How our bodies perceive / interface with the world is fundamental to our human experience: Pain, temperature, positioning. And that these perceptions can be significantly modulated by how our bodies process them (eg pain).
Not only is their actual body of work impressive, as it cuts across so many methodologies to get a glimpse at “how things work,” their discoveries opened up fields for others.
If you throw a vase in the air it will fall down and shatter: like, duh it’s gravity. But how many years to figure the equations? To tie the how/why to the obvious?
Don’t trivialize their work because your work didn’t receive a Nobel. K thanks.
These discoveries could be game changers for prosthetics, brain computer interfaces, augmented reality, etc.
"The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine …” (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel)".
Nobel prizes are notorious for not being reactionary, and waiting for the full effects of the work to be realized - i.e. GFP tagging awarded the nobel prize 16 years after it was first used.
mRNA vaccination technology is just getting started, the impact of which will likely be on the level of penicillin.
I guess the committee needs another 1-2 years time to decide on that, with the benefit of hindsight.
I'd say it's a bit early for mRNA vaccines.
"to be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." (https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/full-text-of-alfred-...)
On the other, mRNA research goes back to the 80's, and mRNA vaccine research goes back twenty years; these facts are often overlooked by the "it was developed too fast" crowds.
That said,
> It's not a popularity content.
And yet, they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize the year he was elected, without any merit or achievements to back it up. That decision was politically motivated. Same with giving it to Al Gore for his climate activism. They even tried to nominate Hitler in 1939, albeit in jest.
- the Nobel prize in medicine is not handed out by the Swedish government, so any dopey politics would not influence the Nobel prize. Rather, it is handed out by Karolinska Institutet (https://www.nobelprize.org/about/the-nobel-assembly-at-karol...)
- Sweden's handling of Covid has not been particularly influenced by politics, it's been run by the government-appointed experts (that were appointed before Covid broke out), so the "dopey politics" referred to have never really been politically motivated.
I don't think there's any reason for connecting Sweden's Covid response with who got the Nobel prize in Medicine this year.
The mRNA technology would not be so clear cut in terms of persons involved since it had to go through many hurdles. There are two illustrative roadmaps [1][2] (And yes, Malone et al. was a early contributor as well (1989)[3])
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7554980/bin/ijm... [2]https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... [3]https://www.pnas.org/content/86/16/6077
As can be seen there the delay is often measured in decades. For medicine many awards around 20 years or more after discovery.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/world/asia/obama-apologiz...
