This discussion brings together Nobel laureates at the royal palace in Stockholm, underscoring their achievements in various fields including science and economics. Key figures such as Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and Prince Daniel graced the event. The session addresses critical issues like the underrepresentation of women in science and social science, while acknowledging historical and societal factors that have hindered gender parity.

The panel engages in a thought-provoking discourse about the successes and challenges faced by women in these disciplines. Notable points raised include career interruptions due to childbearing, the need for role models, societal attitudes, and structural impediments in academia. The speakers also reflect on their breakthroughs in fields like mRNA technology, quantum dots, and light pulse physics, sharing their personal stories of persistence and collaboration.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. laureate [ˈlɔːriət] - (noun) - A person who has been honored for achieving distinction in a particular field. - Synonyms: (honoree, awardee, recipient)

We'll be hearing from this year's Nobel laureates.

2. intertwined [ˌɪntərˈtwaɪnd] - (adjective) - Interconnected, involved with each other. - Synonyms: (interwoven, linked, connected)

She's shown how human and societal development is intertwined with gender equality.

3. pioneers [ˌpaɪəˈnɪrz] - (noun) - People who are among the first to explore or settle a new country or area. - Synonyms: (trailblazers, innovators, forerunners)

And what we have here are pioneers, women that were pioneers in their field.

4. watershed [ˈwɔːtərʃɛd] - (noun) - An event or period marking a turning point in a situation. - Synonyms: (turning point, milestone, landmark)

As well as how parenthood has been and continues to be a watershed when it comes to work and pay.

5. anomaly [əˈnɒməli] - (noun) - Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. - Synonyms: (abnormality, irregularity, inconsistency)

I hope we've made progress since then, and I hope that having three women will no longer receive as an anomaly.

6. incredibly [ɪnˈkredəbli] - (adverb) - To a great degree; extremely or unbelievably. - Synonyms: (remarkably, astonishingly, exceedingly)

As a professor, you are incredibly free. And that helps.

7. skepticism [ˈskɛptɪˌsɪzəm] - (noun) - An attitude of doubting the truth of something (such as a claim or statement). - Synonyms: (doubt, uncertainty, disbelief)

We have had this phenomenon of both vaccine skepticism and also vaccine hesitancy.

8. convey [kənˈveɪ] - (verb) - To communicate or make known. - Synonyms: (express, communicate, relay)

If a single scientist says something that has little weight, but if the scientific community as a whole conveys a message it has much more weight.

9. exacerbate [ɪɡˈzæsərˌbeɪt] - (verb) - To make (a problem, bad situation, or negative feeling) worse. - Synonyms: (aggravate, worsen, intensify)

Could that exacerbate the problem and arrest any progress?

10. disproportionately [ˌdɪsprəˈpɔːrʃənətli] - (adverb) - To an extent that is too large or too small in comparison with something else. - Synonyms: (unequally, unevenly, excessively)

The field of biology has become disproportionately female.

Nobel Minds 2023

Hello and welcome to Nobel Mines with me, Zeynab Badawi from the royal palace in Stockholm. We'll be hearing from this year's Nobel laureates. In the audience, we're joined by some of their family and friends, as well as students from here in Sweden. Joining us are their Royal Highnesses, the Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and Prince Daniel.

Your Royal Highness, you want to say a few words of welcome and to tell us a little bit about where exactly we are in your palace. Well, thank you. So, Nobel laureates, ladies and gentlemen, viewers, I'd like to wish you a warm welcome to the royal palace here in Stockholm and to the Bernadotte Library. This library holds over 100,000 books that used to belong to the kings and queens of the House of Bernadotte. This is a very special library in that sense. But we're not here to read. We're here to listen. And we're here to listen to the Nobel laureates, to their knowledge and wisdom and their contributions to science and economics. So thank you all for joining today.

Welcome to Nobel Mines. Now, laureates, this is the first time that you've been brought together in discussion on television. Renewed congratulations to you all. But do you know what? Just looking around the table, I'm very struck by the fact that for once I'm joined by three women, a very rare occurrence. And it's got me wondering, why do you think that there are so few women at the top in both the sciences and the social sciences? Professor Kotlin Carico, you're the first hungarian woman to win a Nobel Prize. What do you think? You know, what I think is that whenever our career is moving forward, the time is the child bearing age, and many of the women decide to have family. And it is difficult for, you know, advancing their research, for example. And that might be one reason that they give up on the fact that it's women when they have children. Yes, they give up their dreams because they want to have children. But I have a daughter and Ann has two sons, so that, you know, we can show here that they can do both.

All right, Munji Bawendi, you're one of the chemist laureates. What's your take on this? It seems to me that when we look at the Nobel laureates, for instance, it's about research that was done decades ago. And what we have here are pioneers, women that were pioneers in their field when those fields were being opened up more and more to women, where the attitudes towards having women were beginning to change. I hope we've made progress since then, and I hope that having three women will no longer receive as an anomaly, but rather a straightforward common recurrence.

So do you agree, Professor Anne Louillier, you are the first french woman who has won the physics prize since Marie Curie 120 years ago. Yes. Fast forward now. Do you think this is going to be getting better? Yeah, I really think things are improving for women. I think, for me, the fact that there are very few women, especially in science and technology, is very much lack of role models. For me, Marie Curie has played a very important role. So it's fantastic to be the woman after Marie Curie to get the Nobel Prize in physics.

Professor Drew Wiseman, you are also one of the laureates in the prize for medicine or physiology. What's your take? So I think it's a combination. I completely agree with Munshi that 2030 years ago, women were just breaking into the field and were just getting recognized. But if we look at our modern society, women are still not treated equally. I'm sure Claudia can tell us quite a bit about this, and I think that's a problem with society in general. And it applies to women, it applies to minorities, it applies to so many different groups. And to me, the bigger question is, how do we solve all of these problems? How do we get all people to be treated equal?

Okay, Professor Ferens Krauss, one of the physicists here, how do you solve it? I mean, you've got to start pretty early, haven't you? Well, I would agree with everything what was said and would perhaps add that there are also some stereotypes out there where girls might have the feeling that these activities, like working in the lab, doing experiments, are mainly jobs for actually men and not so much for women. And I think our role models here can provide the example that this may not be true. And we can do, of course, proactively a lot to actually reach out to high school pupils and invite them to our laboratories.

You've got to stop that early. Absolutely. That's where we have to do this, because just a too low percentage of pupils actually choose this subject. Physics, chemistry, biology. Professor Louis Bruce, you're one of the chemist laureates also. I know you've got three children, including two daughters and some grandchildren. How do you see it from their point of view? Do you think things are going to get better in the future for women who want to go into science? Yeah, definitely.

There's been steady progress during my lifetime, just as been set at the table here. And role models are critical. You know, a young student in high school looking at some scientists in the front of the room, they're thinking, how could I possibly fill that role? And if it's just white men, it's, you know, it's just they're going to conclude it's not a possible career for them, no matter what we say. So role models are critical.

Claudia golden, what I'm hearing around the table is that the importance of female role models to encourage I females to go into science and social sciences seems to be the crux. Do you agree? I don't think it's the whole thing at all. So the first thing is, as we've heard, is that I would really like to look ahead rather than looking behind. And if we look ahead, we do see, as we've heard, a lot of change. But we also know that there are impediments, and it's incumbent upon us to understand the impediments.

So, first of all, if we look at the various fields, what's pretty amazing is that the field of biology has become disproportionately female. And so we have to ask, why has that gone in one direction? Physics, engineering, chemistry has moved a bit. Economics is a little bit slower. Why are those being held behind a bit? In addition, even those who go through don't necessarily go into academia. They go into big pharma, for example.

The final thing, I mean, we've talked about issues concerning home, family and work, but we also know that the time that it takes to get a PhD and then to get tenure has expanded enormously that disproportionately impacts women versus men. So, in fact, we have added something that is more of an impediment as we've made progress. Really interesting. Well, gender equality in the field of work and pay goes right to the heart of what you won your economics prize for. So let's just take a short video and just remind ourselves of what it was awarded for.

Claudia golden receives her Nobel Prize for uncovering key drivers of gender differences in the labour market. By charting how women's work has been historically underreported, she's shown how human and societal development is intertwined with gender equality, for instance, the factors affecting demand for women's labor and their opportunities in the labour market. She also examined the influences that affect women's desire to get an education, as well as how parenthood has been and continues to be a watershed when it comes to work and pay.

So, Claudia golden, it's clear that gender pay inequality has narrowed, although it still exists. But just give us a brief account as to why gender inequality still exists in the workplace. Women do disproportionately do childcare and elder care relative to men, and therefore they're going to be taking positions. It's not necessarily that they're going to stay in the home, for example. They're going to be taking positions that enable that type of flexibility. And those positions often pay less. They are less demanding in terms of hours and in terms of days, and therefore, they're going to be disproportionately being paid less.

What steps can be taken, then to get greater parity in the workplace in terms of work and pay? So there are many fields that have figured out ways to get around it. So it's sort of interesting that if you think about it, all you need is one perfect substitute for yourself. So if you are working at 11:00 and the phone rings and you have to go to the school to get your child, but you have a client waiting for you, just pull in your perfect substitute. That's all you need. And so, therefore, fields in which that are built on having teams of workers, pediatricians, for example, anesthesiologists, veterinarians, pharmacists, certainly forms of tech work have very good substitutes.

So, so more teamwork, right. Because that's kind of what, what you say, that not work as individuals at the workplace, but work as a team and, and help each other. Right. And support each other. I would like to add a little thing for a little bit what it is to work as a woman in academia. I think as a professor, you are incredibly free. And that helps. As a woman with small kids, it's extremely flexible. You can come whenever you want. You can leave whenever you want. You run your own agenda. And as a woman, I have found it's incredibly helpful. And I think this, I would like to advertise to the young woman, you are incredibly free, and this is helpful when you have small children.

Let's look at another impact on work and pay in terms of the gender debate. What do you think might be the impact of technology and AI on jobs and how it might affect women? Because you were saying, Claudia, that fewer women go into subjects like technology, computer science and so on. And these are the jobs which the economies are beginning to favor, aren't they? So could that exacerbate the problem and arrest any progress? I think it might help.

You think it might help because you can work from home. We realize that technology helps. You've got to learn it in the first place. And if there are not enough females going into computer science. Yes, but, you know, the technology helped us during the pandemic also that we could work from home. And that's interesting. Yeah, well, that it would also help a parent, you know, because let's say, you know, scientists job is not family friendly. Drew Weissman, you were nodding. I mean, I think it's a bigger problem and I don't know the source or I don't think I know the source. But I think in general, in our society, women do not work as much as men.

But the question is why? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Women do not work as much as men? No, no. The percentage of women working outside of a house in paying jobs, just seeking that credibility. No, no. My wife is going to murder me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've saved your life just then by no, but I think getting at the source of that is really critical to understanding it and fixing it.

So we've got a question in the audience for you, Claudia, about your work. Let me go to Clara Peltoma. Clara, what's your question, please? Yes, I would like to ask Claudia Goldin, when you were carrying out your research, did it ever strike you that you would get the Nobel Prize? And how was it to get that call? Well, thanks very much. I think that each of us would say, and we've said it, no, that it never struck us that we would get a Nobel prize. That's certainly not what was driving our passion and our curiosity. That doesn't mean to say that we're not pleased to receive it.

So. And receiving it meant a tremendous amount because there was an outpouring of, to me of jubilation and joy and appreciation and a sense on the part of a large number of people that their work was validated. And for me, this means that my award isn't just for me. It's been magnified many times. And for that I am very grateful. What a lovely answer that was. Thank you.

Good. Well, I think we talked about how working from home has increased flexibility and has perhaps made it easier for women. Professor Kosheninkariko, you brought that up. And indeed, that takes us to our next category because, of course, Covid-19 was when working from home really took off.

And that was central to the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. Let's just look at this video telling us what the award was made for. Something that we had worked on for 25 years was now being stuck in our arms for decades. There have been attempts to speed up the time consuming process of developing vaccines by using viruses, genetic information, messenger rna or mRNA. Discoveries by Kotlin Caricaux and Drew Wiseman fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system and allowed vaccines vaccines to be developed, produced and updated quickly as well as on a large scale. That work received a lot of attention and funding when the COVID pandemic hit the world, and it has the potential to treat many other diseases in the future.

So Drew Wiseman, just remind us of what your words were when you were told that you had won the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology. So I talked to Katie, I think around 04:00 a.m. eastern time, and Katie sent me a note. Did you hear from Thomas? And they said, Thomas who? So we started talking and she said, well, somebody called her and said they were from the Nobel assembly and that we had won, but they didn't have your phone number. And Katie gave them my phone number. We'll talk about later. But we then talked and we said we didn't believe it. We thought somebody was pulling our leg and playing a joke on us and we really hadn't wanted. And then at six in the morning, we saw the video and we were both incredibly ecstatic and surprised.

Now you've had such a close working relationship and both of you said that you sometimes have trouble sleeping. So talking to each other in the early hours of the morning is not unusual. Right? We do that all the time when we were working together. Not the telephone. No, no, it was usually by email. Yeah, because we were not sure that other persons, we don't want to wake up the spouses or the kids. So I mean, you know, you came up with mRNA which uses a completely different approach from traditional vaccine technology. And of course it paved the way for Covid-19 and you know, we salute you because of course that saved countless lives. I think we ought to give them a round of applause.

But the really sad thing is, actually you both were working on what was seen as a scientific backwater and you really had to battle to get to where you are. I mean, one of you picked that up. Yeah, I mean, I started to work on this even ten years on rna, messenger RNA before Drew. And then I couldn't get funding. Zero.

And you were also thrown out of a laboratory. Yeah. Laid off ten years ago. Ten years ago. Because they thought what you were doing was just because I couldn't get the funding and that was enough. But you went back to your native Hungary, didn't you? And you had this heroines welcome how did you feel when all those young people, multitudes, turned up to see you? I mean, that was one, two months ago, you know, in October when I went back and I was just unbelievable that people gathered and they were so happy. They were like, you know, celebrating a rock star or somebody, and it was just unbelievable.

I know we were talking about female role models and how important that is and all your stories are so inspiring, but yours, Cottie, really is because you came from a very economically deprived background and, you know, your father was a butcher and you lived in very modest accommodation. And really, you know, your brilliance now has brought you to the top table. Yeah, I hope that, you know, girls will think that their parents not necessarily has to be a professor. They can be coming, any kind of background, and then they can study believing something, working hard, and then their dream comes through.

Okay, so we got the Covid-19 vaccine. But even though obviously, as I said, it saved a lot of lives, we have had this phenomenon of both vaccine skepticism and also vaccine hesitancy. Two slightly different things. But why do you think there was this skepticism? And do you think scientists were also to blame? So hindsight is always a great thing. And looking back, scientists should have done much more to promote vaccines, to promote their safety, their efficacy. But I think we were against an enormous headwind of social media.

And the problem with social media is it gives any person with unusual thoughts the ability to forecast those to the entire world. In the old days, crazy people would sit on the corner with a megaphone and yell. Now you've got hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are reading their posts, and large number of people who were looking for conspiracy theories wherever they can find them. And I think this was just a great conspiracy theory. They could blame everything in the world that was bad on rna vaccines and use that as a tool to attack the ruling parties, to attack politicians, to attack scientists.

So the politicization, the vaccine is a huge factor. You think it was used by politicians as a football? I mean, in the US that was an enormous problem, but it happened across the world. But does it also boil down to a lack of scientific literacy, perhaps, that, you know, a lot of people in the big wide public out there don't really understand science. To our professor Louis Bruce, your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's our number one problem in the US. You know, the fact that sciences lack magic to much of the population. It's a shame, you know, climate research in the US is highly politicized as well as well as vaccines and all of this comes from politics, you know, taking advantage of situations, basically.

You want to name names? No, but I mean, science literacy is certainly a problem. But I think we scientists and the scientific community has a great deal of responsibility to actually deal with it because I think it's our task and even duty, I would say, to reach out and try to explain in simple terms what we are doing, what it is good for, and in particular, in the case of these new vaccines, science should actually provide clear answers. What is my risk if I'm doing it? What is my risk if I'm not doing it? And I think we didn't do a good job on that.

I think this is an issue also about the scientific process that Lewis was talking about, the scientific literacy. There's uncertainty in science, and we're all comfortable with the uncertainty. But the politicians, you know, they really don't like that. So they want to be able to say something is yes or it's no, you know, not well, I'm going to hedge here, I'm going to hedge there. And, you know, somebody who's not trained in understanding the scientific process, they are completely confused with that.

Drew Wiseman, I know that you and your family have done a lot to try to persuade people to take Covid-19 vaccine. Your wife, a psychologist, Mary Ellen Wiseman, and your daughter Alison, actually offered to be guinea pigs for the vaccine. Actually, just before you answer that, can we just see if they're in the audience? I think they are in the audience, and maybe you'd like to stand and we can say hello to you. Good. So did they become guinea pigs for the Covid-19 vaccine? They were early entrants into the Covid-19 phase three vaccine trials.

One of the tools my wife would use is she would go with friends to church services, to community meetings, and they would say to her, well, we heard the vaccine gives you cancer or it makes you sterile or does a variety of things. And she would look at them and just bluntly say, do you think my husband would have his daughters and his wife take a vaccine that's going to make them sterile? And that was a very strong message to people to encourage them to join the trials. I think we should give them an applause. I think we all salute you.

Okay, let's look at the chemistry prize with its scientific breakthroughs that have myriad uses that will benefit humankind. Let's have a short video looking at what the prize for chemistry was made for. It's very strange. The nanoworld is really, really bizarre when matter is reduced to its smallest dimensions. It's made up of quantum dots, nanoparticles so tiny that their size determines their properties. Alexei Ekimov, Mundji Boendi, and Lewis Bruce discovered and developed this artificially created collection of semiconducting nanoparticles. They are just a few millionths of a millimetre wide and glow blue, red or green when exposed to light. Quantum dots already have commercial and scientific uses, and in future could contribute to flexible electronics, thinner solar cells, and encrypted quantum communication.

So, Munji Bawendi, I don't know. Viewers may be watching this program on QLED TV, one of the things that have arisen from the work that you've done. So just tell us about how your work collectively can be used to improve lives. So, QLEds is one of the biggest money making applications of quantum dots. But the field in the last few decades has grown enormously, and there's a lot of people working on many other potential applications that have yet to see either commercial success or the applications being proven. And that includes fields going from energy harvesting for the sun, either for making electricity through photovoltaics or through the creation of fuels using the energy of the sun into the quantum dots to then create electrons that can be then used to create molecules.

That's one application. Another application is in biomedicine. In diagnostics, it helps surgeons to see tumor tissue in the body more easily. It could do so. I think that it's a tool that the surgical community can use to understand how to do things better on animal models. The issue with the application to humans is much more complicated, but there are all sorts of possibilities, all sorts of possibilities. Professor Louis Bruce, you work independently of the other chemists laureates. Alexey Yakimov, who was born in Russia but moved to the United States. You were working on similar, in a similar field, but independently of each other, because, of course, he was behind the iron curtain at the time. But it does stress the importance of collaboration, doesn't it, in scientists work? Without a doubt, the work that munji and I have done is an extreme example of that. You know, it falls in the cracks between academic scientific departments, between chemistry and physics.

This work that we have done is the last step of a long continuation of progress using semiconductors, you know, in our modern life. And things have been completely transformed by transistors and light emitting diodes and optical communications on fibers. Much of the progress has occurred by making smaller and smaller devices, you know, miniaturizing these and making them cheaper and the methods of chemistry, you know, the same methods that are used to synthesize drugs for the drug industry, are the natural methods for dealing with the tiniest semiconductors that are sort of half molecular in nature, you know. Fascinating.

So, woongibawendi, I know you've been asked this lots of times, or it's been raised, but I can't resist it. You failed your first chemistry test at Harvard University, didn't you? I did. I'm sorry to bring it up, but, you know, it does show that success can be forged out of failure. Absolutely. What do you want to say to any aspiring scientists out there who are not getting the scorecards that they want? Well, first I'll say that, you know, the scientific process is built on failure. Often you try things and they fail. So it's part of the process from my end, you know, I came from a small high school in the midwest, and I wasn't used to the large classes at Harvard and or the environment of taking exams there. And I wasn't used to studying for an exam at the college level.

And I was just completely unprepared for that first exam, both psychologically as well as from the point of understanding the material. And I got by far the lowest grade on that exam in the class. Went home, I think, a little later, and I was crying to my parents, saying, you know, I don't want to go back. But I did go back. But you say you still struggle with imposter syndrome, don't you? I do.

Ference. Well, I couldn't agree more with Munji, that actually failure is part of the process. I would even say that actually failure is dominant part of the process. Have you failed? Well, I mean, we do fail on a weekly basis. If you simply fail at an experiment and drop it and do something else, you haven't learned anything. And the trick is to, you know, experiments aren't bad. The design could be bad, the hypothesis could be bad. There's many other things that can lead to a bad experiment, but if you don't figure that out and figure out what it really means, then you don't learn, you don't know how to make the next experiment.

Let's take a question from our audience, from one of the students here. Hadika Inam, you have a question for the chemistry laureates? Yes. How would you strike a perfect balance between collaboration and individuality when it comes to making groundbreaking discoveries? Gosh, collaboration versus individuality. That's an excellent question. I think the original idea for an experiment comes from an individual but to get something done, once you have this idea for an experiment or the field in which you want to work, you need to assemble the technologies and different expertise to make the whole project work. In my case, it stretch all the way from organic synthesis to theoretical physics. And so you want to make a team of people that each person can contribute something. Old saying, you want to hire people that are smarter than you are.

Munji Bondi, how would you answer that question? It's a very good question indeed. There's always a tension, I think, between collaboration and the individual. And you see that in research groups, because everybody wants credit for having done something. And when it's a team effort, that's harder to do. So I try to make sure that I have an atmosphere in my group that's very collaborative, that everybody gets included. But at the same time, it's also important that somebody feels that they're in charge of something and they can go to other people for help, but they need to have. They need to be feel like, you know, this is their idea that they're pursuing with help of other people.

Claudia? ClauDia golden, economics laureate. You had the closest of collaborations working with your husband, Lawrence Katz. So, I mean, what's it like working with somebody so close to you? Is it more productive? Well, the largest collaboration is a book that we have written called the race between education and technology, which is about economic inequality. And that was a collaboration that brought together my interest in economic history and Larry's expertise in labor economics and in the economics of inequality. So that's sort of the best type of collaboration, where you have two complements coming together who can work well together. Yes.

But long distance collaboration, I think, has been proved not to be as effective as so much long distance since collaboration. Now, Professor Kotlin Carico, you encountered Drew Wiseman at the Xerox photocopying machine. I mean, that forged a great partnership, didn't it? Yes. So we really met there. And the second part that we fight for, the who gets first there, that part was not true. We did not wrestle there. But I, you know, it was, you know, no, no Xerox machine. So wherever people will meet, you know, maybe in the. At the coffee machine, but Drew is not drinking coffee, so I would miss that opportunity to meet him there. And so it is important, you know, that scientists talk to each other.

Sure. Yeah, yeah. I just. I agree on everything that was said. I think, for me, collaboration is really essential. And I would like to say, as a european, I think the European Union has done really a great job in helping these collaborations in Europe and with all of these programs, networks, and that really push scientists to work together, to change ideas, to collaborate. And I think this has been really great.

Yeah, but it's not just within your field, is it? You've also got the collaboration across disciplines, which is also very important. I know, Ferens, you have benefited a lot in physics from what's been done in the chemistry prize. But just also ask you this, which is now because of technology and AI, you know, we've seen that the European Union has put out a code of how technology and AI can be used. People are saying that the scientists need to work with the philosophers, with the ethicists, with the humanities, so that their scientific work doesn't take place in a vacuum.

And you're aware of what the implications are of the discoveries and breakthroughs that you're making. Is that something that resonates with you? I think it's going to get much more complicated in the future, because pretty soon we'll be able to do in vivo gene therapy and maybe we fix sickle cell or we fix cystic fibrosis. At some point it's going to come up, well, I want to change my baby's eye color or their hair color, or their height, or who knows what. That's an area that my answer is no, but nobody cares what I think about that. You need the ethicist and others.

If a single scientist say something that has little weight, but if the scientific community as a whole conveys a message that has much more weight. And that's why I think, particularly in these questions, it would be so important to actually conduct discussions within the scientific community first, try to reach some major conclusions, some consensus, and then communicate that consensus to the outside world. Moonji.

Yeah, so I want to bring up climate change then, because there is consensus in the scientific community, et cetera, but it's being completely denied by important politicians, at least in the US. And so where did we go wrong in the scientific community on that scale? What's your answer? I don't have a good answer, but maybe we did not do anything wrong. Maybe we did do what we could, actually, those the specialists in climate science. And if this was done, then basically at that point, probably our job ends and the responsibility is handed over to the politicians. Right. And it's Claudia's field because I think it's money.

The reason people deny climate change is because it would cost their regions their people money, and they're better off saying, no, we need to pump more gas because it'll make my people richer.

Okay, good. Well, thank you. Well, if the chemistry prize was awarded for research on the tiniest of nanoparticles, then the physics prize relies on the work on the briefest period of time. So let's take a quick look at what the physics prize was awarded for. It's very small. Capturing short lived phenomena like a hummingbird's 80 wing beats per second requires tools such as high speed photography and strobe lighting. In the same way, extremely short pulses of light can be used to study how electrons behave and examine rapid processes inside atoms. The experiments, conducted by Anne Louilier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krauss, produced these pulses of light, which were so short that they were measured in a quintillionth of a second. Their work could lead to more accurate electron microscopes, faster electronics and tests to diagnose diseases at a much earlier stage.

Professor Ferens Krauss. So just spell out for us briefly what the medical applications or uses are of the work that you did. Well, actually, I should say perhaps as a very first important message, that it was completely unforeseeable at a time when we started working actually on the problem we identified, or on trying to answer a question that we identified.

And the question was whether it could be possible to actually explore a world which human beings could not access to, namely the world of electrons in motion. We developed the tools for that. And one of the tools actually also allowed us to capture eventually, not only the ultra fast motion of electrons in atomic and molecular systems, but also the equally fast oscillation of visible and infrared light. And that was actually the enabling technology for the medical application that we started to work on about eight years ago. And this is basically a simply, hopefully, eventually simply blood test for identifying diseases, particularly chronic diseases, hopefully at an early stage.

How could that help, for instance, in detecting cancer? Could this mean that it is detected, picked up in a patient much sooner? This is the goal, this is the aim. It could be revolutionary, couldn't it? Yeah. So, Anne Luiglia, you have spent, I mean, really the best part of four decades. Yes. Doing your research. What was it like when you finally thought, Eureka, this is the moment? This was a great moment, actually. But no, we just happened to. This was in 87. It's a little bit about failure. We were looking for something and we saw something else.

So you can interpret this as a failure. We did not see what we wanted to see, but we saw something else that was really interesting. Now, at that time, I couldn't say that I would work on it 40 years later and get the Nobel Prize for this. This would be. But I was very excited because this was new and very interesting. I just simply wanted to do research on this.

Good. We've got a question from our audience. Alexandra Velkova, you have a question, please. What is it? My question for you is, what inspired you to continue with your research even when progress seemed unobtainable? Well, I think the whole process, actually an excellent question. Thanks for the question. The whole process, in my view, starts with asking the right question, trying to find the question that, that fascinates me so much that I just would try to do everything to find the answer, because I think that if I find the answer, this could perhaps be useful, important for something.

And you must have needed a lot of patience. Yes. I think to be a good researcher, you need to be very obstinate. I think all of us around this, this table have this quality or not, I don't know. But are you all patient people? You need it for your work. Essential. You're saying not, you're not. Claudia's not patient. No, we're not patient. I think that's the point. It's not about patience. It's about obstinacy. Perseverance might be a better word. Perseverance. Perseverance, that's the right word of not being patient. Okay. Right. I just thought 40 years sounded like a long wait, but, yes, you're right. Perseverance is the best word. And the other word is passion. I mean, this is something that passionates you. Passion and perseverance. I like that. Yes.

So, laureates, as we wrap up this discussion, then let me go around the table and ask each of you either, what are you going to use your prize money for? Or if you think that's too delicate and undiplomatic, a question from me. What might you be using your new found platform for this celebrity status that you have? Ferenc, what are you going to do? Well, we are just continuing to do what we have started to do one and a half years ago with an organization that we founded to support children in Ukraine. Those who are, who need this help mostly. And we actually teamed up with an organization in Ukraine. And our part of the job, science for people, is to actually reach out to the scientific community and persuade them for donations. And with the money that comes in, we move to Ukraine and use it for different projects. Right. Supporting ukrainian schools.

Claudia. Claudia Golden Economics laureate I have set up a research fund at Harvard looking into gender studies, looking into economic history, gender studies and other areas that perhaps I don't know, exist. Anne Louvillier. I'm going to give a number of lectures next year. What I would like to do is really to talk to the young, especially women students, and to try to encourage them maybe to go into science. I also want at some point to go back to my usual life, which is to do research and teaching, that I really want to go back as soon as possible. You feel you've more discoveries in you? Oh, absolutely. No, I. And there are still the things to understand on the same thing I have been working on during 40 years. Interesting. There are still things to do.

Drew Wiseman Annulies is working on the same thing she's been doing for 40 years. But we have had cases in the past where some Nobel laureates have had their heads turned and have been, you know, attracted into fields for which they don't really have the particular expertise with rather sad endings. I mean, where do you stand on that? I'm not smart enough to do that, so I'm gonna stick with what I'm doing. I mean, all of our award money goes into a charitable institution that does a variety of things. But I think the biggest thing is to use the megaphone that this has given us to address worldwide equity. Equity for vaccines scenes, but more important, equity for science, bringing science to the entire world and giving them access to experience science. We're mainly looking at junior high and high school kids, and by exposing them to science, we're hoping it'll spark an interest in some of them and build new careers. Gosling yes. So I like other support money, you know, or award money I received. It also goes to education.

I don't like to make statements myself. And, you know, I also like to in the future, you know, working and presently also work on something that during all of this knowledge I collected for 40 years about the rna biology and realizing maybe I have an answer for certain diseases, better understanding and have solution for that. So that's what I will do. Chemistry laureate Professor Lewis Bruce, how are you going to use your new voice? Well, if my health will support it, I will certainly try to begin giving more talks and talks. High school. I'll give a talk in the local high school as soon as I feel. I feel up to it. And as far as the money goes, I will. I've been supporting various charities over the years, one of which is the nature conservancy in the US, you know, and I'll certainly give them more money because they do good work and I'm still thinking about what to do with the rest of it, you know. All right. Yeah. Good. And finally, Professor Munji Bawendi, one of the chemistry laureates. What are you going to do? Well, I have to say that, you know, the award is so sudden for me that I haven't had really, I didn't think about this before, and I'm still processing what I'm going to do. But one of the things that has struck me is the power that we now have for the young. And, you know, I look forward to, as Lewis has said, talking to the younger people, especially in the high schools, and try to be a role model. In some ways, I think those students are our future, and I want to be able to help that.

My goodness, what an altruistic bunch of Nobel laureates you all are. That's all from this year's Nobel mines, from the library of the royal palace in Stockholm. It's been an absolute privilege to be talking to all of you and hearing your fascinating insights and, you know, listening to the work that you have done, which has brought so many benefits to humankind. And it's really been wonderful to be with you renewed congratulations to you all. Thank you to my audience here and to you, wherever you're watching this program. For me, zainab badawihood, goodbye.

Leadership, Science, Technology, Nobel Prize, Gender Equality, Societal Challenges, Nobel Prize