SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It's Nobel Week and today's award is for chemistry. The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to scientists who developed powerful new tools for designing and studying proteins, which are the chemical workhorses of life. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on who won and why the Nobel Prize continues to be controversial.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: When folks in Sweden start handing out Nobels, phones start ringing.
DAVID BAKER: I answered the phone, and I heard the announcement. And then my wife began screaming very loudly, so I couldn't really hear very well.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle. He developed computer software that lets scientists figure out how to create entirely new proteins from scratch. He shared the prize with a couple of researchers at Google DeepMind in London, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. They developed an AI tool that can predict the three-dimensional structure of any protein, a problem that biochemists had been trying to solve for, like, half a century. Jumper says this morning, he was wide awake.
JOHN JUMPER: My goal was to sleep in and then know when I woke up whether I got it or didn't, but I couldn't sleep.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The minutes ticked by. He didn't get a call.
JUMPER: And I turned to my wife, and I said, well, I guess it's not this year.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thirty seconds later, his phone rang. It was Sweden. And who didn't get calls this week? Women. Seven men shared the honors for medicine or physiology, chemistry and physics. Liselotte Jauffred is a biophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. She and some colleagues recently did a statistical analysis that shows men are overrepresented as Nobel winners.
LISELOTTE JAUFFRED: So maybe we have to look into what is it that puts the Nobel Prize laureates, what is it that put them in a position where they could actually do these groundbreaking findings, right?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: On X, formerly known as Twitter, some people raised concerns about the award for physiology or medicine. One of the winners was Victor Ambros, and he's married to Rosalind Lee, also known as Candy. They're longtime collaborators. She's a senior scientist in his lab at UMass Chan Medical School. At a press briefing earlier this week, Ambros referred to the studies that Candy and I did. He noted she'd bought the striking shirt he was wearing, which had tigers on it, and kept turning to her.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
VICTOR AMBROS: Candy has given me a list of things I'm not supposed to forget but I probably forgot them all.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Asked about the concerns raised on social media about Lee not sharing in the Award, a spokesperson with their institution said the two researchers were celebrating the prize and view it as a recognition of the team's collaborative work.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF J. COLE AND KENDRICK LAMAR SONG, "FORBIDDEN FRUIT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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