Molecular Machine-Makers Grab 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A trio who built motors and devices a fraction the size of a human hair has set the stage for a new type of industry

ILustración (C) Johan Jarnestad/ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Bernard Feringa said he was shocked “when we started a molecular machine for the first time and saw motion.” The chemist said he was equally shocked this morning when he got a call from Stockholm, Sweden, telling him that his work netted him this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Feringa shares the prize with chemists Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir. J. Fraser Stoddart, as well as about $923,000 in prize money, for building machines on the tiniest of scales—the nanometer scale, a thousand times smaller than the width of a hair, or a billionth of a meter. Molecular motors and elevators and muscles, and even miniature four-wheel drive cars, were cited by the Nobel committee as some of the inventions of the three scientists, who mastered construction techniques and the ability to create energy to make things move.

Scientists on the Nobel committee, and Feringa himself in an interview, emphasized the practical applications had not yet been worked out, but perhaps they were being overly modest. Nanoscale machines based on these design principles have already begun to shape the future of medicine: Scientific American recently reported on nanorobots that can be sent through blood vessels, and nanomaterials that can monitor vital organ health. And some of Stoddart’s work was highlighted in an article in the magazine in 2007.

Sauvage was born in 1944 and works at the University of Strasbourg, France. Stoddart was born 1942 and is now at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, U.S.A. Feringa was born 1951 and is at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Sauvage was the first to take a big step towards a tiny machine in 1983, when he linked two ring-shaped molecules to form a chain, one component free to move around the other, rather than fixed in place. For a machine to be able to perform a task its parts must be able to move relative to each other. The two interlocked rings fulfilled this requirement, said Olof Ramstrom, a chemist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a member of the Nobel chemistry prize committee.

Then, in 1991, Stoddart showed molecular parts could be controlled. He and his team threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and moved it to different parts and then back. The ring remained around this axle because the two components had complementary electron groups that kept them together yet loose enough to move. When Stoddart added heat—exciting the electrons on various segments of the axle-- the ring slid up and down. This type of control set the stage for devices including a molecular elevator, going up and down, and a molecular muscle that can expand and contract.

Feringa used the idea of added energy to create spinning motions, essential for a true motor. In 1999 he got a molecular rotor blade to spin in one direction, overcoming the basic random movements of molecules. By 2014 he had this motor spinning at 12,000 revolutions per second. He also has used motors to spin a glass cylinder that is 10,000 times bigger than the motor itself. And his team has linked several motors and axles to create a four-wheel drive nanocar.

What does this all mean for changing the world we live in? Many observers liken the situation to the late 19th century, when scientists had just started to create much larger motors powered by electricity. Today we have power drills and washing machines and cars. Feringa drew a comparison to the Wright Brothers. Once they built a flying machine, he said, people reacted happily but also wondered what it could be used for. “And today we have Boeing 747s,” the chemist says. The possible applications for molecular machines range from robots that hunt cancer in the body to tiny energy storage devices to power computers, he thinks.

Donna Nelson, a chemist and president of the American Chemical Society, says “I think this topic is going to be fabulous for science. When the Nobel Prize is given it inspires a lot of interest in the topic by other researchers. It will also increase funding.” Nelson also notes this particular area, tiny machines, “will be fascinating for kids. They can visualize it, and imagine a nanocar. This comes at a great time, when we need to inspire the next generation of scientists.”

And inspiration creates results. Today’s prize-winners were inspired, as were many of their profession, by a 1959 lecture by another Nobelist, physicist Richard Feynmann, who talked about the potential for construction at the smallest scales. His talk was titled “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” Today that lower room proved to be a route to the top of the scientific world.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Josh Fischman

Josh Fischman is a senior editor at Scientific American, covering biology, chemistry, and earth science. He has written and edited about science and health for Discover, Science, Earth, and U.S. News.

ORIGINAL: Scientific American
By Josh Fischman
October 5, 2016

Video by WOCHIT

More than 100 Nobel laureates are calling on Greenpeace to end its anti-GMO campaign

Rice field in the Philippines. No Golden Rice here (yet).(Shutterstock)

This week, 109 Nobel laureates signed onto a sharply worded letter to Greenpeace urging the environmental group to rethink its longstanding opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The writers argue that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world.

Joel Achenbach broke the news in the Washington Post, and you can read the full letter here. The signatories include past winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics.

Nobel laureates to Greenpeace: Your anti-GMO campaign has to end

The letter notes that scientific assessments have repeatedly found GM foods are just as safe to eat as conventional foods and don’t pose an inherent risk to the environment (though, like any technology, they can be misused). Greenpeace, it argues, is on the wrong side here:

We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against "GMOs" in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.

The laureates also take Greenpeace to task for seeking to block Golden Rice, a strain of not-yet-approved rice that has been genetically enhanced to produce beta carotene — which, its creators hope, might one day alleviate the Vitamin A deficiency that’s causing widespread death and blindness in the developing world:

Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia. ...

WE CALL UPON GREENPEACE to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general;

Now, Greenpeace is far from the only reason Golden Rice has struggled to get regulatory approval — the crop also faces very serious technical challenges. Greenpeace isn’t even the only group seeking to block it. But they’re certainly a high-profile face of GMO opposition, so the laureates are focusing on them.

In a posted response, Greenpeace denied that they were the main reason Golden Rice has failed to come to market, but still showed no sign of ending their broader anti-GMO campaign. We'll get to that, but I do want to elaborate on a few issues the letter raises.

Greenpeace accepts climate science. So why do they dismiss GMO science?

(MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)A picture taken on May 3, 2005, shows Greenpeace activists flying a kite displaying a giant corn cob on a field in Seelow, Eastern Germany, to protest against the cultivation of genetically modified maize.

Let’s start off by noting that GMOs will never be a purely scientific issue. Like every policy matter on the planet, the question of how best to incorporate biotechnology into agriculture involves value judgments about what an ideal food system might look like, how to weigh the risks against the benefits, and so on.

But those positions can at least be informed by scientific understanding. To take a different example, on climate change, Greenpeace tends to take very seriously what scientists are telling them. Their website refers frequently to the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer and humans are the cause.

By contrast, Greenpeace’s public statements on GMOs tend to be startlingly unscientific. On their website, they refer to transgenic crops as "genetic pollution." This is absurd. When scientists create transgenic crops, they frequently use Agrobacterium to transfer genes from one plant or organism to another. But nature does this too: Scientists recently discovered that on two separate occasions in history, Agrobacterium transferred bacterial DNA into the sweet potatoes we now eat. Are sweet potatoes also "polluted"? Because it's the same thing.

In fact, many crop scientists tend to see GMOs as sitting along a continuum. Humans have long used all sorts of tools to alter plant DNA and get crops with the traits we desire — this is a big reason farms can feed 7 billion people every year. For thousands of years, farmers interbred crops to alter their genes. Like so:

(James Kennedy)

In the 20th century, plant breeders began exposing crops to radiation or mutagenic chemicals to scramble their DNA and get new traits. Today, scientists use advanced techniques (like transferring genes or CRISPR) that allow even more precision. But it’s the same basic idea. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that GMOs don't appear to pose a special health risk. They’re just not fundamentally different.

Now, the vast majority of the public is unaware of this fact. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about how our food is created. (One of the lovely things about the modern age is that we don’t have to.) So, in the abstract, people tend to fall back on their intuitions: Tampering with the DNA of food seems inherently unnatural. Anything "unnatural" triggers disgust. Therefore, GMOs are bad.

Those intuitions are understandable. But they're unsupported by scientific evidence. And rather than seeking to correct those misapprehensions, as they do on climate change, Greenpeace has long sought to inflame those fears. Take this line from their website: "When we force life forms and our world's food supply to conform to human economic models rather than their natural ones, we do so at our own peril." (Never mind that we’ve been doing this since the dawn of civilization.)

The Nobel laureates are, in essence, telling them to knock it off.

Ultimately, the world will face staggering challenges around food and agriculture in the 21st century. The global population is expected to soar past 9 billion, and we’ll need to figure out how to feed everyone without razing too many forests for farmland. Farmers will have to handle the droughts and heat waves that will come with global warming. There are tricky issues around antibiotic overuse, nitrogen pollution, food distribution, and much more.

Genetic engineering certainly won’t solve all those problems. (It might not even solve most of them.) But it ispotentially a valuable tool for, say, breeding plants with higher drought tolerance or engineering foods that are more nutritious. See, for example, this important work on vitamin-fortified bananas in Africa. We should be thinking seriously about how to use these tools as a larger strategy for improving our food system — not sowing fears about "genetic pollution."

Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice is incoherent — though the crop faces other serious challenges

(David Greedy/Getty Images)Plant Biotechnologist Dr. Swapan Datta inspects a genetically modified "Golden Rice" plant at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), November 27, 2003.

The Nobel laureate letter particularly criticizes Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice — rice that’s being modified in an attempt to alleviate Vitamin A deficiency — and here it’s worth expanding a bit.

Last year in Slate, Will Saletan wrote a damning piece on how incoherent Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice was. As research advanced, the group kept shifting its position. A sample:

In 2001, Benedikt Haerlin, Greenpeace’s anti-GMO coordinator, appeared with Potrykus at a press conference in France. Haerlin conceded that Golden Rice served "a good purpose" and posed "a moral challenge to our position." Greenpeace couldn’t dismiss the rice as poison. So it opposed the project on technical grounds: Golden Rice didn’t produce enough beta carotene. …

While critics tried to block the project, Potrykus and his colleagues worked to improve the rice. By 2003 they had developed plants with eight times as much beta carotene as the original version. In 2005 they unveiled a line that had 20 times as much beta carotene as the original. GMO critics could no longer dismiss Golden Rice as inadequate. So they reversed course. Now that the rice produced plenty of beta carotene, anti-GMO activists claimed that beta carotene and vitamin A were dangerous. …

In the Philippines, where Greenpeace was fighting to block field trials of Golden Rice, its hypocrisy was egregious. "It is irresponsible to impose GE 'Golden' rice on people if it goes against their religious beliefs, cultural heritage and sense of identity, or simply because they do not want it," Greenpeace declared. But just below that pronouncement, Greenpeace recommended "vitamin A supplementation and vitamin fortification of foods as successfully implemented in the Philippines." 

Under Philippine law, beta carotene and vitamin A had to be added to sugar, flour, and cooking oil prior to distribution. The government administered capsules to preschoolers twice a year, and to some pregnant women for 28 consecutive days. If Greenpeace seriously believed that retinoids caused birth defects and should be a matter of personal choice, it would never have endorsed these programs.

It goes on and on like this. Greenpeace has simply dismissed scientific reviews showing that Golden Rice does not pose a threat to human health or the environment. Instead, it continues to file petitions to block all field trials and feeding studies in places like the Philippines.

Now, to repeat what I said above: Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups aren’t the only obstacle to getting Golden Rice into farmers’ fields. It is fundamentally hard to create a high-yielding strain of rice that consistently produces higher levels of beta carotene. Even after 24 years of testing, researchers still haven’t been able to get Golden Rice to work perfectly in field trials. And they might be struggling even if Greenpeace had given them a pass all along.

In a reply to the Nobel laureates' letter, Greenpeace insisted as much: "Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘Golden’ rice are false," said Wilhelmina Pelegrina, Campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia "‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research."

True. But rather irrelevant. It is also fundamentally hard to create a Zika vaccine. It would nonetheless be misguided for me to wage a campaign against researchers working on the project or file a petition to stop trials without any good evidence that it was a risk — even if my protests weren’t the main hold-up.

On a final note, I do think Greenpeace does enormously vital work around the world. They played a crucial role in pressuring soy and beef companies in Brazil to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Their efforts in China to pare back unnecessary coal-burning plants are one of the most consequential climate campaigns going.

But on GMOs, they are very much in the wrong. Let's hope this letter prods them to reflect and reconsider.

Go deeper:

• Mark Lynas, an environmentalist who did reconsider his opposition to GMOs after reviewing the scientific evidence,wrote a post pleading with Greenpeace to do the same.
• Five big takeaways from the most thorough review of GMOs yet.
• More on how GMOs sit along a continuum with a great many other farming practices and even "natural" changes.
• Here's what 9,000 years of breeding have done to corn, peaches, and other crops

ORIGINAL: Vox

by Brad Plumer

June 30, 2016

Why the Scientist Who Unravelled DNA Is Selling His Nobel Prize

James Watson, who has been shunned by the academic community for his racist remarks, is putting his award up for auction.

Markus Schreiber/AP

James Watson, the famed molecular biologist and co-discoverer of DNA, is putting his Nobel Prize up for auction. This sad final chapter to his career traces back to racist remarks he made in 2007, which led to his fall from scientific grace.

Watson is best known for his work deciphering the DNA double helix alongside Francis Crick in 1953. The discovery revolutionized biochemistry and earned the pair and their colleague, molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But in 2007 Watson made an incendiary remark regarding the intelligence of black people that lost him the admiration of the scientific community.

That year, The Sunday Times quoted Watson as saying that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He added that although some think that all humans are born equally intelligent, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Watson’s remarks ignited an uproar. He had to retire from his position as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Sold-out gatherings in his honor were cancelled. Academic centers uninvited him for lectures. His peers condemned him: “He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career,” said Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. His competitors debunked him: “Skin color as a surrogate for race is a social concept not a scientific one,” Craig Venter, the scientist who raced Watson to sequencing the human genome, said to the BBC in 2007. “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.”

James Watson's Nobel Prize for discovering DNA is up for auction following his fall from grace. (Christie's)

Though outrageous, Watson’s statements were not his first comments to create a public outcry. He had a history of making racist and sexist declarations, according to Time. His insensitive off-the-cuff remarks include saying that sunlight and dark skin contribute to “Latin lover” libido, and that fat people lack ambition, which prevents them from being hired. To many scientists his gravest offense was not crediting Rosalind Franklin—his female collaborator—with helping him deduce the structure of DNA (while often sharing his distaste in her appearance).

But now after many years, Watson’s intellectual hubris has caught up with him and left him an “unperson,” he said to The Financial Times. “No one really wants to admit I exist.”

He said he is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. The gold medal is expected to fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million when it goes to auction Thursday, according to a statement from the auctioneers Christie’s (Crick’s medal, which was sold last year, went for $2.3 million). Watson said that he will use the money to purchase art and make donations to institutions that have supported him, such as the University of Chicago. But asWatson said, the auction will also offer him the chance to “re-enter public life.”

“I’ve had a unique life that’s allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part,” he said. “All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are.” For a man who revealed the twists of DNA, yet also insisted he's “not a racist in a conventional way,” this aspiration may not unravel the way he had hoped.

ORIGINAL: The Atlantic

NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

DEC 1 2014

Nobel Prize 1945: Fleming’s Series of Fortunate Events

ORIGINAL: OxBridge Biotech
by: Kate Campbell

3rd June 2013

Petri dish from Fleming’s discovery

The Story of Penicillin’s Beginning in Medicine
Serendipity – or chance meeting the prepared mind – has famously long been a part of scientific discovery, producing Newton’s theory of gravity, dynamite and the microwave to name a few. But by any standards, the discovery of penicillin relied to an improbable degree on a series of fortunate events…

The bright but blighted beginning
One September Friday morning in 1928, in a laboratory belonging to St Mary Hospital, London, an airborne fungal spore without planning or purpose landed on a bacteria-containing petri dish, left open by its owner, Alexander Fleming. Fleming, meanwhile away from work on holiday, as a consequence had unwittingly allowed time for the fungal spore, Penicillium notatum, to develop in his dish of bacteria. The fungus grew into a considerable sized growth amongst the bacterial (-‘Staphylococcal’-) colonies, but strangely contained a clear bacteria free area or ‘halo’ surrounding itself. What followed from this unknowingly fortuitous event indeed changed the course of medicinal history. On his return, Fleming observed this phenomenon and concluded that the mould must contain properties which inhibited bacterial activity by either suppressing growth or killing (-‘lysing’-) the cells.

The Scottish microbiologist consequently began work statim on isolating the mysterious molecule able to lyse the surrounding bacteria, so he could ascertain its spectrum of activity. In other words, if this fungal agent was releasing something into the surrounding environment to kill off one type of bacteria, how many other bacteria types could also be affected? What benefited enormously Fleming’s investigation was his ability to use the many techniques he had applied years earlier when he discovered another antibacterial- ‘lysozyme’- also by chance. Fleming’s experiments thrillingly confirmed that the fungus secreted a metabolite able to kill bacteria that had cell walls with sugar chains connected to short proteins –‘peptidoglycan’- on their outer surface, known as gram-positive bacteria, responsible for such deadly infections as scarlet fever, pneumonia and meningitis. He called this new metabolite ‘penicillin’.

His findings published in the ‘The British Journal of Experimental Pathology’ one year later, only attracted little attention, and after a few years of further investigation, Fleming abandoned work on the molecule. As one man, neither a specialist in chemistry nor clinical biology, Fleming was unable to overcome problems with penicillin’s isolation, stability and yield nor could he prove beyond reasonable doubt that penicillin had any medicinal value. It seemed that progress on penicillin was about to reach a premature demise. 10 years after the initial discovery was made though, by an act of fate or simple chance, Fleming’s work attracted the attention of an English biochemist at Oxford, Dr Howard Florey. By 1939 Florey had convinced his co-workers, including Dr Ernst Chain, collectively known as the ‘Oxford Group’, to work on penicillin with serious determination. By another stroke of luck, their work coincided with the beginning of the Second World War. What resulted from these two simultaneous happenings, led to penicillin only a few years after its revival, attaining the spotlight on a world-wide stage, in the form of an antibiotic viable for use by man.

The wintry war and the champion cantaloupe
By 1941 Florey and Chain had moved on from animal clinical trials to human, the Oxford Group were striving hard to transform penicillin into an effective drug for man, with sufficient strength and minimal toxic side effects. At the same time, America had entered World War II upon Japan bombing Pearl Harbour. With war-time economics in full swing, the cost of penicillin research no longer became a setback, furthermore with US and UK governments seeing penicillin’s potential to treat soldiers, suffering from possibly fatal infections such as gangrene, penicillin production became national priority.

Problems to be overcome, however, were by no means trivial. The structure of penicillin was still unknown, consequently chemical synthesis of the candidate drug was exceedingly challenging. For example, penicillin for clinical trials was in such short supply that that which had not been metabolised had to be recovered from the patient’s urine to be reused for remaining treatment. Victories quickly ensued though from untiring efforts on both sides of the Atlantic. Florey and Chain succeeded in concentrating penicillin to enhance its activity and stability. Additionally, with the collaboration efforts of the US Department of Agriculture, one of the unsung heroes of the Oxford Group, Norman Heatley, and several biopharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, large scale penicillin manufacturing methods got underway with alacrity to conquer the production bottleneck.

A world wide search had also begun to find a new strain of penicillium, able to grow faster and produce more penicillin than Fleming’s original P. notatum. The search remained elusive until 1943 in Peoria, Illinois, when a laboratory assistant Mary Hunt, forever after named as ‘Mouldy Mary’, discovered mould on a supermarket cantaloupe and brought it into work. The mould she found, P. chrysogenum, was considerably more potent than Fleming’s original strain and was subsequently used for further penicillin development to great avail. With most problems solved, except for elucidating the structure (done so eventually in 1945), the modern era of large scale antibiotic production had truly begun. By 1944, enough penicillin could be successfully prepared in quantity to treat wounded Allied forces during the Normandy invasion, D-day. Undeniably affecting the outcome of total war casualties, it did not take long before penicillin was nicknamed the war’s ‘wonder drug’. One could even argue the fortunate timing of penicillin’s discovery and development may indeed have helped secure the Allies win for the war overall.

The endless end…
In 1945, almost 20 years after Fleming first noticed mould growing in his open petri dish in London, and thanks in part to a war that had catalysed scientific discovery, Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on penicillin. Since its medicinal inception, penicillin has saved millions of lives and revolutionised health care across the world. However the effect of ever increasing levels of antibiotic resistance should not be underestimated. Even Fleming himself had a sense of foreboding about the discovery stating, ‘The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily under dose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’ Due to the historic incorrect and excessive use of antibiotics, today modern science is consequently fighting a new war; that against bacterial infections, such as MRSA, resistant to the armoury of antibiotics designed to eliminate them. This shift in the arms race between man and pathogen is seemingly leading to a new era of healthcare, one that doesn’t include antibiotics as we know. To successfully negate the long term effect of antibiotic resistance and navigate towards a new method of treatment, future generation scientists will undoubtedly require extreme perseverance, endless innovation and maybe just a little bit of luck.

Nobel de Química 2012: Robert J. Lefkowitz y Brian K. Kobilka

ORIGINAL: La Vanguardia

Josep Corbella. Barcelona

10/10/2012

La Real Academia de Ciencias de Suecia ha concedido el galardón a los científicos estadounidenses Robert Lefkowitz y Brian Kobilka por sus investigaciones sobre un tipo de receptores de la membrana de las células que regulan múltiples funciones biológicas

Los científicos estadounidenses Robert J. Lefkowitz y Brian K. Kobilka han sido galardonados con el Premio Nobel de Química 2012 AP / EFE / Archivo

Los científicos estadounidenses Brian Kobilka y Robert Lefkowitz han ganado el premio Nobel de Química 2012 por sus investigaciones sobre un tipo de receptores de la membrana de las células que regulan múltiples funciones biológicas.

De los receptores acoplados a proteínas G, como se denominan, depende la actividad de hormonas como la adrenalina o la leptina, así como de neurotransmisores como la serotonina o la dopamina. Regulan, por lo tanto, desde el apetito al estado de ánimo, pasando por la tensión arterial, el tono muscular o las reacciones ante situaciones de estrés.

Aproximadamente la mitad de los fármacos existentes actualmente basan su eficacia en la acción de estos receptores, ha destacado la Real Academia de Ciencias de Suecia al anunciar el galardón. Su conocimiento detallado, gracias a las investigaciones de Kobilka y Lefkowitz ayudará a desarrollar nuevos fármacos más eficaces y con menos efectos secundarios.

Kobilka (Little Falls, Minnesota,1955) es profesor de la Universidad de Stanford en California. Lefkowitz (Nueva Yordk, 1943) es profesor de la Universidad Duke en Durham (Carolina del Norte). Ambos compartirán los 8 millones de coronas suecas (unos 900.000 euros) del premio.

La presente edición de los Premios Nobel arrancó el lunes con la concesión al británico John B. Gurdon y al nipón Shinya Yamanaka del de Medicina, y prosiguió ayer con el anuncio de que el Nobel de Física recayó en el francés Serge Haroche y el estadounidense David J. Wineland.

En los próximos días, la Academia Sueca seguirá dando a conocer el nombre de los ganadores de los Premios Nobel por este orden: mañana jueves 11 será el turno del Nobel de Literatura, seguido por el Nobel de la paz, el viernes día 12.

Por último, el próximo 15 se conocerá el ganador del premio Nobel de Economía. El de Economía, por cierto, es el único de los galardones que no quedó estableció por Alfred Nobel en su testamento, sino que se incorporó a la lista en 1969.

Nobel de Física 2012: Serge Haroche y David J. Wineland

ORIGINAL: La Vanguardia

Josep Corbella. Barcelona

09/10/2012

El francés Serge Haroche y el estadounidense David Wineland han ganado el premio por sus investigaciones pioneras

Imagen de los dos ganadores del Nobel de Física. A la izquierda, el científico francés Serge Haroche, y a la derecha el investigador estadounidense David Wineland Afp / Efe

El científico francés Serge Haroche y el estadounidense David Wineland han ganado el premio Nobel de Física por sus investigaciones pioneras en el campo de la óptica cuántica.

“Los premiados han abierto la vía a una nueva era de experimentación en la física cuántica al demostrar la observación directa de partículas cuánticas individuales sin destruirlas”, destaca la Real Academia de Ciencias de Suecia en el comunicado en que anuncia los premios Nobel.

Sus descubrimientos han sentado las bases de la actual investigación fotónica, que aprovecha las propiedades de las partículas de la luz (los fotones) para crear nuevas tecnologías y profundizar en la comprensión de las leyes físicas. Entre los avances que se han derivado de esta línea de investigación, la academia sueca destaca los ordenadores cuánticos ultrarrápidos y los relojes cuánticos ultraprecisos.

Haroche, de 68 años, es profesor del Collège de France y de la École Normale Supérieure en París. Wineland, también de 68 años, es físico del Instituto Nacional de Estándares y Tecnología (NIST) en Boulder (Colorado, EE.UU.). Ambos compartirán los 8 millones de coronas suecas (unos 900.000 euros) del premio.

Trabajando de manera independiente, Wineland y Haroche consiguieron un hito que se consideraba inalcanzable: manipular partículas individuales sin que se perdieran sus propiedades cuánticas. Wineland lo consiguió utilizando fotones para inmovilizar átomos con carga eléctrica (iones) y estudiar sus propiedades. Haroche lo consiguió utilizando la estrategia opuesta: utilizó átomos para inmovilizar fotones y estudiar sus propiedades.

Antes de que Wineland y Haroche presentaran estos avances, no era posible investigar experimentalmente las propiedades cuánticas de las partículas. Tampoco era posible desarrollar nuevas tecnologías basadas en estas propiedades.

Dado que las partículas individuales pierden sus propiedades cuánticas en cuanto interactúan con su entorno, las investigaciones se veían limitadas a trabajos teóricos hasta que Wineland y Haroche lograron capturarlas y estudiarlas una a una.

“Sus métodos innovadores han permitido hacer los primeros pasos hacia la construcción de un nuevo tipo de ordenador superrápido basado en la física cuántica”, destaca la academia sueca. Fue el propio Wineland quien demostró por primera vez que era posible hacer operaciones de computación con bits cuánticos (o qubits). Aunque estas operaciones se han limitado hasta ahora a unos pocos qubits, “no hay motivo para pensar a priori que no sea posible conseguir estas operaciones con muchos más qubits”. El ordenador cuántico, según la academia sueca “tal vez cambiará nuestra vida diaria de un modo tan radical como el ordenador clásico la cambió en el siglo pasado”.

También Wineland construyó un reloj cuántico cien veces más preciso que los relojes atómicos de cesio que se utilizan actualmente para medir el tiempo. Su precisión es tan alta que, si se hubiera puesto en marcha al principio del tiempo hace 13.700 millones de años, cuando se produjo el big bang, hoy día sólo estaría desfasado por cinco segundos.

Premio Nobel de Medicina 2012: John B. Gurdon y Shinya Yamanaka La institución ha galardonado al científico británico John B. Gurdon y el japonés Shinya Yamanaka

ORIGINAL: La Vanguardia

Josep Corbella. Barcelona

08/10/2012

Los premios nobel de medicina 2012 John B. Gurdon y Shinya Yamanaka EFE

El científico británico John B. Gurdon y el japonés Shinya Yamanaka han ganado el premio Nobel de Medicina 2012 por sus investigaciones pioneras en clonación y células madre.

"Sus descubrimientos han revolucionado nuestra comprensión de cómo se desarrollan las células y los organismos", destaca la Asamblea Nobel en el comunicado en el que anuncia la concesión del premio. Estos avances "han creado nuevas oportunidades para investigar enfermedades y desarrollar métodos para diagnósticos y terapias".

Gurdon, de la Universidad de Cambridge (Reino Unido), sentó las bases de la clonación en experimentos realizados en ranas en 1962. Sus investigaciones fueron claves para la clonación de la oveja Dolly y, posteriormente, de mamíferos de otras especies.

Yamanaka, de la Universidad de Kioto, sentó las bases de las investigaciones actuales con células madre al demostrar en 2006 cómo se pueden obtener las llamadas células madre pluripotentes a partir de células adultas. Las células pluripotentes tienen el potencial de diferenciarse en cualquier otra célula del organismo, por lo que se espera poder utilizarlas en un futuro próximo para regenerar órganos y tejidos dañados.

Según el acta del premio, Gurdon (Dippenhall, 1933) y Yamanaka (Osaka, 1962) reciben en Nobel "por el descubimiento de que las células maduras se pueden reprogramar para convertirse en pluripotentes".

Reprogramar: este es el concepto clave que une los trabajos de Gurdon y de Yamanaka.

Gurdon reprogramó organismos enteros y Yamanaka, células individuales. A raíz de sus trabajos, destaca la Asamblea Nobel, “se han reescrito los libros de texto y se han creado nuevos campos de investigación”.

Antes de estos descubrimientos, biólogos y medicos pensaban que el desarrollo de un organismo es un viaje en sentido único. Desde la concepción hasta la muerte, las células se transforman para formar unos tejidos u otros. Una vez transformadas, se pensaba, no pueden volver atrás. Es decir, no pueden reprogramarse.

Gurdon fue el primero que cuestionó este dogma al demostrar, en 1962, que la especialización de las células es reversible. Su investigación fue inicialmente recibida con escepticismo, pero finalmente aceptada después de que otros científicos confirmaran sus resultados.

En su experimento, extrajo el núcleo de un óvulo de rana y lo sustituyó por el núcleo de una célula intestinal, también de rana. Si el desarrollo de un organismo fuera un viaje de sentido único, como se pensaba entonces, la célula intestinal no hubiera podido volver atrás para ser de nuevo un óvulo. Pero Gurdon observó que, a partir del óvulo en que había introducido el núcleo de una célula intestinal, se desarrolló un renacuajo perfectamente normal. Por lo tanto, sí podía volver atrás. Había reprogamado el óvulo.

Yamanaka, por su parte, se preguntó por qué las células de un embrión tienen la capacidad de convertirse en cualquier tejido del organismo. Razonó que esta capacidad tenía que estar regulada por algunos genes y empezó a buscar genes candidatos .

En aquel momento, hace aproximadamente una década, había una gran expectación en torno a las investigaciones con células madre embrionarias para desarrollar terapias de medicina regenerativa. Pero las investigaciones con células embrionarias se veían obstaculizadas por el rechazo de algunos sectores religiosos. Y planteaban además un inconveniente técnico: aunque se desarrollaran tejidos a partir de células embrionarias para regenerar órganos enfermos, una vez se implantaran en los pacientes serían rechazados por su sistema inmunitario. En cambio, razonó Yamanaka, si se pudieran crear células madre a partir de células de los propios pacientes, no serían rechazadas por el sistema inmunitario. Y tampoco serían rechazadas por los sectores religiosos contrarios a utilizar células embrionarias.

En una investigación que revolucionó el campo de la medicina regenerativa, Yamanaka descubrió que sólo cuatro genes eran suficientes para transformar células adultas en células como las de un embrión –a las que llamó células madre plutipotentes inducidas, más conocidas como células iPS-. A diferencia del descubrimiento de Gurdon, que había sido recibido con escepticismo, el de Yamanaka fue reconocido inmediatamente como un hito.

“Estos descubrimientos han proporcionado nuevas herramientas a científicos de todo el mundo y han conducido a avances notables en muchas áreas de la medicina”, destaca la Asamblea Nobel en su comunicado. El jurado de los premios Nobel cita, como ejemplo, que “se pueden obtener células de la piel de pacientes con distintas enfermedades; estas células se pueden reprogramar y examinar en el laboratorio para observar en qué difieren de las células de personas sanas. Estas células –concluye- representan herramientas muy valiosas para comprender los mecanismos de las enfermedades y, por lo tanto, abren nuevas oportunidades para desarrollar tratamientos médicos”.