Big Island Nobel Prize Winners

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Hilo High graduate Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize today.  Say what you will about East Hawaii schools and teachers, if a student wants to learn we have the essential facilities here.  

LONDON — Two women were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for their pioneering work on genome editing, which has the life-saving potential to be used to cure genetic diseases.

"This year’s prize is about re-writing the code of life,” said Secretary General Göran K. Hansson for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as he awarded the prize to American biologist Jennifer Doudna and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nobel...r-n1242378

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

More about this year’s Nobel Prize winners with Big Island connections:

Doudna, 56, is a Hilo High graduate whose family moved to Hawaii island when she was 7. According to a 2015 New York Times profile, Doudna’s father taught literature at the University of Hawaii-Hilo and her mother lectured on history at a community college. The Times reported that Doudna found her calling in high school after hearing a lecture by a scientist about her research into how normal cells became cancerous. She later went on to study at Pomona College in California and Harvard University.

And speaking of facilities here on Big Island that lead to world class, Nobel prize winning research:

Today was the second day in a row that a woman with ties to Hawaii island won a Nobel Prize. On Tuesday, astronomer Andrea Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, shared in the Nobel Prize for physics for work studying a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way galaxy. Ghez has been using the the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea since 1995 for her research.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/10/0...-scissors/

[TomK]

Let's not forget that back in 2011 three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics after using the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe. That's five people with connections to the Big Island with Nobel prizes that I'm aware of. That's quite an astonishing contribution to science from such a small island in the middle of nowhere. Yet we have some people who want to stop it.

https://keckobservatory.org/nobel_prize_..._universe/

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

From an interview in the NY Review of Books:

Claudia Dreifus: Where did you grow up?
Jennifer Doudna: Hawaii. I grew up in a small town, Hilo. We were one of the few Caucasian families there in the 1970s, and I certainly felt like a different animal from everybody else in my school.
My formative experience was trying to figure out who I was in the world and how to fit in in some way. I spent a lot of time reading. I can remember lying on my bed a lot, just kind of thinking and wondering about how things worked, especially nature and why the animals and plants in Hilo had evolved the way they had.

How was it that your family lived in Hilo?

Well, my father was a literature professor at the University of Hawaii. He loved reading popular books about science. It was he who gave me Jim Watson’s The Double Helix. That was one of the early ways I got exposed to the kind of science I’d be eventually doing. I thought: “Scientists can really do this? They can do experiments and find out the structure of molecules? Wow.” The book was mind-blowing.
The other thing was that it showed the human side of science, the conflicts, the collaborations. These were aspects of science I had no idea about because the science textbooks we had in school were very dry. Jim Watson’s book was a different vision.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/01/24...er-doudna/

She set out on her path in life after reading a book.  In Hilo.  In the 1970’s.
With internet access available at our fingertips in 2020 we on the Big Island, students and adults alike, could with even greater ease follow her example in our own small way.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

A couple of updates on our Nobel Prize winners.  From Keck Observatory’s website:

“Working closely with Keck Observatory and our Hawaii staff of engineers and scientists, Dr. Andrea Ghez harnessed the power of the Observatory’s optical/infrared telescopes and Maunakea’s unparalleled view of the universe to conduct pioneering research proving the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy,” says Hilton Lewis, Director of W. M. Keck Observatory. “We couldn’t be more elated for Andrea, who has devoted the entirety of her career to this research – over 25 years ­­– all done at Keck Observatory
https://keckobservatory.org/nobel-prize-ghez/

And from their Twitter account, photos of Dr. Ghez with her medal:
https://twitter.com/keckobservatory/stat...91616?s=21