2015 Nobel Prize Discussion Thread

So last week was Nobel week, and a lot of really cool discoveries got recognized. I was really excited about the discovery of neutrino oscillations winning a Nobel, as that is my field of work. Here's a list of the winners:

The Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine "was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura 'for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites' and the other half to Youyou Tu 'for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria'. Campbell and Omura "discovered a new drug, Avermectin, the derivatives of which have radically lowered the incidence of River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, as well as showing efficacy against an expanding number of other parasitic diseases. Youyou Tu discovered Artemisinin, a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from Malaria."

The Nobel Prize in physics went to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B McDonald for their discovery of neutrino oscillations, as previously mentioned. There are three different types of neutrinos. Neutrino oscillations refers to the property of neutrinos to be able to spontaneously change from one type of neutrino to another. Mathematically, the discovery of neutrino oscillations implies that neutrinos have mass. This is an important discovery because it contradicts the standard model. The standard model is the most fundamental theory available to physicists. It had been incredibly successful when put up against experimental tests, however it predicted a massless neutrino. The discovery of neutrino oscillations showed that the standard model cannot be complete. Kajita and McDonald made observations that conclusively demonstrated neutrino oscillations.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair". DNA is damaged in a multitude of ways as we go about our daily lives, such as through cosmic rays. Furthermore, it is inherently unstable. "Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell’s genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body. The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA." "In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA. Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilises nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things. Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousandfold. Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.

The Nobel Prize in literature went to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".

The Nobel Prize in economics went to Angus Deaton "for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare". Deaton's work revolves around three central questions: "How do consumers distribute their spending among different goods?", "How much of society's income is spent and how much is saved?", and "How do we best measure and analyze welfare and poverty?". Around 1980, early in his career, Deaton focused on the first question by developing "he Almost Ideal Demand System – a flexible, yet simple, way of estimating how the demand for each good depends on the prices of all goods and on individual incomes. His approach and its later modifications are now standard tools, both in academia and in practical policy evaluation." Around 1990 Deaton published several papers addressing the second question, showing "that the prevailing consumption theory could not explain the actual relationships if the starting point was aggregate income and consumption. Instead, one should sum up how individuals adapt their own consumption to their individual income, which fluctuates in a very different way to aggregate income. This research clearly demonstrated why the analysis of individual data is key to untangling the patterns we see in aggregate data, an approach that has since become widely adopted in modern macroeconomics." He has taken on the third question more recently. "His research has uncovered important pitfalls when comparing the extent of poverty across time and place. It has also exemplified how the clever use of household data may shed light on such issues as the relationships between income and calorie intake, and the extent of gender discrimination within the family. Deaton's focus on household surveys has helped transform development economics from a theoretical field based on aggregate data to an empirical field based on detailed individual data."

Last but not least, the Nobel Peace Prize was won by the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. The Quartet was formed in the summer of 2013 when the democratization process was in danger of collapsing as a result of political assassinations and widespread social unrest. It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war. It was thus instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief.

The National Dialogue Quartet has comprised four key organizations in Tunisian civil society: the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT, Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail), the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA, Union Tunisienne de l'Industrie, du Commerce et de l'Artisanat), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH, La Ligue Tunisienne pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme), and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers (Ordre National des Avocats de Tunisie). These organizations represent different sectors and values in Tunisian society: working life and welfare, principles of the rule of law and human rights. On this basis, the Quartet exercised its role as a mediator and driving force to advance peaceful democratic development in Tunisia with great moral authority. The Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 is awarded to this Quartet, not to the four individual organizations as such."