2011 Nobel Prize Roundup

As of Wednesday, the Nobel Prize committee has announced the recipients for three of the Nobel Prizes, with Literature Prize due to be announced today, the Peace Prize on Friday and the Economic Sciences Prize on Monday.

Physiology or Medicine: This prize was split between Jules Hoffmann and Bruce Buelter for their work on innate immunity and Ralph Steinman for his work on the role of dendritic cells in immunity. Hoffman, who recently served as the President of the French National Academy of Sciences, the roll of the Toll gene in the ability of fruit flies to combat infections back in 1996. Buelter, currently a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, identified a receptor in mice similar to Toll that could bind lipopolysaccharide, a molecular product of bacteria. Steinman, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York, had discovered dendritic cells in 1973, and through later work showed that they activate T cells, a group of immune cells important in the immune response. Unfortunately, Steinman passed away from pancreatic cancer last Friday while undergoing an experimental treatment he had been developing. The Nobel committee has decided to let his award stand.

Physics: For their combined work resulting in the finding that the universe is expanding and that it is expanding at an increasing speed, this year's prize in physics was split between Saul Perimutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. Perlmutter established one team at UC Berkeley in 1988, while Schmidt started another team at Harvard in 1994, with Riess playing an crucial role, to map out the Universe by finding the most distant supernovae. Their findings on the accelerating speed of the universe's expansion lead to the hypothesis that this was driven by dark energy, which still remains a mystery. Schmidt has since moved on to the Australian National University, while Riess took up a professorship here at Hopkins.

Chemistry: Awarded to Dan Shechtman of the Israel Institute of Technology for his discovery of quasicrystals, a finding that had altered the understanding of solid matter by chemists. While crystals are formed by repeating, symmetrical patterns of atoms, Shechtman observed a crystal that had a pattern that could not be repeated, reminiscent of aperiodic mosaics that are found in Arabic art. His original findings got him the boot from his research group while he was working in America, but scientists were later able to reproduce quasicrystals in the lab and identified them in mineral samples from a Russian river.