Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I told you that Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick was good! Now Crick: A Mind in Motion has been given the imprimatur of quality by winning a big book prize in England. Matthew sent me his Bluehair post below, and when I asked him what prize he won, he replied:
Hatchard’s First Biography Prize. Hatchards is a posh bookshop on Piccadilly where the King buys his books. I will get a proper cheque. £2.5k!
Hatchards has teamed up with The Biographers’ Club to support the Best First Biography Prize.
The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.
This year’s winner is Crick by Matthew Cobb.
Go buy it, or take it out from the library to read it. (This advice is for people who are interested in science, but if you’re not, you shouldn’t be reading here.)
Congratulations to Matthew! I told him to use the £2500 prize to treat himself to something nice, like a vacation.
Scientists don’t often admit it to themselves, but most scientific discoveries are over-determined. If Watson or Crick had fallen under a bus in 1952, then Franklin, or Wilkins, or Pauling, or someone would soon have discovered the double helix in their place. Furthermore, as Crick put it in 2000, ‘Discoveries and inventions are more important than the people who make them.’ But sometimes the individual does matter. After the double helix was discovered, none of the clever people involved – not Watson, nor Franklin, nor Wilkins, nor Pauling – sought to draw out the deep implications of the structure. Only Crick did that, and his ideas, and the way he proceeded, influenced the course of discovery and the way we now think about genes and cells and evolution. Had Crick fallen under a bus in 1954, the course of science would have been different.
Having spent three intensive years immersed in writing a biography of Crick, Professor Cobb will use his life and work (not just the double helix!) to explore the role of individuals in scientific discovery and the importance of recent attempts to diversify the pool of scientists, something that is currently under attack.
About the award:
The Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture 2024 is awarded to Professor Matthew Cobb for his work documenting the history of biology as both an author and broadcaster.
The Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture is given for excellence in a subject relating to the history of science, philosophy of science or the social function of science. The Wilkins, Bernal and Medawar lectures were originally delivered as three separate lectures, each given triennially. Since 2007, they have been combined under the one title of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture. The medal is of bronze, is awarded annually and is accompanied by a gift of £2,000.
I was going to put this up earlier but forgot, and the lecture is just winding up. The good news is that it’s on YouTube and you can see the whole thing. I’ll watch it this evening, but put your comments below.
There’s quite a lot about consciousness in here, too, as the lecture is supposed to incorporate philosophy, and there’s a 15-minute discussion/Q&A session at the end.
This year I didn’t have a contest to name the winners of the two prizes above, for nobody ever wins. And, indeed, I’m not sure if these awards were all that predictable, though Literature Laureate Han Kang did win a Booker Prize for international fiction. So, here we go:
The Peace Prize was awarded this morning to an organization: the Japanese group Nihon Hidankyo. short for Nihon gensuibaku higaisha dantai kyōgi-kai (日本原水爆被害者団体協議会), or The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, started in 1956. The press release says this:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.
In response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945, a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons. Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatising the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. This norm has become known as “the nuclear taboo”.
The testimony of the Hibakusha – the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is unique in this larger context.
These historical witnesses have helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons. The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.
They are of course on a mission from Ceiling Cat, and I wish we’d just have worldwide disarmament. With a bunch of rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea getting the bomb, it’s only a matter of time before some demented leader decides to use it. But I am grateful that a worthy organization got it; I was a bit afraid because I heard that UNRWA was nominated. (Remember that Henry Kissinger shared that prize a while back.)
Here’s the announcement (the awardees are told in advance, but cannot share the news until the announcement).
*******************
And. . . . the literature prize, which this year went to Korean writer Han Kang, who’s only 53.
The press release is very short, just says this:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang,
“for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
She is best known for the novel The Vegetarian, which traces a woman’s mental illness and neglect from her family. In 2016, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. In 2024, Han became the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
. . . . .The Vegetarian was Han’s first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated it. There has been some controversy over the translation, as scholars have detected mistakes in it; among other things, there is concern that Smith attributed some of the dialogue to the wrong characters. The translated work won the International Booker Prize 2016 for both Han and Smith. Han was the first Korean to be nominated for the award, and, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. The Vegetarian was also chosen as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2016” by The New York Times Book Review.
. . .The Vegetarian made it to place 49th in The New York Times‘s “100 Best Books of the 21st century” in July 2024.
If you want that NYT “21st century” list to find reading material, the archived link is here. I have read seven of the top ten books, but not #1 (My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante). More from the entry:
Han’s third novel, The White Book, was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize.
Han’s novel Human Acts was released in January 2016 by Portobello Books. Han received the Premio Malaparte for the Italian translation of Human Acts, Atti Umani, by Adelphi Edizioni, in Italy on 1 October 2017. Her 2017 autobiographical novel The White Book centers on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth.[18]
Han’s novel We Do Not Part was published in 2021. It tells the story of a writer researching the 1948–49 Jeju uprising and its impact on her friend’s family. The French translation of the novel won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.
In 2023, Han’s fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons, was translated into English. The Atlantic called it a book in which “words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame”
You can order the book from Amazon by clicking on the cover below (I’ve already requested it via interlibrary loan, as I have no more room for books):
And the announcement, which gives a bit more about the reasons she won the prize:
Well, I missed a day, but the other two Nobel Prizes in science—Chemistry and Physics—were awarded.
The Chemistry Prize, well deserved since I know about the work, went to three people: David Baker (University of Washington), Demis Hassabis (“a British computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher”), and John M. Jumper (“an American senior research scientist at DeepMind Technologies”) for both designing proteins and predicting their three-dimensional structure simply from the sequence of amino acids—an endeavor that had largely defied previous attempts. Now you can feed the AA sequence into a computer and, lo, get the structure. And the 3D structure is immensely important in understanding protein function and figuring out how to modify proteins (and hence DNA) to act in different ways. From the Nobel Press release:
They cracked the code for proteins’ amazing structures
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.
The diversity of life testifies to proteins’ amazing capacity as chemical tools. They control and drive all the chemical reactions that together are the basis of life. Proteins also function as hormones, signal substances, antibodies and the building blocks of different tissues.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
Proteins generally consist of 20 different amino acids, which can be described as life’s building blocks. In 2003, David Baker succeeded in using these blocks to design a new protein that was unlike any other protein. Since then, his research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The second discovery concerns the prediction of protein structures. In proteins, amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein’s function. Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.
Reader Simon found two tweets from the AlaphFold program showing how the protein structures come out when the amino acid sequence is fed in:
Let’s take a closer look at this protein structure determined using AlphaFold2. This protein structure is part of a huge molecular structure in the human body. More than a thousand proteins form a pore through the membrane surrounding the cell nucleus.
And this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield (emeritus professor at Princeton) and Geoffrey Hinton (emeritus professor at Toronto) who together developed models for neural networks of the kind used in the recent set of papers on decoding the fly brain. From the press release:
They trained artificial neural networks using physics
This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we often mean machine learning using artificial neural networks. This technology was originally inspired by the structure of the brain. In an artificial neural network, the brain’s neurons are represented by nodes that have different values. These nodes influence each other through connections that can be likened to synapses and which can be made stronger or weaker. The network is trained, for example by developing stronger connections between nodes with simultaneously high values. This year’s laureates have conducted important work with artificial neural networks from the 1980s onward.
John Hopfield invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns. We can imagine the nodes as pixels. The Hopfield network utilises physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy. When the Hopfield network is fed a distorted or incomplete image, it methodically works through the nodes and updates their values so the network’s energy falls. The network thus works stepwise to find the saved image that is most like the imperfect one it was fed with.
Geoffrey Hinton used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine. This can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data. Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are very likely to arise when the machine is run. The Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained. Hinton has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.
“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit. In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” says Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Both prizes show the power of AI, but it isn’t AI that decided to tackle both the chemistry and physics problems; rather, it was AI that was a tool used to solve important scientific questions.
And we have a (sort-of) winner. Though nobody guessed the Physics winners, reader Luke correctly guessed two of the three Chemistry winners (he gave only two names, Jumper and Hasabis, but I’ll let the absence of a third winner slide), and so wins an autographed book. I ask Luke to get in touch with me to obtain his prize.
Two Americans, Gary Ruvkun of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, and Victor Ambrose of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, have split this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs), single-stranded bits of RNA that do not code for proteins but act to regulate other genes. The Nobel organization’s press release explains the significance of the discovery, but you can read the whole thing, which is much longer than this:
This year’s Nobel Prize honors two scientists for their discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.
The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.
And here’s how it started: as so often, with a seemingly minor observation that blew up big time, leading to generalizations about control of gene expression in all organisms—even viruses (but not bacteria).
In the late 1980s, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, alongside Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. In Horvitz’s laboratory, they studied a relatively unassuming 1 mm long roundworm, C. elegans. Despite its small size, C. elegans possesses many specialized cell types such as nerve and muscle cells also found in larger, more complex animals, making it a useful model for investigating how tissues develop and mature in multicellular organisms. Ambros and Ruvkun were interested in genes that control the timing of activation of different genetic programs, ensuring that various cell types develop at the right time. They studied two mutant strains of worms, lin-4 and lin-14, that displayed defects in the timing of activation of genetic programs during development. The laureates wanted to identify the mutated genes and understand their function. Ambros had previously shown that the lin-4 gene appeared to be a negative regulator of the lin-14 gene. However, how the lin-14 activity was blocked was unknown. Ambros and Ruvkun were intrigued by these mutants and their potential relationship and set out to resolve these mysteries.
After his postdoctoral research, Victor Ambros analyzed the lin-4 mutant in his newly established laboratory at Harvard University. Methodical mapping allowed the cloning of the gene and led to an unexpected finding. The lin-4 gene produced an unusually short RNA molecule that lacked a code for protein production. These surprising results suggested that this small RNA from lin-4 was responsible for inhibiting lin-14. How might this work?
Here’s the announcement, which I always find exciting:
AND THE TWO CONTESTS:
1.) Guess who will win the other two Nobel Prizes in science: Physics and Chemistry. One guess per discipline, and the first person who guesses both winners gets one of my trade books, autographed per their choice (including cat drawings).
2.) Alternatively you can choose the other contest: Guess who will win these two prizes: Literature and Peace. Same rules as above, and same prize.
You can guess in only one of these two competitions.
In previous years, people have failed miserably in these contests, but someday someone will win. . . .
A while back I posted about my cinemaphilic nephew Steven’s nominees for the “Golden Steves,” which he humbly presents as a better alternative to the Oscars. As he says,
Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:
1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.
2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.
3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.’
Click to read and see all the winners.
The nominees for the “big” categories are below, and I’ve put in bold the winners. Remember that there are eight categories below but 12 on the original list, so I’ll put the four extra winners at the bottom.
Best Picture
Afire
All of Us Strangers
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon May December
Trenque Lauquen
Best Director
Laura Citarella, Trenque Lauquen
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers Todd Haynes, May December
Christian Petzold, Afire
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
Best Actor
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Benoit Magimel, Pacifiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Franz Rogowski, Passages Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Michael Thomas, Rimini
Best Actress
Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Natalie Portman, May December
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One
Best Supporting Actor
Jamie Bell, All of Us Strangers
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry Charles Melton, May December
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things
Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Merve Dizdar, About Dry Grasses
Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers
Anne Hathaway, Eileen
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Best Non-Fiction Film
Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob)
Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado) Our Body (Claire Simon)
To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja)
Best Foreign Language Film
About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki) Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
And the other winners:
Best Screenplay–Adapted: All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
Best Screenplay–Original:Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Best Animated Feature: Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)
Best Original Song: “Live That Way Forever,” The Iron Claw (Richard Reed Parry, Laurel Sprengelmeyer)
Here’s that best original song:
I guess I’ll have to see “May December” as it took home three Golden Steves. My moviegoing has been thin in the past year, and I know nothing about this movie save that it got a 91% Critics Rating (but only a 65% Viewers Rating) on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the trailer, showing the costars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
In this short seven-minute segment from last week’s “Real Time,” Bill Maher confers five “Cojones Awards” for having. . . .well, moxie. (Women can also get the Golden Testicles.) You may recognize some of the winners, and of course, at the end, there’s the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, which I have to say is well deserved.
