Two Swiss among favourites for Nobel Prizes

Two Swiss among the favourites for the Nobel Prizes Keystone-SDA

Nobel Prize week is upon us. It is therefore time to speculate on the possible winners, although these will only be revealed on October 6. For the Anglo-American data processing company Clarivate, two Swiss researchers are among the favourites.

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There are twenty-two names on this year’s list, ten active in the United States, three in France, two in Germany, Japan and Switzerland, and one each in Canada, China and the Netherlands. Looking back at previous predictions, 83 out of 450 prizewinners were correct since 2002, some even years after their citation. These include Swiss physicists Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor, who were awarded the prize in 2019, six years after they appeared on the list.

An immune system alarm

Andrea Ablasser, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is in the running in the medicine category for having discovered a central mechanism of the immune system, in collaboration with Glen Barber (Ohio State University/US) and Zhijian Chen (University of Texas/US). This is the so-called cGAS-STING signalling pathway. This functions as a kind of alarm when DNA enters a cell’s plasma in the event of infection, cancer or cellular stress, triggering an immune system response.

On the basis of these studies, carried out between 2008 and 2013, medicines have been developed that strengthen the immune defence against tumours or alleviate excessive inflammation in the case of autoimmune diseases.

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Towards the quantum computer

Daniel Loss (University of Basel) is listed with David DiVincenzo (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Uni Aachen, Germany) as a favourite in the field of physics. The two have proposed a concept for the realisation of a quantum computer. The first applications of this concept dating back to 1998 are already present, but this is a field that is just in its infancy.

Instead of bits (0 or 1), quantum computers use qubits (these can exist in a superposition of states, representing simultaneously 0 and 1 with a certain probability).

Adapted from Italian by DeepL/jdp

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