Top 10 Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Nobel Prize Winning Discovery Can Be Used In Cancer Treatment For Which Discovery Received Nobel Prize
MOSCOW, October 3 - RIA Novosti. The discovery of the autophagy mechanism by Nobel laureate Yesinori Osumi may lead to the emergence of new approaches to cancer treatment and infection control, Alexei Maschan, deputy general director for scientific work of the Rogachev Federal Research Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, told RIA Novosti.
Nobel laureate Yoshinori Osumi confesses that since childhood he dreamed of a prizeAt the same time, the wife of the laureate, who was present at the press conference, said that her husband was never an ambitious person, and she is first of all surprised.On Monday, the Nobel Committee announced in Stockholm that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for the discovery of the mechanism of autophagy to Professor Yoshinori Osumi from Japan of Tokyo Institute of Technology. In a press release, the Nobel Committee said that "this year's laureate discovered and described the mechanism of autophagy - the fundamental process of removing and utilizing cell components." Disruptions in the process of autophagy or cleansing of cells from "debris" can lead to the development of diseases such as cancer and neurological diseases, therefore, knowledge of the mechanism of self-cleaning of cells can lead to a new and effective generation of drugs.
"Any open mechanism that studies cell death can potentially be useful in approaches to cancer treatment. Because the goal of cancer treatment is the maximum destruction of tumor cells," Maschan said.
He reported that prior to the discovery of autophagy, two mechanisms of cell death were known: "necrosis, when cells swell, swell and burst, and so-called apoptosis, which is exactly the opposite, when cells shrink, the nucleus fragmented and they die and are absorbed by the surrounding cells."
"But this mechanism, it is an intermediate, also programmed, also regulated by a large number of genes, and it is a very interesting third mechanism of cell death. Therefore, of course, this is a very important fundamental discovery, from which really new approaches to treatment of tumors, "the expert added.
At the same time, Maschan noted that this discovery can also be used in immunology, namely, to control infections and long-term support of immunity against their pathogens.
... Next in line are the spheres of chemistry, economics, peace, literature and economics. The awards are held annually, and awards are given for excellence in specific areas. Along with receiving the most prestigious academic award, the laureates become millionaires - the cash prize is over a million dollars.IT.TUT.BY has prepared its list of the most significant achievements in three scientific categories - chemistry, physics, medicine and physiology.
Physics
X-rays, 1901
X-rays were discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen at the end of the nineteenth century. The German scientist became the first in the history of the Nobel Prize laureate in the field of physics "in recognition of the exceptional services that he rendered to science by the discovery of wonderful rays, later named after him." Roentgen's discovery quickly found application in the field of physics and medicine.
Radioactivity, 1903
The couple Marie and Pierre Curie investigated the phenomena of radiation and in 1903 shared Nobel Prize with Antoine Henri Becquerel, who discovered the phenomenon of spontaneous radioactivity. The Curies discovered radioactivity while working with uranium salts. For some unknown reason, the photographic plates were illuminated. Becquerel, interested in the phenomenon, after a series of tests determined that the images were destroyed by radiation unknown to science. 
Pierre Curie died in 1906: he slipped on a wet road and fell under a cart. Marie Curie continued scientific activity and in 1911 she became the first two-time Nobel Prize winner.
Neutron, 1935
James Chadwick discovered a heavy elementary particle, which was named the neutron - "neither one nor the other" in Latin. The neutron is one of the main components of the atomic nucleus.
In 1930, Soviet scientists Ivanenko and Ambartsumyan refuted the then current theory that the nucleus consists of electrons and protons. Research has shown that the core must contain an unknown neutral particlediscovered by James Chadwick.
Higgs boson, 2013
Peter Higgs suggested the existence of the elementary particle in 1964. At that time, there was no equipment capable of confirming or refuting the physicist's hypothesis. Only in 2012, during an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, a previously unknown particle was discovered.
Six months later, researchers at CERN (European Center nuclear research) confirmed that the Higgs boson was found. The Higgs boson is responsible for the inert mass of elementary particles, it is also called the "god particle".
Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize with François Engler in 2013 "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that helps us understand the origin of the mass of subatomic particles, confirmed in recent times the discovery of the predicted elementary particle in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. "
Medicine and physiology
Insulin, 1923
The hormone for lowering the concentration of glucose in the blood, without which the life of sufferers diabetes mellitus people would be much more complex and shorter, discovered by Canadian scientists Frederick Bunting and John McLeod. Banting is still the youngest Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology - he received the award at 32.
An open hormone called insulin regulates glucose metabolism. In people with diabetes, this hormone is produced in small quantities, due to which glucose is poorly processed in the body. Experiments on isolating insulin have been carried out for a long time, but it was McLeod and Bunting who discovered it.
Blood types, 1930
Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner took six different blood tubes, including his own, and separated the serum from the red blood cells in a centrifuge. Then he mixed serum and erythrocytes from different samples. As a result, it turned out that blood serum does not agglutinate (precipitation of homogeneous substances) with erythrocytes from one test tube.
Landsteiner discovered three blood groups - A, B and 0. Two years later, Landsteiner's students and followers discovered the fourth group - AB.
Penicillin, 1945
Penicillin is the first herbal antibiotic. The substance is released from molds on fungi. Scientist Alexander Fleming's laboratory was not entirely clean. The researcher studied staphylococcus bacteria. When he returned to the laboratory after a month's absence, he found that bacteria had died on the moldy plate, while they were alive on the clean plates. Fleming became interested in this phenomenon and began to conduct experiments.
It wasn't until 1941 that scientists Ernst Chain, Howard Flory, and Alexander Fleming were able to isolate enough purified penicillin to save humans. The first patient to recover was a 15-year-old teenager with blood poisoning.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to three scientists "for the discovery of penicillin and its healing effects in various infectious diseases."
DNA structure, 1962
DNA is one of the three main macromolecules along with proteins and RNA. She is responsible for storage, transmission from one generation to another and the creation of a genetic program for the development and functioning of living organisms.
The structure was deciphered in 1953. Scientists Francis Crick, James Waughton and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize "for discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and their importance for the transmission of information in living systems."
Chemistry
Polonium and Radium, 1911
The Curies determined that the waste of uranium ore was more radioactive than the uranium itself. After several years of experiments, Pierre and Maria managed to isolate the two most radioactive elements: radium and polonium. The discovery was made in 1898.
Radium is an extremely rare element. More than a hundred years have passed since its opening, and only one and a half kilograms have been extracted in its pure form. The element is used in medicine for the treatment of malignant diseases of the nasal mucosa and skin. Polonium, discovered simultaneously with radium, is used to create powerful neutron sources.
The second Nobel Prize for "outstanding achievements in the development of chemistry: the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this wonderful element" was received only by Maria Curie: the award is not awarded posthumously, and her husband was not alive by that time.
Atomic mass, 1915
Theodore William Richards was able to accurately determine the atomic mass of 25 elements. The scientist began by "weighing" hydrogen and oxygen. To do this, Richards used his own method, burning hydrogen with copper oxide. The researcher used the remaining moisture to determine the exact weight of the element.For further experiments, we used devices of our own invention. Richards found that the mass of lead in radioactive minerals is less than that of ordinary lead. This was one of the first confirmations of the existence of isotopes.
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The Nobel Prize has been awarded since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is extremely difficult to cover all inventions and discoveries in one article. Don't agree with our top ten? Suggest your options in the comments.
Nobel Week in Stockholm began the day before, traditionally opened by the announcement of the winners of the prize for research in physiology and medicine. The winners are James Ellison from the USA and Tasuku Honjo from Japan for the discovery of a new type of therapy in the treatment of cancer.
The size of the Nobel Prize this year is 9 million kroons (just over $ 1 million).
In a conversation with RBC, the director of the Lebedev Physical Institute Russian academy Nikolay Kolachevsky noted that the methods of scientists for whom the Nobel Prize was received have been used in laboratories for a long time. “These are the kind of workhorses that are used both in Russia and abroad, and in commercial devices. This is a whole large layer of already practical work behind these methods, ”he said.
According to him, optical tweezers are used in biology, medicine, and research related to chemistry. "[Optical tweezers] This is a method that allows small particles, sensors, sensors and objects to be captured into a focused laser beam, which can be inserted into some tissue or liquid and mixed there as needed," says Kolachevsky. According to him, the method turned out to be very promising. “Then it turned out that it was possible to capture not one, but several particles, creating some light structures, moreover, of a rather complex shape, that is, you can draw an asterisk or some kind of lattice using a laser,” he explained.
Working on a method for generating high-intensity ultrashort optical pulses, scientists have long tried to create the most powerful light pulse. “It would seem that there are laser amplifiers that allow you to amplify the power, but at some point, if the power is already very high, the amplifying medium itself begins to collapse,” he explained.
According to Kolachevsky, scientists came up with the idea of \u200b\u200bbreaking the impulse by color, making a rainbow out of it, "having run it several times through amplifiers." “And then [it is necessary] to compress it by the reverse process. This is how extremely high-intensity powerful laser pulses are obtained, which can then be used in a number of tasks. Many research tasks in chemistry, chemistry-related fields of biology. This is a huge layer of medical, biological and technological tasks, ”he said.
The prize in physics was awarded 111 times, it was received by 207 people, the first in 1901 was William Roentgen (Germany) for the discovery of radiation, named after him. Among the laureates are 12 physicists from the USSR and Russia, as well as scientists who were born and educated in the Soviet Union, and then received a second citizenship. In 2010, Andrey Geim and Konstantin Novoselov received awards for the creation of graphene (the world's thinnest material). In 2003, Alexei Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg, together with Anthony Leggett (Great Britain), received the award "for innovative contributions to the theory of superconductors". In 2000, Zhores Alferov was awarded a prize for the development of the concept of semiconductor heterostructures and its use in optoelectronics and high-speed electronics.
Last year, scientists from the United States - Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Berry Berisch - won the Nobel Prize in Physics. They received the award "for a decisive contribution to the project of a laser-interferometric gravitational-wave observatory and observation of gravitational waves." And the only scientist who received the prize in physics twice was John Bardeen: in 1956 for the invention of the bipolar transistor (with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain), and also in 1972 for the fundamental theory of ordinary superconductors (with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer).
The Nobel Committee keeps the names of the nominees for the award a secret to the last. Among the possible winners of the prize in physics, researchers from Clarivate Analytics, analyzing the citation rate of articles of scientists in the Web of Science database, this year named American scientists David Oushalom and Arthur Gossard - for the discovery of the Hall effect in semiconductors, which explains the behavior of electrons in magnetic fields; astronomer and astrophysicist Sandra Faber from the USA - for his study of the mechanisms of formation of galaxies and the evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe and for the theory of cold dark matter; American professor Yuri Gogotsi, Rodney Ruoff from South Korea and Patrice Simone from France - for their discoveries in the field of carbon materials and supercapacitors. Physics World magazine named Lena Howe (Denmark) among the nominees for the prize for experiments on decreasing the speed of light using a Bose - Einstein condensate, Yakir Aharonov (Israel) and Michael Berry (Great Britain) - for the discovery of a number of quantum phenomena.
It rarely happens when players in Dibrov's TV show approach such expensive questions as 3 or 1.5 million rubles, so every time it becomes very interesting to find out which or which tricky questions can be so highly valued, and therefore we state that the question about the Nobel laureate Frische was proposed by the editors of the program in the category of 1.5 million rubles. I will say right away that Andrey and Viktor won this question, and it was Burkovsky who managed to "catch" luck or intuition "by the tail" and play beautifully in this round. The couple reached this amount, having spent all the clues at earlier levels, therefore, only thanks to their instinct, they were lucky to guess the correct discovery related to the language (movement in space) of bees.
A little later, choosing the answer for 3 million rubles, Andrey outplayed himself, betting on an obvious, but not correct option. But so intuition is a delicate matter, it will prompt, then no, right?
In the second picture, you can see how the question sounded in the original, i.e. the year Frisch was awarded this prize is 1973, the options themselves, and, tinted orange, the answer itself.
In March 1888, Alfred Nobel read his own obituary in the newspaper. Journalists confused him with his brother and rushed to report the death of the "merchant in death". Nobel was upset because of his brother, because of the mistake of journalists, but especially because of the tone of the obituary. Then he decided to leave behind something other than dynamite and ordered the establishment of the Nobel Prize.
“All my movable and immovable property should be converted by my executors into liquid values, and the capital thus collected should be placed in a reliable bank. Income from investments must belong to the fund, which will annually distribute them in the form of bonuses to those who have brought the greatest benefit to humanity during the previous year. "- Nobel bequeathed.
For more than a hundred years, the Nobel Committee unwittingly violated the will of the founder several times and mistakenly presented the prize for not very useful inventions.
Miraculous lamps
Dane Niels Ryberg Finsen was in poor health since childhood. As he grew up, he noticed that after walking in the sun, he felt much better.
At university, he began studying the healing effects of ultraviolet rays. He gained popularity in the scientific world thanks to innovations in the treatment of smallpox, but later switched to lupus - tuberculosis of the skin (not to be confused with systemic lupus erythematosus - an autoimmune disease). In 1885, he bought powerful carbon arc lamps for research, which played a cruel joke on him.
Finsen used lamps to irradiate patients with lupus for two hours every day. As a result, after a few months they got better, and many even got rid of ugly scars and wounds and recovered. A year later, Finsen was already head of the phototherapy institute that bore his name. Half of the patients who received his treatment recovered completely, and the other half felt much better.
The outstanding results were noticed and in 1903 Finsen received the Nobel Prize in recognition of his services in the treatment of diseases, especially lupus.
Later it turned out that the lenses that Finsen used did not transmit ultraviolet radiation at all. It was not light at all that had a therapeutic effect, but singlet oxygen, which appeared due to the sparkling carbon rods of the lamp. Nevertheless, phototherapy, which was pioneered by Finsen, is really effective for some diseases.
a special oxygen molecule, which has twice the energy than usual
Wedge wedge
At the beginning of the 20th century, syphilis was an incurable disease. In the most severe stages, he gave complications to the brain, and the patients developed progressive paralysis - a psychoorganic disease, death from which occurred within several years. A fifth of patients in psychiatric clinics were sick with syphilis and, as a result, progressive paralysis.
Julius Wagner-Jauregg worked in a psychiatric clinic and was interested in the physiological causes of mental illness. He noted that among the patients with progressive paralysis there were those who survived. It was them that Wagner-Jauregg examined. It turned out that all of them had suffered a severe fever during an illness with progressive paralysis.
At first, he infected patients with tuberculosis. But the tuberculous fever was short and weak.
The doctor began to look for ways to cause severe fever in patients with progressive paralysis. First he infected them with tuberculosis, and then he treated him with tuberculin. But the tuberculous fever was short and weak, so it was not suitable for the treatment of progressive paralysis. In addition, some patients died because tuberculin did not help them.
A breakthrough in research came in 1917, when quinine was discovered for the treatment of malaria: malarial fever was quite strong and prolonged. Wagner-Jauregg infected patients with malaria and then treated them with quinine.
85% of patients experienced significant improvements, but mortality remained high. Later, the doctor isolated a weakened strain of malaria pathogens and reduced the risk of malaria therapy. However, he was not always able to control the course of malaria, and some patients died. But then it was considered an acceptable risk.
In 1927, Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the therapeutic effect of malaria infection in the treatment of progressive paralysis.
His discovery is still controversial: either malaria stimulated the immune system, or high body temperature created an unfavorable environment for the causative agents of syphilis, or both worked at the same time. We were saved from mass malaria therapy by the invention of penicillin, which helps to cure syphilis in the initial stages before patients become progressively paralyzed.
Prepare for complications
In 1948 Paul Müller received the Nobel Prize for the discovery dangerous properties one of the most toxic substances on earth - dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known as DDT or dust. Müller found that DDT can be used as a powerful insecticide to fight locusts, mosquitoes and other pests.
DDT was the best known insecticide: it was considered low toxic, but was fatal to all insects without exception. It was fairly simple and cheap to produce, and easy to spray over entire fields. For humans, a single dose of 500-700 mg was considered absolutely harmless, so the substance was sprayed even in populated areas.
DDT stopped typhoid epidemics in Naples, malaria in India, Greece and Italy, increased yields and gave hope for a victory over hunger in many countries. During its widespread use in the world, 4 million tons of dust have been sprayed. Its benefits were obvious, and the dangerous consequences came much later.
During its widespread use in the world, 4 million tons of dust were sprayed.
In the 1950s, the first studies appeared that proved that DDT accumulates in the environment and in animal organisms and leads to irreversible changes. Particularly alarming was the fact that as it advanced in the food chain, DDT increased its concentration, and theoretically it could reach doses that are deadly to humans. By 1970, all developed countries had banned the use of DDT in their territories.
Millions of tons of toxic substances continue to "walk" around the world in the bodies of birds and animals, accumulate in soil and water, concentrate in plants and again enter the organisms of animals. Today, traces of DDT are found even in the Arctic. This process will continue for several more generations: the decomposition period of DDT is 180 years, and we still do not know about all the consequences of its use.
The secret of obedience
Rosemary Kennedy, the elder sister of the President of the United States, was a difficult child. In early childhood, she pleased her mother with a docile character, gentleness and obedience. Over time, the girl began to lag behind her peers in development, had difficulty remembering something new, and could not learn to read and write. When Rosemary noticed that she was different from other children, her character deteriorated: she became irritable and quick-tempered.
In 1941, a frustrated Joe Kennedy gave his daughter permission to perform a surgical procedure that doctors said could calm Rosemary and make her more manageable. Dr. Walter Freeman pierced the soft bones over Rosemary's eye and cut her brain.