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CNN The coronavirus pandemic has focused attention on the role of science in society like never before - and the pace of scientific discovery has been blistering
When the Nobel Prizes will be announced next week, the greatest minds in physics, chemistry and medicine will be honored. The winners who aren't talked about before find themselves catapulted into instant celebrity, their discoveries thrust away from academic obscurity Googled and discussed.
While predicting who will win Nobel Prize is widely controversial, the short list is secret -- as are the nominators— and documents revealing the juicy details are sealed from public view for 50 years. Here are some Nobel-worthy candidates and the life-changing discoveries they have made.
The Lasker Awards and Breakthrough Prizes the latter founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg were often given as precursors to a Nobel Prize in 2021 to scientists whose work was crucial for the development of Covid 19 vaccines.
The Lasker went to Drew Weissman, senior vice president at BioNTech based in Germany, and Katalin Karik, who is a professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania, for developing a method of using synthetic messenger RNA to fight disease that involves changing the way the body produces virus-fighting material. While their paper received little attention when their research was first published in 2005, it is now the basis of two widely used Covid -19 vaccines.
Convinced by the promise of mRNA therapies and despite widespread skepticism, they created a technology that is not only vital in the fight against Coronavirus today, but holds large potential for future vaccines and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases, according to the Breakthrough Prize in its announcement.
Complicating matters for the Nobel Selection Committee, according to the rules laid down by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895, is that a Nobel can honor only three people - something which becomes harder due to the collaborative nature of much scientific research.
David Pendlebury is a senior citation analyst at Clarivate's Institute for Scientific Information research firm. He makes Nobel predictions by looking at how often a scientist's key papers are cited by peers. Pendlebury says he thinks it is too late for the science behind Covid 19 vaccines to be given Nobel recognition. He said that the Nobel committee is innately conservative and usually waits at least a decade, if not several, before considering membership to its exclusive club.
The Breakthrough Prize also recognized Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer for their work on next-generation DNA sequencing technologies.
Before their inventions, re-sequencing a fully human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars. Today it can be completed with 24 hours at the cost of around $600, Breakthrough Prize Foundation said. This has transformed many fields including biology, ecology, paleoarchaeology, forensics and personalized medicine.
The Nobel Prize is typically recognized by people who contributed discoveries, 20 years ago or 40 years later. In university at that time there weren't very many women as senior people - heads of department, leaders in their field - - at that time, Pendlebury said. That has changed dramatically over the last 40 years. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a physicist from Northern Ireland, is often mentioned as a potential physics winner due to her work on the discovery of Pulsars, one of the major discoveries of the 20th century. In medicine, American geneticist Mary-Claire King discovered the BRCA mutations and its link to breast cancer risk in 1990, confirming an inherited risk of cancer.
There have not been any Black - Nobel Prize laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine although there is a higher representation in the Nobel Prizes for Peace and Literature One potential Black-Nobel Prize winner in medicine is US physician and researcher Marilyn Hughes Gaston for her ground-breaking work on sickle cell disease an inherited condition in which the body is unable to produce normal hemoglobin, that led to screening at birth and preventative treatment for those affected.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology will be announced on October 4 and physics on Wednesday, followed by the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the Prize in Economic Sciences next Monday.