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“Indeed the challenge is for us to insure the world from self-destruction. In our contribution to peace we are resolved to end such evils as oppression, white supremacy and race discrimination, all of which are incompatible with world peace and security. There is indeed a threat to peace.” Chief of his tribe and president-general of the African National Congress, Albert Lutuli was the leader of ten million black Africans in their nonviolent campaign for civil rights in South Africa. A man of noble bearing, charitable, intolerant of hatred, and adamant in his demands for equality and peace among all people, Lutuli forged a philosophical compatibility between two cultures – the Zulu culture of his native Africa and the Christian-democratic culture of Europe. Albert Lutuli was awarded the 1960 peace prize “for his non-violent struggle against apartheid.” Read more about this remarkable laureate by clicking the link in bio. Photo: Terence Spencer/Popperfoto via Getty Images

When it comes to sending electrical nerve signals, some messages are more urgent than others. Our muscles need to be activated quickly when we are attacked, for instance, while our receptors for chronic pain do not require such a rapid response. To meet these various delivery requirements, nerve fibres differ considerably in the way they transmit and fire signals. During the 1920s Joseph Erlanger and his student Herbert Gasser studied the properties and distribution of nerve fibres. They showed that thicker fibres convey nerve impulses faster and were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1944 for their work. 📷 Dr Jonathan Clarke, Wellcome Images. #NobelPrize #brain #nerves #sciart #science

Dorothy Hodgkin, one of the main founders of protein crystallography, possessed a unique mixture of skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds that were far more complex than anything attempted before. Victory in Europe Day in Oxford, 8 May 1945. The war in Europe was over, and thousands of people lined the streets to celebrate. One woman making her way through the cheering crowds had even more reason to be triumphant. Dorothy Hodgkin held in her hands a model of wires and corks so frail she struggled to protect it from the celebrations, yet the information within this model would help to protect many of these people, and countless more, in years to come. Hodgkin had just solved the structure of penicillin, and not even a crowd of thousands could have prevented her from getting to the nearby Dunn School of Pathology to show her discovery to an equally excited colleague, Ernst Chain. Read more by clicking the link in bio. Photo: University of Bristol, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons #NobelPrize #womeninscience #chemistry

Are you ready? Only four weeks to go until we will start announcing this year's Nobel Prizes. We hope you're as excited as we are! #NobelPrize

"If you’ve had any success in the past, you should take stock of that and realise that that will happen again, if you’re persistent, if you’re determined and you’re interested in science. I think it’s important to also relax a little bit. You have to be driven and you have to be determined and work hard, but I think emotionally you have to be relaxed and enjoy the process. I once heard Paul Nurse say when he was being interviewed on television – and I completely resonated with this – he said, sometimes things aren’t working, but you have to take joy in the experiments themselves. You should enjoy the process. Of course, you have to keep your mind on what your scientific goal is, but you should also enjoy the process and take some pride in doing experiments well and mastering new techniques because that’s the joy of the moment that gets you from place to place." Some career advice from 2021 medicine laureate David Julius. He was awarded the medicine prize with Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch." Read our full interview with Julius by clicking the link in our bio. Photo credit: Chris Michel.

Words of wisdom from the co-inventor of graphene, Andre Geim. Together with Konstantin Novoselov, Geim produced the material graphene in 2004. The two often used Fridays to carry out quirky and fun experiments they didn't have the time to do during their research projects. One of these Fridays they started experimenting with graphite and tape and managed to make the new material graphene. After successfully producing graphene, Novoselov and Geim mapped its properties: incredibly thin but still incredibly strong, good heat and electrical conductivity, almost entirely transparent yet very dense. Graphene has created new possibilities within materials technology and electronics. #NobelPrize #adventure #quote

Donna Strickland thinks lasers are cool. With enthusiasm for the field and “very, very hard” work, she found a way to create high-intensity laser pulses. This technique, chirped pulse amplification or CPA, was described in Strickland’s very first scientific paper, and it led to her 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. More important, it began a long career in which, as she has put it, “I get to play with high-intensity lasers.” Photo: Courtesy of University of Waterloo. #NobelPrize #womeninscience

Do you recognise the molecular structure? Chemistry laureate Roger Kornberg solved the structure of RNA polymerase II. In order for our bodies to make use of the information stored in genes, a copy must first be made and transferred to the outer parts of the cells. There it is used as an instruction for protein production – it is the proteins that in their turn actually construct the organism and its function. The copying process is called transcription. Roger Kornberg was the first to create an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level in the important group of organisms called eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have a well-defined nucleus). Mammals like ourselves are included in this group, as is ordinary yeast. In 1959, the then twelve-year-old Roger Kornberg came to Stockholm to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA-molecule to another. Kornberg senior had described how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters. What Roger Kornberg himself did was to describe how the genetic information is copied from DNA into what is called messenger-RNA. The messenger-RNA carries the information out of the cell nucleus so that it can be used to construct the proteins. Kornberg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006. Photo caption: RNA Polymerase II. This is the enzyme in mammalian cells that catalyses the transcription of DNA into messenger RNA, the molecule that in turn dictates the order of amino acids in proteins. Photo credit: David Bushnell, Ken Westover and Roger Kornberg, Stanford University.

Malaria is a potentially fatal disease but used to be treated effectively with chloroquine and quinolines. In the 1960s, as a result of a failed attempt to globally eradicate the disease, the malaria parasite started developing resistance to these drugs and new treatments needed to be found. In 1964 China began confidential research into new antimalarials to tackle this challenge. A young scientist named Tu Youyou was asked to head up and build a research group searching for antimalarial drugs among traditional Chinese medicines. Her work led her to the plant Artemisia annua from which she extracted an active agent called artemisinin, or Qinghaosu (青蒿素) in Chinese. Today this antimalarial is used to treat millions across the globe. Photo: A gambiae mosquito is a known vector for the parasitic disease, malaria, caused by organisms that are members of the genus Plasmodium, 2014.. Credit: © CDC Public Health Image Library. #NobelPrize #medicine #science #malaria

How would you describe Kazuo Ishiguro’s book ‘The Remains of the Day’ in three words? Take a look at how some of our #NobelPrizeBookClub readers have described last month’s book pick - thanks to everyone that’s taken part! We’re going to be taking a little break from the book club while we prepare for the 2022 Nobel Prize announcements but we will be back soon! In the meantime let us know what you think about the book club below or in our stories. Have you taken part this year? What books would you like to read next? How can we make the #nobelPrizeBookClub even better? #NobelPrize #bookstagram #bookclub

For most of her career, Maria Goeppert Mayer worked “just for the fun of doing physics,” without pay or status or a tenured position. She was 58 before she became a full professor. And yet she made major contributions to the growing understanding of nuclear physics. In 1949 Goeppert Mayer and her co-laureate Hans Jensen developed a model in which nucleons were distributed in shells with different energy levels. The model reflected observations of directions in which nucleons rotated around their own axes and around the center of the nucleus. It could be compared visually to an onion. Goeppert Mayer subsequently received the name ‘the Onion Madonna’ by Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Pauli for her discovery. Here you can see Goeppert Mayer with her Nobel Prize medal that she received in 1963 for her discovery concerning nuclear shell structure. In her Nobel Prize lecture she spoke about her revolutionary discovery. Read her full Nobel Prize lecture by clicking the link in our bio. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images #NobelPrize #NobelPrizelaureate #womeninscience

“I personally think that the people with the biggest passions for doing the work are going to do the best work.” - 2020 physics laureate Andrea Ghez. Ghez lead a research group that explored the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Shaped like a fat disc about 100,000 light years across, it consists of gas and dust and a few hundred billion stars; one of these stars is our Sun. With the help of the Keck Observatory telescopes, Andrea Ghez and her research team revealed that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the stars’ orbits at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation. The universe has many secrets and surprises left to be discovered. Ghez shared the physics prize with Reinhard Genzel and Roger Penrose. Click the link in bio to get to know Ghez a bit more. #NobelPrize #quote