Contributions of IIT Bombay researcher to the field that won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prizes award ceremony begins tonight as the winners receive their medals in their home countries. Get a glimpse of the contributions of the Natural Sciences awardees. 

Last week, the world enthusiastically awaited one of the year’s exciting announcements—the Nobel Prize in the fields of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. First of them to be announced was the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly awarded to James P. Allison, Professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA, and Tasuku Honjo, Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. They were considered for this prestigious honour for their contributions to cancer therapy using our body’s immune system to attack cancer cells.

Spirit of inquiry and curiosity are traditions in India,  country that has a history of nurturing science, said Hon’ble President Shri Ram Nath Kovind at a seminar organised as a part of the second edition of Nobel Prize Series, India, at the Rashtrapati Bhavan here.

The Research Matters team caught up with Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, when he was in Bengaluru in June, 2017. Having won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae, our team wanted to know his views about the recent discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO and the Virgo Observatory. Read on to know more about his work on type 1A supernovae and share his excitement for the future of cosmology, after the discovery of gravitational waves.

Autophagy, or self-eating, is a process where cells in our body devour some of the cell components to replenish their nutrient supply during severe shortage.  This process, though sounds gruesome, is essential for our survival and any defect in this mechanism could lead to neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Several research, inspired by Nobel Laureate Prof. Yoshinori Ohsumi’s work on autophagy, has now uncovered new dimensions on our understanding of how cells function.