NAS Members Receive Nobel Prizes

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has announced that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded jointly to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. They have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to David Baker (who receives one half of the award) for computational protein design. He received the award with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who share the other half jointly, for their work in protein structure prediction. David Baker has succeeded in building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold great potential.

The 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is awarded to Daron Acemoglu (who shares the award with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson) for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. Thave demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity. Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better. The laureates’ research helps us understand why.