Get to know the 2023 Nobel Prize winners

Last week, the Nobel Prize awarding institutions announced the winners of this year's Nobel Prizes, the recipients of which made groundbreaking achievements across scientific, artistic and cultural fields. While prestigious, the awards have also been a source of controversy. "No scientist's achievements are really solo," Time wrote in 2022, adding that scientific discoveries are built upon previous work. The Nobel Peace Prize has been especially steeped with controversy, as some claim that it's "politically motivated, subjective," and based on "aspiration rather than achievements," per Al Jazeera. Still, the Nobels are highly anticipated each year and provide the public with insight into work that would otherwise be academic and arcane. Here's a quick look at the 2023 winners. 

Physiology and Medicine

The Physiology and Medicine Prize was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries … that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19," according to a press release from the Nobel Assembly. Their work "helped to unravel a way to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a useful medical technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck," The Washington Post wrote.

Karikó and Weissman published their findings in 2005 but received little attention until the pandemic. Their work helped to eliminate the main complications of using transcribed mRNA for vaccines and was then incorporated into the Covid shots developed by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech. 

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"This year's Nobel laureates critically contributed to this transformative development during one of the biggest health crises of our time," the assembly concluded.

Physics

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for "experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter," according to a press release from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The discovery has "given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules." L'Huillier is only the fifth woman to win the physics prize.

Electrons are negatively charged particles within an atom and are notoriously difficult to study because of how fast they move (43 miles a second). The technique developed by the laureates uses "short light pulses to capture an electron's movement at a single moment in time," The New York Times reported. This is essentially like pointing a flash camera at a moving object. The shorter the light flashes are, the more specific information can be collected. The scientists were able to use light lasting "only on the scale of attoseconds," or one quintillionth of a second.

"Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons," remarked Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. "The next step will be utilizing them."

Chemistry

Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov received the chemistry award "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots," which are "of great importance in nanotechnology," according to a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release. "Quantum dots have many fascinating and unusual properties,” said Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. "Importantly, they have different colors depending on their size."

Quantum dots are "semiconductors made of particles squeezed so small that their electrons barely have room to breathe," explained The New York Times. Semiconductors are "crystals that help power our electronics," but "while traditional crystals may be quite large at the molecular level, a quantum dot consists of just a few thousand atoms squished into a space just a few nanometers across." Today, quantum dots "illuminate computer monitors and television screens based on QLED technology," and “could contribute to flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication," per the press release. 

Literature

Norwegian author Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable," per a press release from the Swedish Academy. Fosse's large body of work includes "40 plays as well as novels, short stories, children's books, poetry and essays," The Associated Press reported. The author describes his work as "literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations."

Fosse's creations have been read and performed across Europe and the U.S. His first novel, "Red, Black," was published in 1983, and his first play, "Someone is Going to Come," was published in 1992. His magnum opus is the novel "A New Name: Septology VI-VII," which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022. Fosse is the fourth Norwegian author to win the literature award but the first to write in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language used by only 10% of the population.

Fosse's work "focuses on human insecurity and anxiety," Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, told the AP. "The basic choices you make in life, very elemental stuff."

Peace

Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her "fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all," per a Norwegian Nobel Committee press release. The 51-year-old activist is currently in prison and has been arrested 13 times, convicted five times, and sentenced to 31 years in prison and 154 lashes by the Iranian regime.

Mohammadi has been a staunch advocate for human rights in Iran since the 1990s and has campaigned against the death penalty and capital punishment. Her award comes following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police in 2022, which launched widespread protests against the government in support of women's rights. Iran condemned the award as "biased and politically motivated," adding that the prize "is a political maneuver in line with the interventionist and anti-Iran policies of some European governments," per CNN.

"I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny, and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women," Mohammadi said.

Economic Sciences

Claudia Goldin of Harvard University became only the third woman to win the economic sciences prize for her work advancing "our understanding of women's labor market outcomes," per a press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Her work "provided the first comprehensive account of women's earnings and labor market participation through the centuries.” 

Goldin studied 200 years of U.S. data and demonstrated "how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time." One of her biggest findings was that "married women dropped out of the workforce during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and women rejoined the workforce with the shift to a service economy," Forbes reported. She also found that much of the wage gap "largely arises with the birth of the first child."

"We now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future," said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.