Nobel Recognition

The Nobel prizes announced this year appear to have seized the public imagination, although it is quite likely 2019 will be a tough act to follow. In recent years, grand discoveries like the existence of gravitational waves or the Higgs boson were expectedly recognised with Nobel prizes; this year, the prize committees have more forcefully driven home Alfred Nobel’s dream of encouraging works that bring about the greatest benefits to mankind. This in particular is exemplified by the Chemistry Nobel going to the inventors of lithium ion battery. Powering smartphones, laptops and an array of electronic devices, this battery has made possible the mobile revolution; what is more, it promises to be the precursor of more powerful solid-state, non-inflammable, much longer lasting, rechargeable batteries that could soon make electric transportation a viable proposition.

Lest we forget, the first cars were supposed to have run on electric power sources like lead acid batteries had not oil been discovered in the 1920s. With the power of petroleum and gasoline harnessed through ‘series of controlled explosions’, the battery was relegated to the role of merely starting the engine. It was the oil crisis in the 1970s that motivated Stanley Whittingham of U.K. to fabricate a battery using the tremendous urge of lithium to lose its outermost electron. John Goodenough of USA then took over, correctly identifying after painstaking search a lithium cobalt oxide with layered structure as better material for the battery cathode. Akiro Yoshino of Japan then used petroleum coke as carbon cage intercalated with lithium ions as the anode, and the battery was ready for commercial production by 1991. It is heartening that battery technology, hitherto a neglected area of materials science, has at last been recognised. It is high time to have done so, considering the urgency for mankind to switch from fossil fuels that are polluting and heating up our atmosphere. Dr. Goodenough, at 97 the oldest recipient ever of the Nobel prize, has said his faith in loving his neighbour and God, inspired him to create something that could ‘help safeguard the planet and improve people’s lives’. The same point, in another way, is made by Swiss astrophysicist Michel Mayor, one of the three recipients of the Physics Nobel this year. Reacting to speculations that his co-development (with fellow Nobel prize recipient and doctorate student Didier Queloz) of an ingenious method to detect exoplanets in faraway solar systems will one day bring about mass migration of mankind from Planet Earth, Mayor insists the very idea is ‘crazy’.

All such planets discovered are very distant, and even if one is discovered a few dozen light years away, the time barrier will be too formidable. For human survival in the near future, Mayor says the only alternative is to ‘take care of our planet, which is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable’. It needs be appreciated that one half of the Nobel Physics prize this year goes to James Peebles of USA for groundbreaking work in cosmology — the Nobel citation mentions his studies into the growth and structure of the Universe, the decoding of ancient radiations soon after the Big Bang, and the puzzles of dark matter and dark energy. The Nobel prize in Medicine this year also recognises a ‘textbook discovery’ into how cells in the human body sense and respond to changes in oxygen levels.

This work has opened the doors to treat cancer by blocking cancerous cells from accessing oxygen, developing new drugs to treat anaemia so that red blood cells get to carry adequate oxygen, and for better treatment of heart attacks and strokes which are marked by cell damage caused due to interruption of supply of oxygen-rich blood. The Nobel prize in Economics for 2019 too has attracted widespread attention for recognising Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer’s work in helping to see global poverty in a new light. They have been praised for designing their experiments at small grassroots level, pushing for targeted interventions as in preventive healthcare and remedial teaching, guiding the deployment of capital for maximum effect including micro-finance, and applying the ‘randomized-control-trial’ approach used in clinical research for conducting their studies into poverty. This renewed emphasis on recognising work that brings about the greatest good of the greatest number will undoubtedly vest the Nobel prizes with even higher prestige in coming years, considering the huge challenges facing our planet.