Context

• The Nobel Prize for 2024 was awarded to scientists, litterateurs and social workers who have made remarkable contributions in various fields (Science, Literature, Peace and Economics).

Nobel Peace Prize: Nihon Hidankyo

• The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the representative Japanese organisation for the grassroots movement of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as 'Hibakusha', for its efforts to create a world free of nuclear weapons.

Literature: Han Kang

• The Nobel Prize in Literature, 2024 has been awarded to South Korean writer Han Kang for her intensely poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.
• She has become the first Asian woman to be awarded this honour.  

Physiology or Medicine: Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun

•  Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNAs, a new class of small RNA molecules that play a key role in gene regulation. Their ground-breaking discovery in the tiny worm C. elegans revealed an entirely new principle of gene regulation.
• It proved to be essential for other multicellular organisms, including humans. MicroRNAs are also proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.

Chemistry: David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper

Contributions of David Baker:

• Revolutionizing protein engineering: Baker's research group has used computational methods to design new proteins, reshaping the possibilities of protein engineering.
• Applications in medicine and technology: These artificially designed proteins have wide-ranging potential, especially in the development of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and biosensors. 

Contributions of Demis Hassabis and John Jumper:

• In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper introduced AlphaFold-2, an AI-powered system that revolutionized future protein structure modeling.
• The model was able to predict the structure of nearly every known protein, 200 million in all. This achievement solved a 50-year-old problem in structural biology.

Physics: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

• John Hopfield is best known for creating the Hopfield network, a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) that has been foundational in ANNs and AI. Developed in the 1980s, Hopfield networks are designed to store simple binary patterns (0 and 1) in a network of artificial nodes (artificial neurons). 
• Based on Hopfield's work, in the 2000s Hinton developed a learning algorithm for restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), enabling deep learning by adding multiple layers of neurons.

Economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson

• The Nobel Prize to be given in the field of economics in 2024 has been given for their research to understand the difference in happiness between poor and rich countries.
• In their research, these three economists have explained how poor countries have not been able to develop like rich countries despite years of progress. Along with this, they have also studied how institutions are formed and how they affect the progress and happiness of the society.

Nobel Prize

• The Nobel Prize is an international award that recognizes people internationally who have brought the greatest benefit to mankind in the past year.
• The prize is awarded in six different fields: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics, and peace.
• The Nobel Prize is administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.
• It is awarded in memory of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and entrepreneur who invented dynamite.
• The first distribution of the prizes took place on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death.

Indian/Indian origin Nobel Prize winners