The 2023 Nobel Prizes

Following the announcements of the Nobel Prizes this past week has been quite thrilling.  While I won't comment on the literature and economics prizes, one surprise (to me) is that this year's Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned, was a physics major in college, and onetime professional engineer.  She has previously been awarded the Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society.  Physics World notes that she is the third physicist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Andrei Sakharov himself, and Joseph Rotblat.

The physiology or medicine prize to K. Kariko and D. Weissman for "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19" was particularly delightful.  Reading of Kariko's professional struggles and marginalization, while managing to raise an Olympic Gold-Medalist daughter, provides yet another critique of conventional academic culture, groupthink, and incentive structures.  Both laureates labeled in the scientific wilderness for many, many years, before seeing one fruition of their work take on global significance, arguably changing the course of history.

The prize for physics to P. Agostini, F. Krausz, and A. L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" is for an accomplishment less familiar to me, and learning of its details has been very instructive.  As I started reading about this work, I immediately thought of 1999 Chemistry laureate Ahmed Zewail, who I found is indeed mentioned in the scientific information packet released by the Nobel Foundation.  It was interesting to see AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) physics honored again after the 2018 prize; indeed both the 2018 and 2023 prizes have done much to address the historical imbalance against female laureates.  There are now three living female Nobel laureates in physics at the same time, something unprecedented.  (And if you include this year's Peace laureate, there are four living women physicist Nobel laureates!)

Finally I am always pleased when a chemistry prize is awarded (as in Zewail's case) for a physics-related achievement - in this year's case, quantum dots.  Like many, I'd heard of quantum dots without knowing the names of the scientists who pioneered them, including those honored this year:  M. G. Bawendi, L. E. Brus, and A. I. Ekimov.

This has been a good batch of laureates to honor industrial scientists, as Katalin Kariko was, for some time, primarily employed by BioNTech, while Alexei Ekimov was still affiliated with a company called Nanocrystals Technology, Inc., at the time of receiving the award. 

The Nobel Prizes are justly criticized in many quarters, and should not be the only mark of high prestige that scientists and the general public focus on.  Having said that, the Nobel Committee did a fine job with this year's selections, doing much to maintain credibility for their efforts.