The story behind Nobel research

IT INVOLVES A PRETZEL, HAIR AND A SCREAM Committee finds creative ways of explaining awards.

What do a pretzel, a lock of hair and a scream have in common? They’ve all been used to explain the highly complex scientific research honoured with a Nobel Prize to the general public.

In recent years, the various Nobel science prize committees have gone to great lengths to make the pioneering discoveries understandable to a broad audience, occasionally finding creative and amusing ways of getting their message across.

“I think we’ re sometimes a little scared of being too adventurous when presenting the Nobel Prize because it’s serious and important,” Sven Lidin, who served for 12 years as a member of the Nobel chemistry committee, told AFP.

This year’s Nobel Prize season kicks off today.

Currently a chemistry professor at Lund University, Lidin stunned the audience and elicited laughs when he shouted “Boo!” under a painting inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream to explain the 2012 chemistry prize.

“Do you remember the last time you got really scared? The dryness of the mouth, the heart that skips a beat. These are signs that your body is getting ready for flight or fight,” he said at the time.

Lidin was explaining the discovery of “G-protein-coupled receptors”.

Not many people may know what they are, but they’re crucial: they help our cells react to adrenaline and hormones, explaining how cardiac cells know to raise the heart rate when we are startled, for example.

And in 2014, the chemistry Nobel honoured “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”, according to the prize citation.

To explain it, Lidin pulled out a lock of his own hair to show how the prizewinners had laid the foundations for the development of nanoscopy, an ultra-powerful microscope that enables scientists to closely look at the inner workings of a cell, revolutionising disease research.

Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel physics committee, made headlines last year when he brought a cinnamon bun, a pretzel and a bagel to explain the field of topology, a highly specialised mathematics field studying unusual phases or states of matter.

Regarding the two holes in the pretzel, the one in the bagel, and the shape of a bun, Hansson showed that topology explains how a material’s shape can be deformed into a new one without losing its core properties. – AFP