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At Last, A Nobel – At Age 97!
By Shlomo Maital
John Goodenough
This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists: John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize.
Goodenough is American, Whittingham is British and Yoshino is Japanese.
The three won the prize for their work in developing lithium-ion batteries, which are ubiquitous in our lives, including in all our cell phones.
Goodenough has the best story. According to the Wall Street Journal,
“At age 97, Dr. Goodenough of the University of Texas in Austin, who was born in Germany of American parents, is the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize.
“I’m extremely happy that the lithium-ion battery has been able to help communications through the world,” Dr. Goodenough said during a call with reporters from London, where he is receiving the 2019 Copley Medal for his contribution to materials technology. While there, he learned he had also won this year’s chemistry Nobel.
“It’s been a very eventful day,” he added .”
The three have been touted for a Nobel for over a decade. Thank goodness, Goodenough lived long enough to win it (Nobel’s are never awarded posthumously).
Don’t you love his wonderful understatement, about an “eventful day”?
A member of the Nobel Chemistry committee noted: “Lithium-ion batteries can be combined with energy sources that fluctuate over time, such as solar power, to provide a seamless power supply. The batteries have also enabled a switch from fossil-fuel transportation to electric transportation.”
p.s. Some weeks ago, I wrote a magazine column about “Snow-Capped Idea Volcanoes” — senior citizens who have creative ideas and implement them. In it I mentioned Goodenough: “John Goodenough and his team at University of Texas (Austin) “has just set the tech industry abuzz with his blazing creativity”, wrote Pagan Kennedy, in the New York Times, in April 2017. “He and his team filed a patent application on a new kind of battery that, if it works, as promised, would be so cheap, lightweight and safe that it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.”
The Creativity of Nature:
How One Creative Scientist Harnessed It
By Shlomo Maital
Prof. Frances Arnold, Caltech
Frances Arnold is a professor of chemical engineering at California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, CA. She won the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry, along with two others. She is only the fifth woman in history to win the Chemistry Nobel.
Prof. Arnold has had numerous personal tragedies. She has overcome all the grief – and not a small amount of gender discrimination. UK border police interrogated her for over two hours, when she told them she was “coming to meet the Queen” (she was – but a lot of nutty people say that, apparently).
Prof. Arnold won the Nobel for finding a creative way to leverage the powerful creative force of evolution. Instead of designing new chemicals from scratch, to fight crop-eating pests, remove laundry stains or clean up oil spills, Arnold figured out how to get Nature to do it.
“You start with a protein that already has some features you’re interested in”, she said, “ and use standard lab techniques to randomly mutate the gene that encodes the protein. Then you look for slight improvement in the resulting protein, in the direction you seek. You mutate the improved version again and again and screen the output. You do this with a bacterial workhorse, like E. coli….. you encourage the microbes to rise to the challenge, adapt, survive.”
In Dr. Arnold’s lab, organisms have been ‘mutated’ to stitch together carbon and silicon, or carbon and boron. “We’re discovering that nature can do chemistry, in the lab, we never dreamed was possible”, Dr. Arnold said. Arnold has invented the new field of evolutionary chemistry – using Nature’s incredibly creative system known as evolution and ‘survival of the fittest’, to create random mutations, select the ones that work, perfect them – and change the world. Nature is creative, in much the same way that humans are – try things, fail, try again, find something that does work and run with it. That is how we humans were created – and according to Darwin, all the millions of species on earth.
Arnold has launched a number of startups, including one that synthesizes insect pheromones and fends off agricultural pests by simply driving them crazy and confusing them.
Much of Dr. Arnold’s pioneering research was done while she fought breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. She underwent surgery, radiation and chemo, all while raising three young boys and working day and night in her lab. And in 2010 her husband Andrew Lange killed himself; her middle son William, 20, died in an accident in 2016.
“Why would I give up?” said Arnold. “First you learn you have no control. Then you straighten up, fetch your invitation and go to meet the Queen.”
[This is based on an excellent New York Times article, by Natalie Angier, who writes for the Science Times].
Nobel Prizes 2016
By Shlomo Maital
This year’s Nobel Prize winners:
Medicine/Physiology: Yoshinori Ohsumi, Japanese cell biologist. He discovered how cells recycle their wastes – an amazing and complex process that keeps cells from choking on garbage. Ohsumi asked a question that intrigued him, but that interested few others…
Economics: Oliver Hart (Harvard) and Bengt Holmstrom (MIT): contract theory. Especially “incomplete contracts”. See Hart’s American Economic Review 2001 article on financial contracting — enlightening, especially for Venture Capital.
Physics: David Thouless, F. Duncan Haldane, J. Michael Kosterlitz. Their mathematics (based on topology) revealed insights into ‘extreme state’ matter (e.g. very low temperatures, super-cooled, etc.), and may lead to important new products, perhaps in semiconductors and computing.
Chemistry: Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, Bernard Feringa: synthesis of molecular machines. These tiny machines, the size of a single molecule, can do actual mechanical work. Also may lead to important innovations one day.
Note the common denominator: Willingness to ask really good questions, questions others aren’t asking, ability to take risks in research, tackle very challenging hard problems, and in some cases, defy the establishment by choosing a research direction others think is a dead end.
And the Peace Prize? To Colombian President Santos, and the peace agreement that ended 50 years of senseless civil war. We learn from Colombia what we already know, from Britain’s Brexit vote – beware of referendums, you cannot be sure what they will yield. Colombia will revote its peace agreement, narrowly defeated in a referendum, and gain approval. But Britain? Britain will leave the EU, for certain, a result very few expected, with major consequences for Europe and the world.
Too Small to See? A Nobel for 3 Who Pioneered
By Shlomo Maital
The 2014 Nobel Prize for chemistry was won by two Americans and a German: Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner. Their work greatly extended our vision into the smallest of molecules, in part enabling nanotechnology.
Hell, born in Romania, heads a Max Planck Institute in Gottingen, Germany. Moerner is from Stanford University; and Betzig, from the Howard Hughes Institute in Virginia.
According to CNN: “Back in 1873, science believed it had reached a limit in how much more of a detailed picture a microscope could provide. At the time, microscopist Ernst Abbe said the maximum resolution had been attained.” As with so many Nobel prizes, the three winners simply did not accept the statement, “we’ve reached the limit — no more can be done.”
The three scientists, according to the Nobel Prize Committee, did this: “….Due to their achievements, the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” the committee said. “The importance can’t be overemphasized: Now, scientists can see how proteins in fertilized eggs divide into embryos, or they can track proteins involved in Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases.”
Betzig and Moerner found a way to make single molecules ‘glow’ using fluorescent microscopy. Hell found a way to use two laser beams to make the molecules glow. This is creative thinking. Rather than conventionally illuminate molecules with photons, why not make the molecules themselves into little ‘lamps’?
“Guesswork has turned into hard facts and obscurity has turned into clarity,” the Nobel Committee added. The work of the three has “blurred the boundary between chemistry and biology”, by enabling us to see right inside single molecules.
Thank you, scientists!
TIMnovate 