Nobel prizes for corona vaccine and electron research
Corona vaccine
For their research on mRNA, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman receive the Nobel Prize in medicine. Thanks to their discoveries, vaccines against the corona virus arrived at lightning speed.
A vaccine trains the body to make antibodies against a virus. Previously, this was done on the basis of the viruses themselves, or on parts of the virus. The development took a comparatively long time.
Today, thanks to the research of Hungarian Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman, it can be done much faster. Vaccines against the coronavirus have arrived in record time.
Electron research
Researchers from America, Germany and Sweden win this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. They have developed super-short laser pulses that reveal the world of electrons. Electrons move extremely fast, in so-called ‘attoseconds’ (10-18 seconds). Nobel Prize winners have developed a grasp of this time scale, says the Nobel Prize committee.
Nobel laureates Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz, have developed a new form of physics to study electrons in all kinds of materials. Possible applications, L’Huillier said, lie in the fields of chemistry and medicine. But the holy grail is to be able to “talk” to electrons and to control the reaction time of atoms through electrons, L’Huillier said.
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