Science Nobels awarded to UK researchers

The UK is at the forefront of science and engineering, and we’re a magnet for overseas researchers; the scientific community were reminded of this when this year’s Nobel science prizes were awarded to the father of IVF and two researchers from Manchester.

Professor Robert Edwards – Pensioner Fellow at Churchill College and Emeritus Professor of Human Reproduction at the University of Cambridge was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Edwards – together with his colleague Dr Patrick Steptoe – developed in vitro fertilisation. Edwards has been dubbed the ‘father of IVF’ and to date over 4 million babies have been born through the technique.

Edwards and Steptoe first began working on the technique in 1968 and the first test tube baby was in born 1978. Their work met with scepticism, resistance and set-backs in funding, but together they founded the first IVF clinic at Bourn Hall in Cambridge in 1980. Steptoe died in 1988 but not before Edwards had the chance to tell him that 1,000 babies had been conceived at the clinic.

“I’m delighted that Bob Edwards’ work has finally been recognised with the much-deserved award of Nobel Prize in Medicine,” said Professor Azam Surani, a former graduate student of Edwards’. “Bob’s work was critical for many other important medical advances, including pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for disease and for the derivation of the first human pluripotent stem cells, which hold great promise for advances in medicine in the future.

“I just wish it had come sooner,” Dr Alan Findlay, fellow of Churchill College and colleague of Edwards said. “Bob braved tremendous difficulties in the early days of the research that led to IVF. He had to make weekly journeys from Cambridge to Oldham – in the pre-motorway era – where Patrick Steptoe, one of the few obstetricians willing to collaborate with him, was using keyhole surgery to collect eggs from ovaries.”

“The greatest reward for him has been the joy that his work has brought to millions,” Findlay added.

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester who discovered graphene in 2004. Ordinary sticky tape was crucial to the breakthrough – the duo placed the tape on graphite so that flakes of carbon ripped off. They repeated the process obtaining thinner and thinner flakes, but believed the flakes would lump together once in solution. The flakes remained stable and they were able to start making transistors from the thin flakes of carbon. Although there are now more sophisticated ways of producing graphene, the list of potential applications is endless – it may even find a use in sensor for toxic gases and in high performance materials for aircraft.

“This is a fantastic honour. People have been talking about graphene as a possible prize winner for a number of years so for the community in graphene research it hardly comes as a surprise,” said Geim, “However, I personally did not expect to get this prize.”

“I was really shocked when I heard the news and my first thought was to go to the lab and tell the team,” said Novoselov.

Three scientists – Richard Heck from the University of Delaware, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Akira Suzuki from Hokkaido University in Japan – shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work which saw them come up with an efficient way to link carbon atoms together. They developed a technique using palladium to catalyse reactions between carbon atoms without producing lots of unwanted by-products. The main problem the scientists overcame was how to make atoms of carbon, a very stable substance, more active and thus likely to link together to make bigger, more useful compounds. Their palladium-catalysed cross coupling reaction has been used to develop novel drugs, agrochemicals and electronic coatings.

I would be telling a lie if I wasn’t thinking about this,” said Negishi, “I would like to keep on working for a least several more years. I would like to use the money to further propel my research.”

The Nobel Prizes were established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1895, with the first prizes awarded in 1901. They are bestowed on winners by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances.