South Korea’s Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel literature prize

South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, said in a statement.

Han Kang, the first South Korean to win the literature prize, began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine Literature and Society, while her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection “Love of Yeosu”. Her major international breakthrough came with the novel “The Vegetarian”.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with one half to David Baker(University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA) “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper (both are from Google DeepMind, London, UK) “for protein structure prediction”.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about pro­teins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 given to Victor Ambros (Affiliation at the time of the award: UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA) and Gary Ruvkun (Affiliation at the time of the award: Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA)  for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type.