Why We Celebrate Nobel Prize Winners - DTNS Weekend

0:03Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition, a special version of the show where we get to dive deep into a topic and joining me for this weekend's episode is Dr. Nikki. Welcome back, Dr. Nikki. Thanks for having me. Love bringing you guys some science on the weekend. That's right. If Dr. Nikki's here, you know it must be science. And you've probably heard us talking about the Nobel Prizes. We've mentioned some of them as they were announced, but I thought it'd be fun to sit down with Dr. Nikki and go through the science prizes. So we're going to talk about physics. We're going to talk about chemistry.

0:36We're going to talk about the physiology or medicine. And we're just going to talk about why do we care about the Nobel Prizes? And so settle in, folks. It's going to be fun. Let's start with the Nobel Prize for Physics. Dr. Dickey, tell us a little bit more about this one. Yes. So the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for quantum mechanics that paved the way for eventually creating the technology today that works in cell phones and cameras. I word it this way because the Nobels are awarded for the initial work plus the entire career of the work that tends to be 20-ish years. So a lot of the times the prizes are awarded for something that was initially performed in the 80s, as is the case with this physics prize.

1:24what the three-person team did here was prove principles of quantum mechanics, something called quantum mechanical tunneling, which is basically particles that pass through a barrier when they really shouldn't. And they did an experiment using a superconductor electrical system to prove that this in fact did happen. And eventually through many complicated processes that I'm not going to explain that led to helping our technology today. Yeah, this is the one I actually know the most about because it is more essential to computers and technology. And from what I understand, and as I think I said when we talked about this on the main show the day it was announced, anyone who tells you they understand quantum mechanics doesn't, including quantum physicists.

2:13who will, you know, they're actually quantum physicists when they go, well, no one really understands this, but the math is... Yeah, you've got to admit. And from what I understand, what they did was they showed that if you put a wire with some insulation in it, enough heat can drive some electrons to jump over that insulation. But at a certain point, if you cool it enough, the number of electrons jumping the insulation doesn't go down anymore. and so that proves that there's this quantum tunneling that you were talking about where the electron just jumps over the barrier without actually pushing through it at all i appreciate you explaining that because i wouldn't have been able to i'll freely admit that uh biology doesn't involve a lot of quantum mechanics at my scale so i just kind of skip that's what i'm here for this one section of this and k-pop right right uh you need me to explain the members of twice or quantum tunneling, I am here for you.

3:10The other thing that bears on what you were talking about with where it is in the modern day, I think a lot of people looked at this and said, oh, this is involved in quantum computers. And it absolutely is. The quantum tunneling can be used to help create what are called qubits, which allow your one or a zero to be in a superposition, which makes it faster to do a lot of cryptography calculations. And we won't bother trying to go down that rabbit hole right now. But it also allows for transistors to be made in a way that is more power efficient. And that helps your phones and your solid state drives and things like that.

3:46That is a very helpful clarification. So now let's get to something I don't know anything about, the Nobel Prize for chemistry. I did try my best to wrap my head around this one. It felt easier than quantum mechanics. Yeah, anything would be. So the chemistry prize was awarded for molecular structures that can harvest water from desert air, extract polluants from water from the air and things like this. So this is also for experiments that were done in the 80s and the development of this research over 15 years. Usually what happens, it's the original person who discovered it and then people who built on that work and then they end up working together.

4:24So this team developed a chemical structure that forms a metal and organic framework. And it put very simply acts as a sort of very extremely efficient filter or net for other chemicals. Basically, what happens is and the reason this is innovative, first of all, it's you can do this with metals, but they combined metal and organic to make a pliable chemical structure. that has a very big capacity on the inside of it. So it's like a 3D net structure, and it can almost capture particles and keep them inside and kind of bind them in a chemical reaction. And that's how it would do things like, quote-unquote, harvest water from the air.

5:12So overnight, they coat maybe a surface in these types of chemicals that capture the water molecules, and then they'll do a separate chemical reaction to release the water molecules. And you could do this also with poluants, other types of molecules that you're trying to extract from the air or water. Yeah, if you want to reduce pollution, clean up something, smoke, something. Yeah. That makes sense. I like to, based on your description, call this the TARDIS meets the one ring. Because it's bigger. In good space. It's bigger on the inside. Kind of, not really, but kind of. Some quotes say that some of them can fit a football field's worth of equivalent chemicals on the inside.

5:56It's hard to explain that, but yeah. And then it's the one thing that binds them. Yeah, that's pretty good. So you get the one true ring in there. Nobel Prize media needs to make some more puns like you. Yeah, I don't even know if that's a pun. I don't know what that is. It's something. If it helps you remember about the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, that a TARDIS meets the one ring, bigger on the inside and binds things, then maybe I've done my work here. I think you have. There is a product that I've interviewed the CEO about that captures water from dry air. They say they even make it work in places like Arizona.

6:35They are selling a coffee maker that you never need to add water to. You still have to buy the coffee, of course. Oh, that's a good stunt. And they're doing that to kind of popularize the technology with the hopes of also creating things for helping people in dry areas who need water. Right. But it's all based on this this this same principle that was discovered by these folks. And in reading about this, I really like that one of the sort of the second person who who started building on the original discovery read a book by a former Nobel Prize winner who said that not everything has to have a use.

7:09So some discoveries are going to be useless until they're not. And they had this structure, but some people had developed metal structures that were similar that worked better. And so everyone was like, okay, you develop it this, but it doesn't matter until eventually they were able to kind of refine it enough that they became extremely useful. So you never know. And we talk about this a lot in science, like basic science. You can't know until you know that it's useful. Right. It's like, let's figure out how things work. Then we can figure out what to do with them. And sometimes it may take some time.

7:40Exactly. Well, let's get to one that's more, at least closer to your wheelhouse. Yeah, this one is easier to explain. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. So, yes, you may have heard about this one. This one always tends to be more relatable than the other two. but this one was based on immune system regulation, how our immune system is prevented from harming our own body, and the results of this finding leading to cancer and autoimmune disease therapies and treatments. So you probably know when we get an infection or something wrong with our body, our immune system reacts. We have cells called T cells that are part of this reaction.

8:19we've got helper t-cells they patrol the body and they sound the alert and then we have killer t-cells and they they can either become infected or attack like tumors for example um and when you have an autoimmune disease there's a t-cell misfunction where the t-cells think that some of your own body tissue is infected even though it's not and it'll attack your own body so the helper t-cells might misidentify something that's not an enemy as an enemy and then the killer t-cells come in and kill it and you're like hey that was my liver don't do that yeah and so you could see how that would be a problem because you need your liver um what the winner the winners of this award what they realized is that there must be some kind of uh they call this like security guard cell so through a long series of research um they identified a new group of t-cells called regulatory t-cells And these are the ones that are actually helping prevent the other T cells from attacking themselves.

9:18Autoimmune diseases can be pretty rare. So we don't usually have those. And it is thanks to these regulatory T cells. So these are the T cells that hold back the other T cells when they get a little crazy at the bar. And like, you don't want to do this, man. And after the bar fight, quote unquote, they also tell everyone else, OK, this is over. Let's calm down. So everybody nothing to see here. Yeah, so they'll help the immune system also regulate after an invasion because you can't be on high alert all the time. Good metaphor. So when they discovered this new T cell type, they did this in mice, I believe.

9:51They mapped the genome and then, again, I just say this like it's easy, but I'm sure this was like decades of work. But eventually in mapping this genome, it revealed the cause of a rare autoimmune disease called IPEX, where these regulatory T cells are mutated. So you can imagine if they can't do their job properly, then that's when you would have autoimmune diseases. This is when somebody bribes the bouncer to let a fight happen. Sure. I'll kill this metaphor somehow. No, don't. You know what? Let's keep going. So based on their research, as you can imagine, this is huge breakthroughs in science of like understanding how these cells work.

10:29Currently, there's 200 clinical trials in process that are building on this work. and one of my favorite anecdotes about this award is that one of the winners didn't find out for a few days that he had won because he was hiking off grid and had not checked his phone in a few days and everyone was like yeah he won but we don't think he knows because he's hiking there's always a story like that where somebody doesn't hear for some unusual reason that's yeah one of the other ones um hung up on them because they thought it was spam because he's coming from sweden so Who would call me from Sweden at this hour?

11:03It's not like I'm going to win the Nobel Prize. Wait. Oh, yeah. Okay. So that is the physiology prize for basically not only identifying, but also mapping out the genome for the regulatory T cell, which goes along with the help of the case. Yeah, and figuring out how to get that to help us understand and prevent autoimmune disease. And we're not talking about the Nobel Peace Prize or the economics prize or the literature Prize. We're just talking about the science prizes. Yeah, I don't have expertise in those things. Yeah. Although the economics one is kind of interesting because it's about what causes a national economy to grow and it had to do with creative destruction, sort of about innovation, the idea that you need someone to disrupt things.

11:49And if you as a government get in the way of disruption, it can stagnate your economy because the incumbents just ossify in place and then you don't get any movement. That seems very topical. And that makes me want to read up on that quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. So we've every year when I talk about the Nobel Prizes, I always have like a caveat of, you know, these exist and we have to talk about them because they're a big deal in science, but they're also kind of problematic. And I don't quite know why everyone's so excited about them. So one of my first questions was like, do the Nobel Prizes, finding out about them, do they impact your life?

12:30What do you think about the Nobel Prizes? Yeah. So if I run down that question, because I don't really know if I have an answer yet, we'll find out right now. I think that these kinds of prizes could be motivating for people in science. However, I don't get the sense, and I would be curious if someone would study this. I don't know how you'd A-B test this, but I don't get the sense that the people who win the Nobel Prizes really factored that in as a major motivation for their work. They quite often seem surprised that their work got this recognition, right? Well, you can't say like, I knew it was coming.

13:11Yeah. And I get that. Nobody's going to go like, well, of course I won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. I don't have a lot of students that are like, my goal is to win the Nobel Prize. But that, yeah, that's my point is like, I don't think these scientists were like, this is what I was after this whole time. I wasn't sure if I could win it, but this, this was my goal. It's always the science that's the goal. So I'm not sure how much it's doing to encourage science, which then leads me to, but it makes people aware of science because you hear about it and suddenly you're like, oh, that kind of fundamental research from 20 years ago led to me having a better, more useful device.

13:45now. That kind of research 20 years ago now has led to the ability to cure this particular disease. And I think it is important in that respect to be able to show people the process of science and how it is long-term. And it's not something that, well, if I don't see a result today, it's not worth it. Like we were talking about earlier, the idea of doing fundamental research and it taking a while to understand how it has a practical benefit. Yeah. And then there's also these kind of side benefits of we call people from the nobel club once they get the nobel prize the university they're currently at and the university they made the discovery at jump up in academic rankings um but this then becomes a problem because the nobel prize is i want to say kind of nepotistic 96 of the stem prizes come from the same nobel academic family so like people who previously had a nobel prize and then trained other people which makes sense like um you tend to get more grants.

14:45If you got a Nobel prize, people are going to be like, okay, this is assured funding. I mean, at that point you're, you're at the, I would say like maybe not the end of your career or anything, but you've already accomplished quite a bit, but like, yeah, it will, you know, say like, okay, this is a good place to put more money. So it kind of has this positive feedback loop effect. Well, and also, I mean, I hate to say it, but if you're smart enough to win a Nobel prize, probably more people are going to learn more things from you too, right? well you have to have been given the opportunity to give that's the other side of it yeah that's the other side of like well a lot of these are i mean the majority are focused amongst five countries we did this last year where we were like what do you need to do to get a nobel prize be an older white man be in the u.s at these three or four universities uh be of this age and have already been trained by an academic who won a nobel prize yeah um we still i think one woman uh from in stem won this year so we're up to four percent of total nobel prize winners are winning or women still no a single black person has won a stem nobel prize they've all been peace prizes um and it's still around 1.5 percent of total winners and that's that as as you can tell because you're getting the award for something that was fundamental and established in the 80s um women and people of color were not necessarily doing a lot of science in the 80s yeah and then And apparently one of the criteria, and again, it's a secret selection process, so who knows, but they say one of the criteria is your work has to have been cited at least a thousand times to be considered.

16:18But that will, like the people who are citing are other scientists who may or may not have biases, probably have societal biases. And then there's already been papers written about how, you know, minorities are cited less. So this kind of perpetuates itself. But then at the same time, I think it's a good tool for scientific communication. I was also looking at what people do with the prize money. So you get about a million dollars and it's yours. So some people put it back into research. Some people I saw one guy put in a croquet field in his house. Someone bought a motorbike. So it's varied. Some people put it back into scientific research.

16:59Some people buy a motorbike. Yeah, it's, you know, it's varied. And also a million dollars was a lot more when they started their research than it is now. Yeah. And it depends on the price too. Some are less. Yeah. I think that it is important to pay attention to the distribution of the prizes. And I think the Nobel Foundation should continue to pay attention to that. But I think a lot of the selection prejudice that you see is, as you said, reflective of the situation in science. And it's not only reflective of the situation in science now, it's more reflective of the situation in science 30 years ago, 40 years ago, right?

17:48So you do have to – there's not much you can do about the past now, right? Yeah, exactly. That's the conundrum that they're facing. So, yeah, it's like any award, right? Like the Oscars or the Grammys or any of that. You're like, well, this is just a mutual appreciation society, in this case, of scientists. But I do think because there's so much attention given to it that it does a lot of good in getting people to understand a little more about science. So, on the whole, I have a mixed reaction to it. But on the whole, I think it's probably still a positive. And I'd be willing, you know how we do our prediction show every year?

18:32I'd be willing to bet that in 20 years, Tom, okay, when we're like AI robots doing DTNS, I bet the American prices are going to take a huge dip because of how academic funding is being impacted in these next, let's say, five to ten years. Yeah, if it does, you know, there's a lot to be seen over the next four to five years about, you know, what is done after that. And I think depending on what comes after, I think we're going to take a big hit. I mean, who cares if Americans get less Nobel Prizes? But like in terms of just like geopolitical science and like America being the number one that always gets all the Nobel Prizes.

19:13I didn't mention, but the University of California broke the record and have five Nobel Prizes in the same year this year. I think that we may no longer be in the lead soon. And that is a typical cycle. It used to be they were all German and French and English, right? And that is not the way it is now either. So for multiple reasons, I can imagine you will have a lot more Chinese scientists winning the Nobel Prize 30 or 40 years. And they've been developing for decades. I'd be curious to know what the DTNS listeners want to hear about the Nobel Prizes or if they're more interested in learning about the other scientific prizes.

19:53There's the Turing Prize. There's the Field Medal. All of these other ones that are also prestigious for different fields. You know, Nobel Prize for STEM is only three categories. Yeah. There's a lot that's not getting – We didn't talk about it as much this year, but it often is them shoehorning some kind of technology into one of the categories it doesn't really necessarily belong in. Right? And they're not going to add more categories. So yeah, it'll be interesting. They really need to redefine a category or add a category, but yeah. Too late. Yeah, we'll see. Well, Dr. Nikki, thank you as always for helping us wrap our head around all of this.

20:28Very helpful context provided to it as always. And like she said, send us an email, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com and let us know what it is about the Nobel Prizes. Or you're like, I don't care about hearing about them at all, or I love hearing about them, but this is the part I want to emphasize. Uh, it's always helpful to find that out. Nikki, if people want to find what you are doing and, and where they should go, uh, well, if they want to find out what you're doing, where should they go is what I'm trying to say. Well, if you want to look at my research and see if I might win the Nobel prize in 25 years, um, I haven't trained under a Nobel prize laureate, so I'm off the, I'm off the data, but, uh, you can go to Nicole Ackermans.com.

21:08I also have the same handle on blue sky and my paper should be coming out soon. So keep an eye out for that. And this will also get posted there. Excellent. Excellent. Do all of that. And of course, big thanks to the patrons who make it possible for all of us to do this at patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon.

21:35The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. They laughed out that said It'd fall out of the house