Finally, the first Monday in October arrives, and the week finally begins when we find out who will receive this year's Nobel Prize.
This year is also the anniversary. It is 125 years since Wilhelm Röntgen, Jacobus van 't Hoff, Emil von Behring, Sully Prudhomme, Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy became the first to receive what is now the world's most prestigious award, at least in the natural sciences.
Just in time for the anniversary, the Nobel Foundation takes the opportunity to increase the prize amount. Now the prize winners in each category receive SEK 12 million, alone or to be shared, depending on how many there are. That is one million kroner more than in recent years. For comparison: In 1901, Röntgen and his fellow laureates received SEK 150,782.
Who will receive the awards from the king's hand in the Konserthuset on December 10 this time, we can only speculate about for now. This year, evaluators in the magazines The Scientist and Chemistry World believe in a medicine prize, or chemistry prize, for the discoveries that laid the foundation for diabetes and obesity drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Possible names then are some combination of Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Svetlana Mojsov, Daniel Drucker, Jens Juul Holst and John Eng. Personally, I think that the Nobel committees will wait a few more years, until we have seen more long-term effects of the medicines.
When the prize in medicine or physiology is presented (earlier) at 11.30 on Monday, I believe more in Michel Sadelain, Carl June and Steven Rosenberg for the so-called Car-T cell therapy, against cancer and also against autoimmune diseases.
Another possibility is Arthur Horwich and Franz-Ulrich Hartl for pioneering research into how proteins fold into their unique structures inside the cell.
On Tuesday, it's the physics prize's turn. Perhaps the Nobel committee will follow in the footsteps of the Norwegian Kavli Prize and reward Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan MacDonald for their contribution to creating a completely new field of research: twisttronics, where two layers of the two-dimensional material graphene are put together at different angles and acquire completely new properties.
It could also be astrophysics, after a few years with prizes for other parts of physics. One possibility is Carlos Frenk, Julio Navarro and Simon White, for fundamental work on how galaxies form.
Or maybe for the first time it will be a single woman: Nicola Spaldin, a pioneer in developing so-called mulitferroic materials.
Last among the natural science prizes is chemistry, which will be presented on Wednesday. Last year, my colleague Jörn Spolander correctly guessed that the award would go to the development of metal-organic framework compounds, or MOFs.
This year there may be a prize closer to biology and medicine, such as David Klenerman, Pascal Mayer and Shankar Balasubramanian for next-generation DNA sequencing.
Harry Gray could receive the prize for discovering how electrons are transported in large biological molecules, possibly together with his former PhD student Jay Winker.
Another worthy laureate in chemistry, or medicine, is David Liu, who developed a method to make precise genetic changes in living cells, without cutting the DNA molecule.
Now, in any case, I am looking forward to three exciting days, where we will find out which scientists the Nobel committees consider to have done humanity the greatest good, as Alfred Nobel put it.
