Previous prizewinners

The British materials scientist Nicola Spaldin has laid the theoretical foundations for the innovative class of materials called multiferroics. These are crystalline chemical compounds consisting of metals and oxygen. What is special about these crystals is that they react both to electric and to magnetic fields. Furthermore, their internal magnetic ordering can be influenced through the use of electric fields. This predestines multiferroics for use in ultrafast, extremely small, and very energy efficient computers in the future. At some point, they could replace silicon, the basis of the computational ability of the chips used in today’s PCs and smartphones.

As part of her doctoral thesis at the University of California at Berkeley, Nicola Spaldin investigated materials on an atomic and molecular basis, mainly semiconductors and magnetic substances. As a postdoc, she moved to the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University. After working as a full professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara from 2006 to 2010, Nicola Spaldin took up a position in the Department of Materials Research at the ETH Zurich, where she still researches and teaches.

The Norwegian husband and wife research team of May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered previously unknown brain nerve cells in numerous experiments on rats, cells that – as a natural navigation system – enable rodents to maintain precise orientation. Grid cells, together with other orientation neurons, divide space into an imaginary coordinate system of “longitudes” and “latitudes”. This information is used by the brain to compute cognitive maps. The brain researchers were thus the first to demonstrate an abstract mental act at the cellular level. The knowledge gained in their studies could one day help Alzheimer patients to improve their limited sense of orientation caused by the disease.

The German physicist Immanuel Bloch has succeeded in making it possible experimentally to view and study quantum mechanical processes inside matter for the first time. To do this, Bloch creates a microscopic crystal of light using laser beams, in whose optical cage he catches ultracold atoms. The atoms in the lattice of light behave similarly to electrons in metals and, like them, obey the laws of quantum mechanics. The knowledge gained with this quantum simulator should help bring more light to bear on the darkness of the partially mysterious quantum world. Bloch hopes, furthermore, that this can contribute to the development of novel types of materials, such as super-conductors that conduct electrical power loss free as well as new magnetic materials for processing information.

The German physicist and bioinformatician Matthias Mann has set himself the goal of cracking the code of proteomes, i.e., of all of the proteins in the human body. Mann developed a revolutionary analytic procedure that has made the mass spectrometer useful for biologists just as it has been a proven tool in physics and chemistry for years. This tool makes it possible to analyse all of the proteins present in a cell at once, and not just qualitatively but also quantitatively. Mann first succeeded in decoding a complete proteome – of a yeast cell – as early as 2008. His team has now turned its attention to the human proteome. This research promises to provide basic knowledge for our fight against diabetes and cancer.

The German physicist Stefan Hell has constructed a noveltype of light microscope that can produce much sharper images than permitted by Abbe’s limit from 1873, which previously had been thought to be practically impossible to overcome. Ernst Abbe considered the wavelength of light to constitute a natural limit to optical resolution. According to Abbe, structures smaller than 200 nanometers – half the wavelength of blue light – cannot be distinguished using an optical microscope. Yet Hell found a way – using tricks from quantum mechanics – to overcome Abbe’s limit. The STED microscope that he developed permits resolution to less than 15 nanometers. Hell’s insights have not only given physics a push, they have also created unanticipated optical nano perspectives for life scientists and biologists.

They are food stuff, biosphere, construction material, and medical substance. They control the climate, supply energy and oxygen, or are simply beautiful to look at. Plants are just naturally there and have been for millions of years. This makes it is all the more surprising that, until just a few years ago, no one knew precisely how they function and which processes regulate their development. Jiří Friml has made decisive contributions to our understanding of these events. He identified the hormone auxin as the universal regulator of plant development and discovered the mechanisms by which the hormone reaches the right spot at the right time. Using his discoveries, it should be possible to regulate the growth of crops in a targeted manner. Moreover, medicine should also profit from his research.

In October 2004, the Dutch physicist Andre Geim discovered a material that researchers had previously long believed could not exist, namely ultra-flat crystals consisting of only a single layer of carbon atoms. These two-dimensional crystals called graphenes are full of surprises. They are as hard as diamonds yet pliable. They conduct electricity better and faster than most other materials and promise to revolutionise microelectronics and computer technology. In the next 10–15 years, transistors made of graphenes could replace today’s that are made of silicon. Last but not least, graphene makes it possible for scientists to study relativistic particles on their lab bench, something for which they until now needed huge particle accelerators.

How do we age and why? And why do so many people develop cancer as they get older? Professor Maria Blasco from the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO) in Madrid searched for – and found – answers to these questions of literally vital importance. The molecular biologist conducts research in telomeres, the end pieces of chromosomes, and telomerase, an enzyme which adds to the length of a telomere. Long-term, her work promises the development of drugs to fight aging and cancer.

Despite intense efforts, doctors have been unsuccessful in developing vaccines against malaria and AIDS. But now, a change is in sight. Professor Peter Seeberger from the ETH Zurich has developed a machine that attacks pathogens in a new way. From individual building blocks, the fully automated “carbohydrate synthesiser” produces synthetic carbohydrate chains that are identical to those of the pathogens, and when used in experiments on mice, they have already proven to be effective vaccine candidates.

In the age of Queen Victoria and the German Emperor William II, chaperones provided a guarantee of morality and common decency. Since then, they have lost their significance in social regard. But in the past few years, the proteins referred to as chaperones have become a very hot topic in scientific research. Thanks to the fundamental discoveries made by the German physician and biochemist Ulrich Hartl, these chaperones may make it possible for medicine to successfully treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s in a few years. The molecular chaperones even seem to be able to slow down the aging process itself.

Thanks to a genial idea, the British physicist Philip Russell succeeded in giving the good old glass fibre cable some entirely new properties. In the magic fibres from the University of Bath, which are nearly as thin as a hair, light can not only be used to transmit data for telecommunications but also employed for completely new purposes. They make it possible, for example, to fabricate mini lasers for any colour of light, to construct extremely precise clocks, to determine the presence of minute amounts of substances in gases, and to continuously measure a person’s blood glucose level. There appear to be unlimited possibilities for finding applications in connection with technical equipment, chemical analyses, and apparatus for medical or biological measurements.