Nobel Prize Winners: 2013

This years Nobel Prize winners for Physics, Chemistry and Medicine have been declared so far.

In Physics, as expected Nobel Prize had to go in the direction of most recent discovery of Higgs Boson or God Particle. Higgs and few other Scientists worked on the idea of existence of Higgs Boson which give mass to all other particles way back in 1960s. Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of the United Kingdom shared this years Nobel Prize for Physics for introducing us to the concept of existence of Higgs Boson.

In the field of Chemistry, this year the award went to Computational Chemists. Many people are still not aware but Computational Chemistry is a branch in Chemistry that really helps to make understanding a concept easier by allowing you to look at it at molecular level. It allows you visualize molecules (something an experimental chemistry is unable to do) and understand mechanisms behind each and every reaction that occurs. This year Nobel Prize was awarded to three scientists Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel  who worked separately to develop different models that allows  one to study different molecular systems like proteins, DNA, enzymes etc. These models allowed combining the quantum mechanical models and newtonian law based classical models and generate a new one which allows big systems like proteins to be handled (classical mechanics) but at the same time giving better accuracy as giving by quantum mechanical models).

Nobel prize for Medicine this year went to Randy W. Schekman,  James E. Rothman of Yale University and Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University.Their basic research solved the mystery of how cells, which are factories producing molecules, organize a system to transport the molecules within cells and export them outside. Read more about their work here