People have always known science would advance faster with various incentives and rewards. As modern experimental science took off, these took the form of gifts and favors to and from wealthy elites.
The science is now used to tackle a range of diseases.
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This year, the Nobel Prizes are trying to reach a wider – and younger – audience. However, critics argue that the commercial partners needed to fund the awards’ many extraneous events are compromising their integrity.
Antibody attacking a bacterium.
Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock.com
The unavoidable regime of publication pervades contemporary academic life across the world. While presented as a virtuous thing, it can actually suffocate the academic profession.
Angus Deaton: winner of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
Reuters/Dominick Reuter
The favourite in the betting won has almost every single US presidential election since 1868 and more recently the Academy Awards. But how well can the market predict the Nobel Prize winners?
Nobel Prize for Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich.
Reuters
Employing a unique literary method that blurred the genres of oral history and documentary prose, the Nobel Prize for Literature winner told the stories of a traumatized people.
Wided Bouchamaoui, president of Tunisia’s Employers’ Organisation and a member of Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet.
Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters
Cells must repair the thousands of bits of DNA damage they incur every day. These cellular mechanisms fend off cancerous tumors, and cancer researchers are working to harness their power.
Giving voice to the voiceless.
Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA
Kum Kum Khanna, Queensland Institute of Medical Research; Amanda L Bain, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, and Janelle L Harris, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
The recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry showed that DNA is far from static. Rather, it is bombarded by damaging forces, but our bodies know how to repair these precious strands.
Farmers beat the stalks of sweet wormwood trees to extract the leaves during harvesting in rural China, The plant contains artemisinin, the drug which won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
epa/Michael Reynolds
The drug partly responsible for more than halving the rate of malaria over the last 30 years and which won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has a long history of use.
Um, you figured out what by doing which?
Woman image via www.shutterstock.com.
Elizabeth Bass, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Nobel Prize-winning science is almost by definition arcane and complex. While these esoteric fields have their moment in the spotlight, does it matter if the rest of us understand?
Plants mentioned in ancient Chinese books helped inspire the latest Nobel Prize for Medicine winner, but testing old remedies isn’t as simple as following the recipe.
Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita after he won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Arthur B McDonald of Canada.
EPA Franck Robichon
The drug that led to two scientists wining the Nobel Prize for Physiology or medicine has made a significant difference for those suffering from elephantiasis and river blindness.