Meet the 2021 Nobel Prize Laureates

We look back at the Nobel Prize winners in 2021. In this 2021 edition, we have six Europeans among the winners: Germany’s Klaus Hasselmann and Italy’s Giorgio Parisi in Physics; Germany’s Benjamin List and Britain’s David W.C. MacMillan in Chemistry; Russia’s Dmitry Muratov who has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; and the Netherlands’ Guido W. Imbens in Economic Sciences.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 is awarded with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.” Their tools revolutionised the construction of molecules.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine 2021

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute has decided to award the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.

The Nobel Prize in Peace 2021

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

Maria Ressa uses freedom of expression to expose abuse of power, use of violence and growing authoritarianism in her native country, the Philippines.

Dmitry Muratov has for decades defended freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions.

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2021

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021 with one half to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics” and the other half jointly to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”