Can you imagine not scanning your shopping in the supermarket or waiting to get home to reply to an email? Life-changing breakthroughs made by Nobel Prize laureates over the last 100 years have transformed the way we work and play by enabling a host of helpful electronic devices, while innovations in medicine make daily life more manageable for people with chronic conditions.
1925: De-mystifying mixtures
The 100-year-old scientific breakthrough that made it possible to observe small colloidal particles still plays an important role for modern science.
In 1902, Richard Zsigmondy began working on an idea that led to the ultramicroscope. By observing an intensely-lit solution at an angle perpendicular to the illuminating beam of light he found it was possible to differentiate between particles that were too small to be observed under an ordinary microscope. We can compare this to how dust particles suspended in the air sometimes become visible if we happen to be standing to the side of a window on a sunny day.
Using this tool he was able to observe small colloidal particles not visible in a conventional microscope. His observations inspired scientists such as Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics 1921), Jean Baptiste Perrin (Nobel Prize in Physics 1926) and The Svedberg (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1926), whose studies lead to the general acceptance of the atomic nature of matter. By monitoring at right angles relative to the incoming light the microscope registered the scattering from the colloidal particles. Common manifestations of this effect can be seen as smoke (particles dispersed in air), milk (fat droplets in liquid) or fog (water dispersed in air).
His work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1925 and his discovery underpins modern colloid science. It represented an important step in a continuing effort of developing methods to directly image smaller and smaller molecular assemblies, for example nanoparticles. In 2014 Stefan Hell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a method that improved the microscope resolution by orders of magnitude relative to the Zsigmondy method.
Today applications of colloidal particles are abundant. The most spectacular is the use of LNPs (lipid nanoparticles) in the COVID vaccine to transport mRNA to cells. Similar particles are used to control the release of drugs in the body. Quantum dots can report on motion in cells. Colloidal particles are also a source of environmental hazards like smog in urban area and plastic microparticles in the oceans.
1950: Relief for rheumatoid arthritis patients
Millions of people are living with rheumatoid arthritis, which causes swelling, stiffness and pain in the joints. While today there are various treatments available, the discovery of cortisone was an important breakthrough.
Philip Hench’s announcement in 1949 about an effective treatment for the autoimmune condition, was greeted with “thunderous applause” from physicians. When news of the discovery of cortisone in rheumatoid arthritis spread to the public, there was an immediate demand for the “wonder” treatment, including from celebrities of the day, such as Raoul Dufy.
The famous French painter who described in poetry how his “splinted” and “disjoined” hands made painting difficult if not agonising, wrote about his hope that cortisone might enable him to draw freehand “following the wind” to immortalise anemones; cheerful flowers in the buttercup family.
Following his treatment, he painted the flowers in his distinctive style and sent a signed print to Hench in gratitude. Hench was further rewarded for his work alongside Edward Kendall and Tadeus Reichstein. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex and the effects of cortisone.
It did not take long for cortisone to be used to treat hundreds of diseases and conditions, from a host of autoimmune rheumatic diseases to allergies and skin diseases, and it is still bringing patients relief today.
1975: Advancing cancer research
While rheumatoid arthritis affects around 1 in 100 people, one in two of us will develop some form of cancer during our lifetime, making any leap in understanding, or medical breakthrough in the field incredibly impactful.
The discovery in 1916 by the 1966 Nobel Prize laureate Peyton Rous, showing that a retrovirus can cause cancer in chickens, was long treated as a biological curiosity, until more methods for cultivating cells in the lab became available in the 1950s. These methods enabled scientists to study how a normal cell can turn into cancer cells when exposed to different retroviruses, by a process known as transformation. Scientists believed that transformation was triggered by cancer-causing genes carried by retroviruses.
David Baltimore and Howard Temin, Nobel Prize laureates in 1975, studied how tumour-causing retroviruses replicate after they infect a healthy cell. They independently found that retroviruses, which are so called RNA-viruses, contain the blueprint for an unusual enzyme called reverse transcriptase that can make a copy of DNA from RNA. The ‘new’ DNA integrates with the infected host cell, transforming it into a cancer cell.
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1 (of 2) David Baltimore.
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
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2 (of 2) Howard M. Temin.
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Although we now know that viruses rarely cause cancer, the groundbreaking work of Temin and Baltimore had a major impact on our understanding of cancer at the genetic level. A later discovery revealed that the cancer-causing genes found in some viruses actually originate from normal genes within our own cells – an insight that was recognised with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 to Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop. When these cellular genes become mutated, they can drive uncontrolled cell growth, leading to cancer.
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1 (of 2) Harold E. Varmus.
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2 (of 2) J. Michael Bishop.
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The interest in how viruses can transform normal cells has in this way revolutionised our understanding of the genetic pathways causing cancer, and paved the way for new successful approaches to cancer treatment.
2000: Chips for change
When the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded 25 years ago, recognising contributions to the early developments of microelectronics and photonics, most computers occupied half of your desk space, phones weren’t smart and artificial intelligence only existed in science fiction.
The advent of the transistor in 1947 heralded the dawn of a new age, but emerging computers needed tens of thousands of them on a single circuit board whose assembly was a time-consuming and error-prone task. Almost a decade later, Jack Kilby solved this problem by designing a circuit out of tiny components made together with the transistors, directly on the surface of a single crystal of semiconducting material. The components were fabricated in a series of steps using a photo lithographic-like patern transfer process. On 12 September 1958, he demonstrated a working integrated circuit, today called a ’chip’.
We now produce more than a trillion chips a year, found in almost all electronic devices from tiny wearables and smartphones to powerful medical equipment and satellites. Chips have become increasingly powerful and their development has followed Moore’s Law, with the number of transistors doubling approximately every one and a half years. This exponential growth has driven an explosion in the computing and communication capabilities of electronic devices.
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1 (of 2) Herbert Kroemer.
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2 (of 2) Zhores Alferov.
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Modern electronics not only required smaller and cheaper chips, but faster transistors. Herbert Kroemer developed methods to advanced the speed of transistors. Together with Zhores Alferov, Kroemer led work on semiconductor heterostructures – a stack of interfaces between two different semiconductors – that enabled not only high-speed transistors, but also specialised light emmiting diodes (LEDs), lasers and solar panels, enabling a host of other inventions that have changed the way we live. For example, without the heterostructure laser, we would not have had optical broadband links, speedy laser printers or barcode readers to make grocery shopping less arduous.
The extraordinary growth in computing power driven by Moore’s Law cannot continue for ever. But a growing number of new applications for chips and lasers, as well as ideas for medical research, will surely drive technological advancement for a long time to come. New semiconductor chips for artificial intelligence are currently under development and chips for quantum computing made from superconducting materials promise another technological leap. We can only imagine what the next century of scientific progress will yield.