Nobel Prizes

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• Contents

The precision and versatility of Nature is remarkable. Cell division is at the heart of all organic matter. It allows for replication in a highly faithful manner. This stability depends on the impressive fidelity of duplication of the central information-carrying molecule, the DNA. The error in insertion of a proper matching nucleotide in the double-stranded molecule, remarkably, is only one in a million. And still there are errors. These may be detrimental to the function of cells and potentially cause disease in multicellular organisms, but accidentally they may sometimes also be of value. The progress of evolution depends on such mistakes…

At the beginning of the twentieth century cancer was a serious and frequently lethal disease among many other equally life threatening diseases. The relative importance of cancer has increased not least in industrialized countries because of improved longevity and major advances in treatment of other medical illnesses. The introduction of antibiotics and prophylactic use of vaccines to prevent infectious diseases as well as major improvements in management of coronary heart diseases have been critical. In some countries death from cancer today even supersedes that caused by the latter kind of afflictions. In the course of the previous century there have been a number of discoveries in biology and medicine that have progressively, and sometimes dramatically, changed our understanding of the mechanisms of cancer development. Many of these advances have been recognized by Nobel Prizes after the award to Rous and Huggins in 1966. To a large extent the revolutionary insights have become possible because of the introduction of techniques of molecular biology. But let us first see how it all started. The selected samples given will refer to various relevant Nobel Prizes awarded or in a few cases discoveries potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. To get the full story it is worth consulting leading books on this topic, be they the more popular, already mentioned, The Emperor of All Maladies. A Biography of Cancer or a modern textbook like The Biology of Cancer. The early means of treatment were surgery and irradiation with X-rays. At a somewhat later stage chemotherapy and immunotherapy were introduced…

In the middle of his Nobel lecture Rous stated…

The world we live in regionally may give the impression of providing a stable ground, terra firma. However, this impression sometimes needs to be modified depending on where we are on the globe and also which reference of time we apply. One of the first problems to be approached by the newly created Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739 was the question of the progressive alterations of the coastal profile of the country. Significant changes in the water level could be observed even within a lifespan of a human. Valuable natural harbors in the archipelagoes could turn unusable in a few generations, affecting conditions of fishing. The question was if the land was rising or if the water level was being reduced? When it was discovered that the changes noted clearly varied along the extensive Swedish coast the answer was obvious. It was the land that was rising. This was soon deduced to be due to the pressure that the heavy inland ice existing some 10,000 years ago had applied. Not only did the ice suppress the rocks, in some places it also polished them to a silk-like texture. In some areas the height that the land has risen in recent times is quite impressive. At the island of Blidö in the northern part of the Stockholm archipelago, where my family has its summer houses, it is about 60 centimeters in 100 years. Thus what were two rocks that barely reached above the water level when I was a child has now developed into an island with grass and bushes. It can be added that the expected rise of the water level because of global warming will have essentially no effects in some parts of the east coast of Sweden because it is compensated for by the land elevation…

The evolution of life on Earth is a magnificent story. The principles by which this had occurred did not become apparent until after the book The Origin of Species was published by Charles Darwin in 1859. Since then our insights into how different forms of life have emerged and developed have grown immensely. It is a fascinating story. As conditions on Earth have changed new forms of life have emerged. Originally development took place in the oceans and the existence of some kind of simple cellular life has been identified as far back as 3.8 billion years ago. Reading the books of life provide facts on genetic relationships as mentioned in my previous books on Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine. Comparison of differences between various species by use of genome characterizations has sometimes given surprising insights. New forms of life are continuously being unraveled and new unexpected relationships are identified. We start to get an insight into the early developments of life not least by studies of viruses and microorganism, which we shall briefly return to in the last chapter of this book…

The revolutionary discovery of the unique equidistant pairing between the nucleotide bases guanine and cytosine and adenine and thymine led Watson and Crick to propose the double-strand structure of DNA in 1953. This momentous finding had two major consequences. The first one was that the structure allowed a semi-conservative replication preserving the complementary sequence of nucleotides for succeeding generations of cells. Separating the two strands and building a new complementary strand provided two copies of the double-helix, identical to the parent molecule. The second major implication was that the existence of four different bases offered a potential insight into the information storage and the language used by nature to control protein synthesis and metabolism in general. The question of coding and the possible access to a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the language used by nature was raised soon after the discovery. However, several fundamental questions first needed to be answered…

The lead character of the previous chapter Nirenberg, could easily have carried a Nobel Prize in chemistry or in physiology or medicine on his own. However, in 1968 he was joined by Robert W. Holley and H. Gobind Khorana for the prize. Let us trace why the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute preferred a prize including all three of them. At the earlier time of writing about the 1968 prize I was communicating with the only surviving member of the committee at the Karolinska Institute at the time, Reichard. He was a very central person in connection with the prize for the genetic code. As has already become apparent he was the main reviewer of the candidates both at the Karolinska Institute and also at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. When the prize was awarded he was selected to be the introductory speaker at the prize ceremony. On May 30, 2018 I received an email from him starting and finishing with a few words in Swedish, but mainly using English. It read…

Humans are a curious species. Already early in civilization it was noticed that water could change the angle of light. When glass was first produced some 2,000 years ago it was observed that this material too could bend light. The first lenses were produced and were given their name because of similarity in form to a bean, Latin lentil. It took some thousand years before the first eye glasses were produced but in between the Basra-born Arab polymath Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Latinized to Alhazen had described the fundamentals of optics. As we have learnt in Chapters 4 and 5, what we see is light that has bounced off the objects filling our surroundings. Alhazen was a prominent representative of what is referred to as the Islamic Golden Age. He should also be mentioned because he may have been the first proponent of the scientific method in which a hypothesis is proven by experiments or by confirmatory mathematical procedures. This concept was reintroduced with force by the later Renaissance researchers launching the modern era of science-based societal developments. Galileo Galilee is considered as the pioneer in this field. He used his primitive binoculars to identify four moons circulating around Jupiter and this led to the revolutionary change from an Earth-centric to a heliocentric view of our solar system. Whereas Galileo looked outwards another scientist of the 17th century looked inwards…

The following sections are included:

• References
• Index