Nobel Science Minds 2007

If I could describe the extent in which some kids and adults who have iPods depend on the said gadget or similar ones, it is “I think, therefore iPod.” Oblivious to the world as these iPod wearers are, I wonder if they know that this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to two scientists who, in 1988, independently discovered what made it possible to store a stupendous amount of information in small disks such as that insane volume of music in those little MP3 player pocket instruments. So if parents are wondering whom to blame in science when their iPod-wearing teenager could not hear their reminders, you can start with Frenchman Albert Fert and German Peter Grünberg who both share this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics for the “discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance.” Their achievement is about storage. Storing information magnetically is no secret. But storing, for instance, all the music that mankind has ever hummed in smaller and smaller physical spaces such as the ones inside your iPods requires a packing capacity that is very dense. Due to this increasing density, the magnetic spaces that code the information become smaller. But Fert and Grünberg discovered a way to magnify those very small magnetic effects so that very little things could be pregnant with a universe of information that would be accessible if you have an earpiece.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine went to three honorees: Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for their discoveries of “principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells.” Dr. Capecchi’s story has been particularly cited over and over again because he was caught in war-time Italy when he was a boy and did not go to school until he was nine, and in fact, wandered around chaos until then. Because of what he has been through and what he has become, he told Adam Smith of the Nobel Foundation in a phone interview “that anyone can do it, if given a chance, if given the opportunity.” Luckily, for the mice — the animals that geneticists always experiment on, not everyone can really do it. Another favorite story of the three was when Dr. Evans went to the US to visit Dr. Smithies carrying cells in his pocket. Most people carry souvenirs or any token as a gift but with scientists, they carry their cells in their pockets across the oceans. These cells were the kind that Dr. Evans discovered as a vehicle to carry out what Dr. Capecchi and Dr. Smithies had discovered — a technique called “gene-targeting” which involved “knocking out” specific genes so that they know what happens if they silence them. They have to knock them out to know what they do. Because of their discovery, gene-targeting has advanced the research on genetic diseases and how to treat or even cure them. 

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry goes to Gerhard Ertl for “for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.” Reading the scientific background of his achievement gives one a sense that it spans his entire career. While we “commoners” in this world do not think it is ever a problem when something small hits a surface, Dr. Ertl found it to be such an interesting problem that he devoted most of his life’s research to meticulously studying what happens to atoms and molecules when they hit a pure surface. And because he persisted, the results he gained from those experiments have led us to understand what happens to the pollutants that hit the ice crystals that are there in the atmosphere. It has also paved the way for the development of catalytic converters (those that clean our car exhaust before it comes out) since he revealed what happens when carbon monoxide, which our car coughs up, comes in contact with platinum in our catalytic converters.

In 1967, there was no Nobel Peace Prize winner. The Nobel Committee did not find anyone worthy. But in that same year, Hans Bethe, the physicist who elucidated for us how stars burn, won the Nobel for Physics. He was such a champion of peace that his having won that same year for me made him a shadow Nobel Peace Prize winner that year. This year, the Nobel Peace Prize turns and marries science with our human sense of responsibility and tells us that climate change impacts on our human sense of security — that our peace is held not just by a contract of respect and responsibility between one another but with the planet that holds not just humans. The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared equally between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Giving the Peace Prize to IPCC and Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee  “is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

From the littlest processes in nature — magnets and atoms splashing onto metals — to one of the biggest of them all — climate — scientists are found, probing, tinkering. They never seem to sit too long reveling in self-congratulations. In a phone interview by Adam Smith right after the announcement (a tradition every year), Ertl, I think, best captured the spirit of science at the cusp of discovery. He said, “A scientist is never, never at the end, and when we solve a problem, five other problems develop anew. So that’s why a scientist will always think about his work and what he can do next.” That “next” sometimes covers a kind of knowledge on which an entire generation of technology is built upon. This is what science ever so reliably does — it always says, “Next…”

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