Whether youre jet-lagged from flying across time zones, worried
about the worlds prospects for nuclear war or wondering why its so
hard to save for retirement, this years Nobel Prize-winning work might
provide some understanding.
And at the University of Delawares 11th annual Nobel Symposium on
Oct. 25, faculty experts helped supply that context by describing the
work of the 2017 laureates and explaining its significance.
The public event, held in Harker Interdisciplinary Science and
Engineering Laboratory, consisted of short talks by six UD faculty
members who conduct research and scholarship in areas closely connected
to those that won this years Nobel Prizes. Each talk was followed by
the opportunity for audience members to ask questions.
Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the symposium gives interested members of the University community and
the public more in-depth information about the laureates work than is
typically found in general news stories about the prizes.
Following are the 2017 prizes highlighted at the symposium.
Literature
Alex McKee, assistant professor of English, discussed the Nobel Prize
in Literature, which was awarded this year to the English author Kazuo
Ishiguro, who, the Nobel committee said, "in novels of great emotional
force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection
with the world."
Although the prize was awarded specifically for Ishiguros work as a
novelist, McKee noted that he has also written short stories,
screenplays for film and television and even song lyrics and has
experimented widely with genres including detective fiction, fantasy
and science fiction.
Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but moved with his family at age 5 to
England and has continued to live there, once described himself as a
homeless writer, McKee said. He told the audience that Ishiguros lack
of connection to his original culture (for decades, he didnt visit
Japan and doesnt speak the language) and his sense of being an outsider
in England can be seen in the themes of his novels.
His first novel in 1982 explores memory and displacement [and] he continues those themes in later work, McKee said.
That exploration of how individuals rely on memory as a way to cope
with displacement is also evident in Ishiguros best-known novel, The
Remains of the Day, he said.
Physiology or Medicine
Michael Moore, professor of biological sciences, spoke about the 2017
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall,
Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for what the committee said were
"their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian
rhythm."
Moore, who has conducted research himself in the field of clock
biology, began by describing a person waking up at 1 a.m. to make a
flight. Despite having gone to bed very early and sleeping an almost
adequate number of hours, he still feels terrible.
Why is this so hard? Moore asked. Its hard because your body has a clock, and your body knows what time it is.
Your body, he said, begins preparing for activity a couple of hours
before your normal waking timeraising your blood sugar, body
temperature, hormone levels and metabolism, for examplebut at 1 a.m.,
it hasnt yet started those preparations. The effects can be seen in
situations such as jet lag and shift work.
This years Nobel winners studied fruit flies and discovered that the
internal clock, which has been set by the day-night rotation of the
Earth, is in the genes of organisms. They isolated a gene that controls
the daily bodily rhythm by encoding a protein, and then identified other
protein components that also regulate the clock.
This is a fundamental discoverywhat this clock is and how it
works, Moore said. Almost every function in your body is tied into
this clock, and there are a lot of health implications for numerous
conditions including depression, diabetes and cancer.
Economics
Jeremy Tobacman, assistant professor of economics, explained the work
done by Richard H. Thaler, who will receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize
in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his contributions
to behavioral economics.
Economists had long assumed that people made economic decisions in a
rational way, Tobacman said, calling these hypothetical, rational agents
econs.
Then, he said, Enter Thaler, with a commitment to understanding
humans, not just econs. Thaler incorporated behavioral psychology to
explore how people actually act in terms of accepting risk, having or
lacking will power and other types of decision making.
His work examined how most people view the concept of fairness and
how they simplify financial decision making by focusing narrowly on
individual decisions rather than overall, big-picture consequences. His
book Nudge shows how people can be influenced to save for retirement,
for example, by automatically enrolling them in a savings plan with the
choice of opting out, rather than requiring them to opt in.
Tobacman cited Nudge as an example of Thalers skills in
communicating with the public. In addition, he said, his work on
individual decision making has broader implications for financial
markets.
Physics
In September 2015, a collaborative project known as LIGO enabled
scientists to detect the universes gravitational wavespredicted by
Albert Einstein a century agofor the first time.
That observation by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory was described by Veronique Petit, assistant professor of
physics and astronomy, as she discussed the Nobel Prize in Physics. The
prize was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for
their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector," according to the
award announcement.
Petit explained the gravitational waves occurred from the collision
of two black holes and spread through the universe at the speed of
light. The waves arrived at LIGOs two sites, in Washington state and
Louisiana, just a few days after switching the thing on, Petit said.
With the final proof that binary black holes exist and can merge, It
opens a new field of research that is very exciting for us, she said.
Gravitational waves provide scientists with a new way of observing and
learning more about events in space.
The Nobel committee noted that although LIGO is a long-term project
that has involved over 1,000 scientists from more than 20 countries, the
three laureates enthusiasm and determination ensured that four
decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.
Peace
Matthew Weinert, associate professor of political science and
international relations, spoke about the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to
the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
ICAN is a coalition of non-governmental organizations from some 100
different countries around the globe. The Norwegian Nobel Committee
recognized the group for its "work to draw attention to the catastrophic
humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its
ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such
weapons."
Previous international agreements have banned landmines, cluster
munitions and biological and chemical weapons, Weinert said, but the
nine nations that hold nuclear weapons have never agreed to give them
up.
The dilemma facing ICAN was: How do you eliminate a weapon that some
value so deeply? he said. The strategy the organization used has been
to reframe [the issue] in humanitarian terms, Weinert said, making the
argument that when nuclear weapons are used, there is no way to avoid
causing catastrophic harm to civilians.
ICANs work has been successful in stigmatizing nuclear weapons,
Weinert said. More than 125 nations have formally endorsed a commitment,
called the Humanitarian Pledge, to prohibit and eliminate such weapons.
Chemistry
Juan Perilla, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry,
described the work done by Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard
Henderson in developing cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that
Perilla uses in his own lab.
Dubochet, Frank and Henderson won this years Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for the technology, which allows researchers to generate
three-dimensional images of the molecules of life.
The method, which improves the way biomolecules can be imaged, has
moved biochemistry into a new era, according to the Nobel organization.
With the technique, researchers can freeze molecules and see processes
that were never before available visually.
In his talk, Perilla showed images generated through cryo-electron
microscopy, including 3-dimensional views of structures such as the HIV
capsid, described as a protein cage that carries the virus into the
nucleus of a cell. Perilla has published findings from two years of work
in which a supercomputer simulated the capsid, providing insights into
how it travels in the human body.
Cryo-electron microscopy creates high-resolution models, Perilla
said. We can not only build small models, but we can go beyond what was
possible before.
Article by Ann Manser, with information from the Nobel Prize organization; for more, visit the website. Photo by Wenbo Fan.
