Nobel Prize Series: President to meet Nobel Laureates at Rashtrapati Bhavan today

New Delhi: In the backdrop of the Nobel Prize Series, India 2018 that was kicked off recently at Goa, the President of India has invited all distinguished Nobel Laureates to Rashtrapati Bhavan today on 5th February 2018.

The Department of Biotechnology and Nobel Foundation have signed a five year agreement, which has initiated annual lectures by Nobel Laureates. An exhibition on the separate theme will be organized each year. The aim is to excite talented students to take up careers in science and come up with new ideas that would benefit the world.

The broad theme for the Nobel Prize Series, India 2018 is “Education and the value of teachers” and as such most discussions will revolve around Better Education: Anvil for shaping future science, technology and innovation.

The President of India is the Chancellor of central universities and is a great advocate for the reformation of higher education system, to meet the challenges for 21st century learning and innovation skills and his interest and overview of this programme will provide the necessary impetus for initiation of a change in higher education in India.

The Nobel Laureates gracing the occasion are Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Sir Richard John Roberts, Serge Haroche, and Dr Tomas Robert Lindahl.

The German biologist, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is renowned for her embryonic development of fruit flies. Her contribution earned her the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She completed her degrees in biology, physics, and chemistry from Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University in 1964, a diploma in biochemistry (1968) and a doctorate in biology and genetics (1973) from Eberhard-Karl University of Tubingen.

Richard John Roberts is an English biochemist and molecular biologist who was felicitated with Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the mechanism of gene-splicing.

Roberts’ fantasy with chemistry started as early as in high school. He was so interested by the subject that he chose to make it his career. Following his graduate studies and doctoral thesis, Roberts made his way to Harvard and eventually the Cold Harbor Laboratory. It was at the laboratory that Roberts first found success in restriction enzymes. By 1972, he discovered or characterized almost three quarter of the world’s first restriction enzymes. Later in 1977, Roberts demonstrated how RNA can be divided up into introns and exons, after which the exons can be joined together. The discovery was crucial as until then the scientific world believed that genes comprised of unbroken sketches of DNA. The discovery had important implication for the study of genetic diseases. Furthermore, it allowed different parts of the gene to be brought together in new combinations.

Serge Haroche, (born September 11, 1944, Casablanca, Morocco), French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics for devising methods to study the quantum mechanical behaviour of individual photons.

Haroche received degrees in physics in 1967 from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a doctoral degree in 1971 from Université Paris VI (now Université Pierre et Marie Curie), where his adviser was French physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. In 1972 and 1973 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California, where he worked in the laboratory of American physicist Arthur Schawlow. Until 1984 he was an assistant professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris (and from 1976, Palaiseau). From 1982 to 2001, he was a professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He was also a professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie from 1975 to 2001 and a part-time professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1984 to 1993. In 2001 he became a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, where he was chair of quantum physics.

Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS, FMedSci (born 28 January 1938) is a Swedish-born British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

After obtaining his research doctorate, Lindahl did postdoctoral research at Princeton University and Rockefeller University. He was professor of medical chemistry at the University of Gothenburg 1978–1982. After moving to the United Kingdom he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) as a researcher in 1981. From 1986 to 2005 he was the first Director of Cancer Research UK’s Clare Hall Laboratories in Hertfordshire, since 2015 part of the Francis Crick Institute. He continued to research there until 2009. He has contributed to many papers on DNA repair and the genetics of cancer.

(Source: DBT India)