Who Won the Nobel Prize this Year? 2021

Last week the scientific community was abuzz with the winners of the most prestigious awards in the sciences. If you have not been keeping track, do not fret. We have compiled a list of all the announcements.

1. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”

2. Nobel Prize in Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems” with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

3. Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.”

For further details, go to https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ .

What are the Nobel Prizes?

The Nobel Prizes are named after Alfred Nobel, a Swedish scientist, engineer and industrialist. He is most famous for inventing dynamite. Alfred was born in Sweden in 1833, fluent in multiple languages and had a wide variety of interests. He died in 1896 and gave most of his assets to the establishment of five awards which later became known as the Nobel Prizes. In his will, he wrote “that much of his fortune was to be used to give prizes to those who have done their best for humanity in the field of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace”. The Prizes reflect his varied interests. The award includes $1.1 million per prize. At ceremonies held in Stockholm, the awardees are given three things, a diploma, a medal and a document confirming the Prize amount.