Nobel Prize

Rosalyn Yalow became a physicist at a time when being a woman was a serious impediment to success. But succeed she did. With her research partner Solomon Berson, she made a transformative contribution to medical research: radioimmunoassay, a method for measuring concentrations of substances in the blood.

Donna Strickland thinks lasers are cool. With enthusiasm for the field and “very, very hard” work, she found a way to create high-intensity laser pulses. This technique, chirped pulse amplification or CPA, was described in Strickland’s very first scientific paper, and it led to her 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. More important, it began a long career in which, as she has put it, “I get to play with high-intensity lasers.”

The radiochemist Irène Joliot-Curie was a battlefield radiologist, activist, politician, and daughter of two of the most famous scientists in the world: Marie and Pierre Curie. Along with her husband, Frédéric, she discovered the first-ever artificially created radioactive atoms, paving the way for innumerable medical advances, especially in the fight against cancer.

Marie Curie is still the only individual to receive the prize in two different science categories. Her relentless resolve and insatiable curiosity made her an icon in the world of modern science. Indefatigable despite a career of physically demanding and ultimately fatal work, she discovered polonium and radium, championed the use of radiation in medicine and fundamentally changed our understanding of radioactivity.

Carol Greider achieved success in molecular biology in the same way she overcame dyslexia as a child: with persistence and creativity. She discovered telomerase, an enzyme that is key to the ageing process and the growth of cancer cells, and has major implications for medical research.

Tu Youyou turned to Chinese medical texts from the Zhou, Qing, and Han Dynasties to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound – artemisinin – that has saved millions of lives. When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject. She is the first mainland Chinese scientist to have received a Nobel Prize in a scientific category, and she did so without a doctorate, a medical degree, or training abroad.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard approaches biology with the rigour of a scientist and the sensibility of an artist. She helped solve one of biology’s great mysteries: how the genes in a fertilised egg form an embryo. She pursues her love of music and cooking in her spare time, but even her work itself – the quest to understand nature – is, she believes, a creative act.

For most of her career, Maria Goeppert Mayer worked “just for the fun of doing physics,” without pay or status or a tenured position. She was 58 before she became a full professor. And yet she made major contributions to the growing understanding of nuclear physics, including the revelatory nuclear shell model.

Gerty Cori uncovered the process of cellular energy storage and release, answering one of the most fundamental questions about how the human body works. In so doing, she and her husband and lifelong research partner, Carl, transformed the study of biology, proving that the clarity of molecular chemistry could and should be applied to the opaque mechanisms of biology.

“Captured for life by chemistry and by crystals,” as she described it, Dorothy Hodgkin turned a childhood interest in crystals into the ground-breaking use of X-ray crystallography to “see” the molecules of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. Her work not only allowed researchers to better understand and manufacture life-saving substances, it also made crystallography an indispensable scientific tool.