Who won the Nobel Prize in 2024?
In the previous days of October, Nobel Prizes were awarded in other fields. In particular, the Physics Prize was won by John Hopfield for the invention of the associative neural network and by Jeffrey Hinton, who based it on the network, which can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data. These developments later helped create modern artificial intelligence systems.
The chemistry prize was awarded to David Baker, along with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. The former was able to create a new protein back in 2003 and has since led a research group that designs proteins, including those that can be used as drugs, vaccines, nanomaterials, miniature sensors, and more.
In turn, Hassabis and Jumper, who are the director and senior research fellow at Google DeepMind Lab, created an artificial intelligence model, AlphaFold2, in 2020, which predicts the spatial structure of proteins.
This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered microRNAs, a class of RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation.
The literature prize was awarded to Korean writer Han Gang “for her rich poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.”
In turn, the Peace Prize went to the Japanese public organization “Nihon Hidankyo”, created in 1956 by hibakusha – people who survived the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It promotes the social and economic rights of hibakusha, including those currently living outside Japan, and also conducts educational work on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.
Not quite a Nobel Prize
It should be noted that unlike other prizes awarded by the Nobel Foundation since 1901 for outstanding achievements in other fields (physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and contribution to peace), the Economics Prize was established only in 1969 at the initiative of the Bank of Sweden.
It is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is not officially called the Nobel Prize, although it is known by that name informally. The prize (like the other five) is presented annually on December 10. The ceremony for the award of the five prizes takes place in the Swedish capital Stockholm, and the Peace Prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, with the participation of the kings of these countries.
In addition to the corresponding medals, the laureates receive a cash prize: in 2023 and 2024 it is 11 million Swedish kronor (about 44 million hryvnias) for each prize, which can be divided if there is more than one laureate.