Here are the predictions on who will win the Nobel 2022

There is very little time left to discover the new entries of the 2022 Nobel Prizes. It starts on Monday 3 October, with the announcement of the prize for medicine and physiology. The 4th will be the turn of the one for physics. To finish then with chemistry, on 5 October. As always, the committees of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Karolinska Institute (for the Nobel Prize for Medicine) will decide the names of the next Nobel laureates. And if it is impossible to know in advance the names of the winners (the new Nobel laureates themselves are notified live only at the time of the announcement), it is always fun to try to make some predictions. To help us is the list developed by the Clarivate Analytics experts, who, as is now tradition, have selected the most eligible candidates for the Nobel by measuring the citations received from their works in other scientific papers and studying the history of the awards. A system that works all too well, given that just last year he got the award for our Giorgio Parisi. So let's see what we can expect this year.

Medicine and physiology

Masato Hasegawa and Virginia Man-Yee Lee

Masato Hasegawa is an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, and directs the Department of Brain and Neurosciences of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science. Since 1988 he has made a long series of discoveries in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Virginia Man-Yee Lee is a neuropathologist specializing in the study of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. She works at the University of Pensilvanya, where she holds a professorship in Alzheimer's Research and directs the center for the study of neurodegenerative diseases. As in the case of his Japanese colleague, Man-Yee Lee also made important discoveries in the study of the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, demonstrating in particular the role of different types of pathological aggregates of proteins in brain tissues (such as the Tau protein and the beta-protein). miloid in Alzheimer's).

Clarivate believes they could win a Nobel Prize for "the identification of Tdp-43, a pathological signature of amyotriphic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and for other important contributions in the study of neurodegenerative diseases ". As we said, both researchers were among the pioneers of the study of pathological aggregates of proteins in the brain (such as Tdr-43 cited by Clarivate), and of their role in the genesis of neurodegenerative diseases, and for this they are vying for the award. Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022.

Mary-Claire King

Born in 1946, King is an American geneticist who currently teaches medicine and genomics at the University of Washington. Clarivate analysts could win a Nobel Prize for "demonstrating hereditary susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer, and discovering the role that mutations in the Brca1 gene play".

King was in fact one of the first scientists to show that some defective genes can greatly increase the probability of developing a specific neoplasm. In particular, her work focused on breast cancer, a neoplasm for which King showed in the 1990s a correlation with some variants of the Brca1 gene, which encodes an enzyme involved in the repair of DNA damage. Women with mutations in this gene have an 80% chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetime, and a 55% risk of developing ovarian cancer. Thanks to King's research, women with a high familial risk for these cancers today routinely undergo genetic screening, and can implement various prevention strategies in case potentially dangerous mutations are found.

Stuart H. Orkin

Orkin is a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. His research has focused on the genetic causes of thalassemias, and other hematological diseases. His discoveries have allowed us to characterize with extreme precision the genetic mutations that cause hematological diseases such as sickle cell anemia and beta-thalassemia, and are the basis for the development of several promising gene therapy approaches currently under development. Not surprisingly, Clarivate thinks he could deserve a Nobel Prize for "his pioneering research on the genetic basis of blood diseases, and for the advances he has made possible in the field of gene therapy for sickle cell anemia and beta-thalassemia".

Physics

Immanuel Bloch

Immanuel Bloch is a German physicist, professor of experimental physics at Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and scientific director of the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. His research focuses on quantum many-body systems, a field of quantum mechanics in which the application of the Schrödinger equation with which the temporal evolution of the state of a system is determined is particularly complex. Block has made revolutionary contributions to this field by carrying out experiments with ultracold atoms and optical lattices. And despite being extremely theoretical research, his discoveries have direct repercussions in fields ranging from the development of quantum computers, to the discovery of new superconductors.

Clarivate analysts believe he is vying for the Nobel Prize for "his groundbreaking research in the physics of quantum many-body systems using ultracold atoms and molecular gases, which paved the way for the quantum simulation of 'articular solids'".

Stephen Quake

Quake is an American physicist and entrepreneur, professor of biophysics at Staford University, and scientific director of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He is an expert in microfluidics, the science that studies the behavior of fluids in channels of microscopic size, conventionally below 100 micrometers in diameter. He is of particular interest in the field of medicine, because he allows to create effective, economical and safe diagnostic systems. Clarivate believes that Quake could win a Nobel Prize for "his contributions to the physics of fluid phenomena on the nanoliter scale".

Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe

Taniguchi is the director of the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics of the National Institute for Materials Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan. Watanabe is a colleague of his, and together they have been working for years to create hexagonal crystals of boron nitride, an ultra-thin material of which they are practically the only producers in the world, and which is fundamental in research involving graphene and other two-dimensional materials. . The crystals they produce are provided free of charge to all the laboratories in the world that carry out these researches, and so the two are often cited among the authors of the scientific articles obtained thanks to their crystals. Result: Today they are among the most cited scientists in the world in the field of two-dimensional materials, even if they do not even deal with graphene physics. Clarivate thinks it might be enough, however, and nominates them for the Nobel Prize for "the production of high quality hexagonal boron nitride crystals, the availability of which has allowed a revolution in research into the electrical behavior of two-dimensional materials".

Chemistry

Zhenan Bao

Bao is a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and director of the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR). Her specialty is the study of organic semiconductors, substances that allow the creation of flexible electronic devices and are the basis of what is now called plastic electronics, that is, based on transistors and other electronic components made of plastic polymers. According to Clarivate's analyzes, the Nobel Prize could come for "the development of new biomimetic applications of organic and polymeric electronic materials, such as flexible 'electronic skin'".

Bonnie L. Bassler and E. Peter Greenberg

Bassler is an American molecular biologist who teaches at Princeton University. Greenberg is a microbiologist at the University of Washington. They are considered the discoverers of quorum sensing, a chemical communication system that allows bacteria to exchange information and coordinate their behavior, and which in the future could be exploited to obtain a new generation of antimicrobial therapies, based on the disturbance of this communication path. . According to Clarivate, the Nobel Prize could come precisely for "research on the regulation of gene expression in bacteria through quorum sensing, a chemical communication system".

Daniel G. Nocera

Nocera is an American chemist and a professor of energy at Harvard University. He has extensively studied an energy transfer mechanism known as "Proton-coupled electron transfer", and the possibility of using it in fields such as artificial photosynthesis and the development of solar fuels. Clarivative foresees the possibility that he will be awarded a Nobel Prize for "his fundamental experiments and his theoretical contributions to proton-coupled electron transfer, and its application to energy sciences and biology".