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The best minds in science will be thrust from academic obscurity into the spotlight this week when the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine are announced.
The accolades, established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel more than a century ago, celebrate groundbreaking work that can take decades to complete.
It’s notoriously tricky to predict who will win science’s top honors. The short list and nominators remain a secret, and documents revealing the details of the selection process are sealed from public view for 50 years.
However, there is no shortage of Nobel-worthy discoveries: Here are five breakthroughs that haven’t resulted in a life-changing call from Stockholm — at least not yet.
The first human genome
One often discussed candidate for the Nobel Prize is the mapping of the human genome, an audacious project that launched in 1990 and was completed in 2003.
Cracking the genetic code of human life involved an international consortium of thousands of researchers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and China.
The endeavor has had a far-reaching impact on biology, medicine and many other fields. But one reason the project may not have earned a Nobel Prize is the sheer number of people involved in the feat.
According to the rules laid down by Nobel in his 1895 will, the prizes can only honor up to three people per award — a growing challenge given the collaborative nature of much scientific research.
A revolution in obesity treatment
The development of blockbuster weight-loss drugs that mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1, has shaken up the world of health care in the past few years.
One in eight people in the world live with obesity — a figure that has more than doubled since 1990 — and the medication, which lowers blood sugar and curbs appetite, has the potential to usher in a new era for obesity treatment and related conditions such as type 2 diabetes.
Three scientists — Svetlana Mojsov, Dr. Joel Habener and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen — involved in the development of the drug, known as semaglutide, won the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, often considered an indicator of whether a specific breakthrough or scientist will win a Nobel Prize.
Mojsov, a biochemist and associate research professor at the Rockefeller University, and Habener, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, helped identify and synthesize GLP-1. Knudsen, chief scientific adviser in research and early development at Novo Nordisk, played a pivotal role in turning it into an effective drug promoting weight loss that millions of people take today.
Transformative AI
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is transforming people’s lives at an unprecedented pace.
It’s a crowded field, but two names stand out, according to David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information. Pendlebury identifies “Nobel-worthy” individuals by analyzing how often fellow scientists cite their key scientific papers throughout the years.
The two key figures are Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, the Google DeepMind inventors of the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database — an AI program that decodes the 3D structures of proteins from amino acid sequences that at least 2 million researchers around the world have used.
AlphaFold acts as a “Google search” for protein structures, providing instant access to predicted models of proteins, accelerating progress in fundamental biology and other related fields.
Since the pair’s key paper was published in 2021, it has been cited more than 13,000 times, which Pendlebury described as an “exceptional number.” Out of a total of 61 million scientific papers, only around 500 have been cited more than 10,000 times, he said.
Jumper and Hassabis have already won the 2023 Lasker and the Breakthrough prizes. A Nobel Prize for chemistry may be in their future, Pendlebury said, along with a third researcher, David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who laid the groundwork for AlphaFold.
But it might be premature for the typically conservative Nobel committee to honor the field, Pendlebury said.
“Some people have suggested it may be too early for such a prize, that the work is of too recent vintage, and that this is an entirely new area, the application of AI to scientific research,” he said.
Understanding the gut microbiome
We’re not alone in our bodies. Trillions of microbes — bacteria, viruses and fungi — live on and in the human body, collectively known as the human microbiome.
With advances in genetic sequencing in the past two decades, scientists have been better able to understand what these microbes do, how they talk to one another and interact with human cells, particularly in the gut.
The field is long overdue for Nobel recognition, Pendlebury said.
Biologist Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is a pioneer in the field.
Gordon strove to understand the human gut microbiome and how it shapes human health, starting with lab research in mice. He led work that found that the gut microbiome plays a role in the health effects of undernutrition, which affects almost 200 million children globally, and he is developing food interventions that target improved gut health.
Cancer-causing genes
In the 1970s, it was understood that cancer sometimes ran in families, but mainstream thinking about breast cancer did not factor in any inherited susceptibility to the disease.
With a background in researching the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees, Mary-Claire King, now a professor of medicine and genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, took a fresh approach.
Working long before scientists had any kind of map of the human genome, King spent 17 years detecting and identifying the role a mutation of the BRCA1 gene played in breast and ovarian cancer.
The discovery has enabled genetic testing that can identify women who are at increased risk of breast cancer as well as what steps to take to reduce their risk, such as additional screening and preventive surgeries.
The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine will be announced on Monday, followed by the physics prize on Tuesday and the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday. The Nobel Prize for literature will be announced on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
