Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Happy Kwanza! With the year wrapping up, it is the perfect time to think more about what most teenagers dread: academics. 

In times of crisis, the greatest minds offer their unwavering support, and with the election to a second term for Donald Trump, over 75 Nobel laureates — some of the greatest minds across the world — have come together to urge the rejection of Robert F Kennedy Jr. as Trump’s head of the Department of Health and Human Services. It is vital that society listens and learns from what people have accomplished because they have done mass amounts of work and spent countless hours on their craft. 

The Nobel Prize was founded in 1901 by Alfred Nobel, a prominent businessman and investor, who left a large sum to the Nobel Foundation to award prizes in sciences and humanities (FPSH) to people who have made the most impact on the world in the past year. The prize rewards individuals in the categories of peace, literature, physics, economics, chemistry, and medicine. Most people, according to an Action Network survey, could not name a single Nobel prize winner, missing out on the genius that is being unveiled each year. 

Peace

One of the most anticipated prizes of the year is the peace prize. The Japanese organization of Nihon Hidankyo received the award  “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.” Nihon Hidankyo was formed in 1956 in the wake of the atomic bomb in Japan for sufferers of the A and H-bomb attacks. Hidankyo soon became the most widely represented Hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, organization in Japan. Nihon Hidankyo has two primary goals. Firstly, promoting social and economic rights of atomic bomb survivors  Secondly, guaranteeing a tragedy on an atomic bomb level never occurs again. 

The second award was bestowed upon Han Kang, a Korean author, in the literary category by the Nobel Foundation “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her prize makes her the first Korean and first woman from Asia to be awarded this honor. Her anthology includes “The Vegetarian, Human Acts” and “We Do Not Part.” Her work is noted for blurring the line between life and death, and the connections between body and soul. She is considered an innovator of contemporary poetry. 

Physics

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Artificial neural networks are AI that simulate the complex parts of the brain that help humans remember things and create intelligence. For artificial intelligence, nodes are small data points that symbolize the little parts of the brain that help move knowledge back and forth to formulate ideas and movement. Nodes are like baseball players that are throwing and catching the ball around to transmit and pass knowledge. 

Hopfield was awarded the prize for his 1982 invention of an artificial network that is capable of saving and recreating patterns in data similar to a memory. His invention became significant in image analysis or the extraction of information from an image. Similarly, Hinton was also noted for an invention he was credited for in the 1980s. His “Boltzmann machine” used statistics and physics to recognize important parts of a data set, which aided in classifying and creating images through AI. 

Economics 

This year’s economic prize was one of the most fascinating yet and was awarded jointly to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, for their research on how government institutions in colonized territories are formed and how they affect the success of that nation. Each of these three are noted for their studies on the impact of European colonization. Some countries that were impacted by colonization are more successful post-colonization than other countries. These economists explain that this was caused by social institutions. 

They explain that social institutions such as governments, more specifically the interference of white colonizers, were placed into countries that were poor to over time build a more prosperous nation. These colonies were focused on the idea of spreading Europeans across the globe, in order to expand European dominance and implement inclusive governments, introducing government and stability into the colonies. 

Some resource-rich countries become trapped by the people in power who are focused on extracting resources over establishing institutions. These are known as extractive nations, where colonizers strive worsen the society of the country overall. Eventually the colonizers are faced with the threat of rebellion from populations, and that is how democracy emerges. 

Chemistry

David Baker took home the first gold with a prize in chemistry “for computational protein design,” and Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper were awarded a joint award “for protein structure prediction.” Baker was awarded his prize on the basis that he was able to create a new protein in 2003. Proteins are 3D structures whose function includes driving the needed reactions in life such as digesting the food eaten into energy to sustain life. They also act as hormones and more. Chemists are able to create these proteins that are normally found in foods such as meat through synthesizing amino acids, like stringing together beads on a necklace.

Since 2003, Baker has created numerous proteins that have been used in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors. With their invention AlphaFold2 in 2020, a device that predicts the folding pattern of protein, Hassabis and Jumper were able to use AI to predict the folding pattern of nearly all 200 million recognized proteins, a decisive key in identifying the function and ability of the protein. Their discovery has enabled researchers to better understand antibiotic resistance and how enzymes decompose in plastic. 

Medicine

The last prize awarded was in medicine to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.” All of the cells in bodies are pre-determined by the information in chromosomes, think of them as little butterflies filled with instructions that pass on to different parts of the bodies. Some cells, such as liver and muscle cells, are vastly different from others. Scientists used to credit the differences in the types of cells across the body to the fact that some cells choose only to follow certain information. 

Ambros and Ruvkun discovered microRNA by studying worms, seeing how different strands of microRNA stopped another strand from coding. Think of microRNA as smaller flies than the butterflies that pass along the instructions that the butterflies gave, but sometimes  skip over giving instructions to that cell. That tiny microRNA is present in all organisms and is what causes the variation in cells across the body. 

The Nobel Prizes have been around for over a century, and continue to recognize the most beneficial discoveries humans have made. Oftentimes the prize is presented decades following the initial creation or discovery, but the prize reminds humanity of the importance of discovery and innovation