Nobel Prize lectures

[BioBytes SRG]

(Warning: Long Post)

As you all might have heard (unless you have been living under a rock - how big a rock is this?), the Nobel prizes for this year were announced at the start of this month, and three of them relate to this group! (well, one is tangential, but who cares?). So, as a Diwali gift for the group, here's a brief tour to them:

1.) Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:

Awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of Molecular Mechanisms Controlling the Circadian Rhythm

A key attribute of many organisms on this earth is adaptation. And this involves adaptation to the variations in the amount of sunlight and temperature and so other factors that an organism could have used to tell the time - Is it noon right now? Or perhaps the sun is at the horizon - the day's over? Or is it the middle of the night? Many of us will agree that organisms do have to tell the time - their processes depend on it. As an example, how about the flowering of the 9 o'clock plant? Or of any plant for that matter? What about the various animals' sleep cycles? This all indicates the presence of a syncronised clock inside the organism, but how does it work and where is it was a mystery to all till these three guys came around. Using the identification of genes responsible for the said clock, they proposed a series of interlocked transcription-translation feedback loops together with a complicated set of reactions that ultimately acted as a robust internal oscillator in each cell that can maintain the so-called circadian rhythm without external inputs, while also revealing troubles that can occur when we mess around it. The end message - time of your activity matters. Lunch at 5 pm and sleep at 4 am doesn't work.

Scientific Background - https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2017/advanced-medicineprize2017.pdf

2.) Nobel Prize in Chemistry:

Awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for their work in the development of Cryo-EM

The development of Electron Microscope (EM) opened the road to the understanding of even smaller structures than what could be done with a light microscope, giving usthe first pictures of the cell organelles that we know today as an example. But EM for biological samples faced troubles of its own, such as:

i) Intense electron bombardment meant the invariable destruction of the living sample.

ii) Vacuum is required for the procedure, which means water evaporates from the sample.

Thus EM was useless for live cell imaging - what the proteins do in the cell remains unknown. What these three eminent scientists figured out was a way to quickly and easily prepare live sample for EM, by freezing them in place (hence the cryo), and then do some computations to figure out the 3D structure of the protein. By doing this at multiple stages of a process, one can now follow the dynamics of the cell at atomic scale with no trouble - whatever the protein of interest may be.

Popular science - https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2017/popular-chemistryprize2017.pdf

Scientific Background - https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2017/advanced-chemistryprize2017.pdf

3.) Nobel Prize in Economics:

Awarded to Richard H. Thaler for integration of economics and psychology

Traditional economics bases itself on the rationality of the players involved in any economy - this is what the work of behavioural economists such as Thaler's questions. Through multiple behavioural studies which are more at home in psychology than in economics, Thaler and other behavioural economists show how Smith's principle of selfishness falls flat on its foot in the real world. We do not evaluate all possible cases when we do our transcations (limited rationality), nor do we make decision just based on losses and gains. Major role is played by social preferences and our perception of loss and gain - this all, while being rooted in psychology, is very much responsible for much of the systematic aberrations in today's economies that traditional economics cannot explain.

Popular science - https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/popular-economicsciences2017.pdf

Scientific Background - https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/advanced-economicsciences2017.pdf

Do have a look, and if you are free on 25th October (that is, this Wednesday), give yourself a treat and go to the Prof. B.Nag (Main) Auditorium, Victor Menezes Convention Centre from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm for the Institute Lectures on these Nobel achievements.

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Hope to see at the next talk! 

Best regards,

Shashwat Shukla & Archit Bhatnagar

BioBytes SRG