The Nobel Prize

It’s Dolly the sheep’s birthday! She made history when she was born on this day in 1996 as the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. This feat was made possible by the work of laureate John Gurdon. In 1962, Gurdon successfully cloned a frog by replacing an immature cell nucleus in an egg cell of a frog with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. His ground-breaking experiment showed the DNA of the mature cell still had all the information needed to develop all cells in the frog. A flurry of research followed and the method was further developed, leading to the cloning of mammals, including Dolly, who was cloned from a cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and an egg cell taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep. Dolly’s birth on 5th July 1996 proved that specialised cells could be used to create an exact copy of the mammals from adult cells. Gurdon’s research and the cloning of Dolly have re-written science textbooks and accelerated the quest to develop personalised stem cells. Scientists are still developing his technique, with the aim of regrowing body parts or organs. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3NxD5v8

“‘A man who knows everything.’ This, reportedly, was my reply to a school teacher asking me what I’d like to become when I grow up. I was eight years old, or thereabouts, and what I wanted to say was ‘professor’, but, still not knowing everything, I had forgotten that word. And what I really meant was ‘scientist’, someone who unravels the secrets of the fundamental Laws of Nature.” Gerardus 't Hooft was awarded the 1999 physics prize “for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics.” Read his biography: https://bit.ly/2MNTI5B

In a lively and energetic podcast conversation, economic sciences laureate Simon Johnson talks about how the past, future and present are interconnected, as well as how science fiction and history are intertwined. He comes to the conclusion that “science fiction is history in reverse or history is science fiction in reverse, whichever way you want to think about it.” He also tells us about his family history in the steel industry in Sheffield, England, and the responsibility that comes with inventing technology. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eUA9wtbj

In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope, transcending the limits of optical microscopes. In optical microscopes, the observable size of objects is limited by the wavelength of light. The scanning tunneling microscope solved this limitation. The instrument has an extremely thin point, which passes very close to a surface. A low electrical charge is positioned between this point and the surface. Through the tunnel effect – a quantum mechanical effect – a current arises that varies with the distance from the surface. This current allows an image to form where objects as small as individual atoms can be distinguished. Five years after revealing their new microscope, Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope." They shared the award with Ernst Ruska. Learn more about their research by reading their paper 'Surface Studies by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy' that was published on this day in 1982: https://lnkd.in/dGyWm7s

Remembering the remarkable Marie Skłodowska Curie - awarded the 1903 physics prize and 1911 chemistry prize - who passed away #OTD in 1934.

Today we remember one of the world's greatest scientists: Marie Skłodowska Curie. Curie dedicated her life to science. She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the first person to be awarded twice and is still the only person to receive the prize in two different scientific fields. Curie died #OTD in 1934.

On this day in 2012, physicists at CERN discovered the Higgs particle, confirming the theory of how particles acquire mass. But before the particle was discovered it had to be imagined - by theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013, almost 50 years after they first independently came up with the theory of the Higgs. Read more: https://bit.ly/3nogkvt

"We can animate how chemistry behaves." Nobel Prize laureate Morten Meldal on how he views chemistry. Meldal was awarded the 2022 chemistry prize “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

High school isn’t fun for everyone … even Nobel Prize laureates. “Although I was likeable and had a ‘good personality’ and was even funny, because I was small and shy and socially inept […] high school was not a great time for me,” said medicine laureate Harvey Alter. “I did pretty well scholastically, but was not an outstanding student, wrote for the school paper and magazine, won some minor honors and a national essay contest and most importantly, grew to a reasonable size. [...] Overall, my high school days were nothing like one sees in the movies; Ferris Bueller or Tom Cruise, I was not. So, I will give short shrift to my high school years as they were less than memorable.” Did you love high school? Learn more about Harvey Alter's life: https://bit.ly/49D1IhC

Can particles move faster than light? Nobel Prize employee Olof is here to explain more about how that's possible in Cherenkov radiation - the discovery that received the 1958 physics prize Learn more about this effect: https://bit.ly/3X4uIdB Reactor Video Credits: Sandia National Laboratories; IAEA Office of Public Information and Communication