As every year around this time, the names of the Nobel Prize winners in the different categories are already known. On October 13, the biotechnologist and journalist Ángela Bernardo pointed out on Twitter the fact that, of the 11 awards granted, none was for a woman. His tweet has had a lot of impact and has been retweeted thousands of times … and has also been the subject of sexist insults and contempt.
The truth is that the number of women awarded since 1901 is much lower than that of men, specifically, 49 compared to 832. In the case of scientific categories, 97% of the prizes have gone to men.
Some Outstanding Nobel Prize Winning Scientists
The first female scientist to win the Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, in 1903. Curie received the prize in the physics category for her discoveries about radiation, along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel. In addition, she is the only woman who has won the Nobel twice, since in 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium .
In 1986, the Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of growth factors, substances that regulate cell division. Levi-Montalcini not only stood out for his scientific work. She wrote books, fought for gender equality , created a foundation to help educate African women, and was persecuted by the Nazis. He died in 2012 at the age of 103.
The last scientist awarded was Tu Youyou , who also became the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel in any of the categories. Furthermore, never before has a Chinese man or woman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Youyou received the award in 2015 for his discovery of a new therapy for malaria.
Researchers who could win the Nobel
One of them is the American astronomer Vera Rubin , born in 1928, who has been in the pools for several years. Rubin is one of the discoverers of dark matter, a type of matter invisible and undetectable by human instruments, but which occupies part of the Universe and has gravitational influence on galaxies.
On the other hand, this same year, the researchers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were firm candidates for the Nobel, who in 2015 received the Princess of Asturias Award for “having developed a genomic editing technology that allows rewriting the genome and correcting defective genes with a level of unprecedented precision and very economically. ” This technique uses DNA sequences called CRISPR , which were discovered by the Spaniard Francisco Mojica. Although it was others who developed the applications, it was this researcher from Alicante who started the journey, something that had also placed him in this year’s forecasts to win the award.
