Five discoveries that deserve the Nobel Prize but haven't received it yet

One of the most important events in the world of science, the so-called Nobel Week. From October 7 to 14, we will meet the Nobel Prize winners in the fields of physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The Nobel Peace Prize and the Bank of Sweden Prize will also be awarded. Alfred Nobel in economic sciences.

This year's first winners were Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkunwho received the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology. The scientists were recognized for their discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

On the occasion of Nobel Week, the American station CNN presented its list of five discoveries worthy of this prestigious distinction.

The study, started in 1990 and completed in 2003, is often mentioned as one of the front-runners for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Human Genome Project aimed to learn the sequences of all the complementary base pairs that make up the human genome.

Thanks to the work of an international consortium consisting of thousands of researchers from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and China, there has been progress in the study of nucleotides contained in living organisms, as well as development in fields such as biology and medicine.

As CNN describes, one of the reasons why this project may not have received a Nobel Prize is the huge number of people involved in this achievement.

Under the rules established by Nobel in his 1895 will, prizes can be awarded to a maximum of three people at a time.

“This is an increasing challenge, considering the team nature of many scientific studies,” describes the American station.

Svetlana Mojsov, Dr. Joel Habener and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen – these three scientists are responsible for one of the biggest breakthroughs in the treatment of obesity in the world. The drug they developed was called semaglutide has proven to be extremely effective in the fight against excess weight and related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes or coronary heart disease.

This discovery was awarded the Lasker-DeBakey Prize for clinical and medical research in 2024, which is often a determinant of who will win the Nobel Prize.

According to statistics, almost 900 million people in the world struggle with obesity. In the United States alone, this problem affects 40 percent of adults.

The next candidates mentioned by CNN are Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, authors of Alpha Fold – an amazing program based on artificial intelligence.

Its operation can be compared to a Google search for protein structures. Alpha Fold provides instant access to predicted protein models, accelerating progress in fundamental biology and other related fields.

Since 2021, when the groundbreaking article by two scientists from Deep Mind was published, it has been cited over 13,000 times. By comparison, of the 61 million research articles, only about 500 have been cited more than 10,000 times.

The gut microbiome is the totality of bacteria living in the human intestine. Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing over the past two decades, scientists have better understood what these microbes do, how they communicate with each other and how they affect human cells, especially those in the gut.

A pioneer in research on the intestinal microbiome is biologist Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, distinguished professor at the University of Washington in St. Louis named after Dr. Robert J. Glaser. Among other things, he led work that showed that the gut microbiome plays a role in the health effects of malnutrition, which affects nearly 200 million children worldwide.

Professor of Medicine and Genomic Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Mary-Claire King has worked for 17 years to detect and determine the role that BRCA1 gene mutations play in breast and ovarian cancer. It is worth emphasizing that her research took place before the map of the human genome was created.

Her discovery led to genetic testing that could help identify women at increased risk of developing breast cancer, as well as what actions should be taken to reduce that risk, such as through additional screening and preventive treatments.