Today's Edition
Narcolepsy, cancer or mRNA vaccine research could win the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday when a week of announcements kicks off, but experts see no clear front-runner for the Peace Prize.
The awards, first handed out in 1901, were created by Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel in his 1895 will to celebrate those who have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
The Medicine Prize is first out, and will be announced in Stockholm on Monday around 11:30 am (0930 GMT), followed by the awards for physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday.
The Peace Prize, the most highly-anticipated Nobel and the only one announced in Oslo, will follow on Friday, before the Economics Prize rounds things off on October 9.
The Medicine Prize has over the years crowned groundbreaking discoveries like the X-ray, penicillin, insulin and DNA -- as well as now-disgraced awards for the lobotomy and the insecticide DDT.
Several Nobel watchers have suggested this year's prize could go to research into narcolepsy and the discovery of orexin, a neuropeptide that helps regulate sleep.
It could also go to Hungarian-born Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman of the United States for research that led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight Covid-19, made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Their discovery has already won a slew of major medicine prizes, but the Nobel committee nowadays often waits decades to bestow its laurels to ensure the research stands the test of time.
"Maybe the Academy thinks it needs to look into it more, but someday they should win," predicted Annika Ostman, science reporter at Swedish public radio SR.
But Ostman said her guess for this year was on Kevan Shokat, an American biologist who figured out how to block the KRAS cancer gene behind a third of cancers, including challenging-to-treat lung, colon, and pancreatic tumours.
T-cell therapy for cancer treatment and work on the human microbiome could also be contenders, said David Pendlebury, head of the Clarivate analytics group which identifies Nobel-worthy research.
"There are more people deserving of a Nobel Prize than there are Nobels to go around," he told AFP.
Lars Brostrom, Ostman's colleague at SR, singled out two American biologists, Stanislas Leibler and Michael Elowitz, for their work on synthetic gene circuits which established the field of synthetic biology.
It enables scientists to redesign organisms by engineering them to have new abilities.
But Brostrom noted the field could be seen as controversial, raising "ethical questions about where to draw the line in creating life".
