNA was awarded in the Physiology or Medicine category, even though it was all about determining the structure of a molecule. There has been a lot of speculation that, after the development of the Covid vaccines in record time, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman would win this year for their pioneering work in mRNA technology, which helped lead to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. There was some doubt as to whether they would be awarded in Physiology or Medicine or in Chemistry. We will see if they win the Chemistry prize tomorrow.

[Greg]

The awarding of the 2022 Nobel Prizes began today with "the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo 'for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution'”.

https://www.nobelprize.org/