Research that promises to win the Nobel Prize in 2021

The research that led to the development of a Covid-19 vaccine could become a potential candidate for this year's Nobel Prize.

The greatest minds in physics, chemistry and medicine will be honored at the Nobel Prize, the highest science award, announced next week. Although predicting a Nobel laureate is extremely difficult because the list of votes and candidates is kept secret, experts still say that some researchers with a life-changing discovery are likely to become prize winners. .

The Nobel Prize is awarded to the winner. (Photo: AP)

In 2021, the Lasker and Breakthrough prizes , often seen as a guideline for the Nobel Prize, honor scientists whose work has played an important role in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine. The Lasker Prize went to Katalin Karikó , vice president of BioNTech in Germany, and Drew Weissman, professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania, for developing a method to use artificial messenger RNA (mRNA) to deal with disease outbreaks. , which changes the way the body produces antiviral compounds. Although it did not attract much attention when it was first published in 2005, their research now forms the basis for two widely used Covid-19 vaccines.

"Convinced in the potential of mRNA therapy despite many skepticism, they have created a technology that is not only essential in the current fight against nCoV, but also has huge potential for application in vaccines and therapeutics." future treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases ."

However, there is still a lot of controversy about who deserves to be credited as a pioneer in this technology, given that mRNA research dates back to the 1980s, involving many groups of scientists around the world. The problem is more complicated for the Nobel Selection Committee because according to the rules set by the Swedish founder Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a maximum of 3 people in a category.

David Pendlebury, an analyst at the Information Science Institute at research firm Clarivate, specializes in predicting Nobel prizes by looking at how often a scientist's major papers are cited by colleagues. . Pendlebury thinks it's too early for the research behind the Covid-19 vaccine to be recognized at the Nobel Prize. Nobel committees tend to be conservative and always wait at least a decade before honoring a scientist. According to Pendlebury, the Nobel Committee could award the prize to Jacques Miller, the Franco-Australian researcher, for his discovery of the organization and function of the immune system in the 1960s, especially B cells and cells. T, has many implications for vaccine research.

The Breakthrough Prize was also awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer, who develop next-generation DNA sequencing technology. Previously, sequencing the entire human genome could take months and cost millions of dollars. Today, this work can be completed in 24 hours at a cost of about $600, according to the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The work of the three scientists has changed many fields, including biology, ecology, archeology and medicine.

In 2019, the Nobel Council asked nominees to consider gender, geographic and field diversity, but all of that year's laureates were male. Last year, two female scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR gene-editing method, while Professor Andrea Ghez and two other astrophysicists won the Nobel Prize. Physics with work on supermassive black holes.

"Nobel Prizes usually honor researchers whose findings date back 20, 30, 40 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, in universities, there weren't many women in positions as high as deans. That has changed dramatically over the past 40 years," Pendlebury said.

It is not uncommon for female scholars to have the potential to win this year's Nobel Prize. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a physicist from Northern Ireland, is likely to win the prize for her work on pulsars, one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century. In medical terms, American geneticist Mary -Claire King discovered the BRCA mutation and its association with breast cancer risk in 1990, helping to confirm an inherited cancer risk.

One scientist honored by Pendlebury this year is Ho Wang Lee, an emeritus professor at Korea University in Seoul for his work identifying and isolating Hantaviruses, a family of viruses that spread through mice and cause many diseases in around the world. To date, there have been no Nobel Prize winners of color in the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine. A potential candidate of color in medicine is American doctor and researcher Marilyn Hughes Gaston, with her work on sickle cell anemia, a genetic syndrome in which the body cannot produce normal erythrocytes.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine will be announced on October 4, followed by the Nobel Prizes in Physics (October 5), Chemistry (October 6), Literature (October 7), Peace (October 9) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (October 7). Economy (October 11).