A Nobel Prize laureate collaborates on research with Czechs

The week of the Nobel Prize announcements is behind us. Read the comments of two of our scientists on selected laureates and the research that dazzled the jury of the world's most prestigious scientific prize.

A Nobel Prize laureate collaborates on research with Czechs

A comment on the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by the parasitologist Julius Lukeš, a member of the Neuron Foundation's scientific council

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on 5 October to Harvey Alter of the American National Institutes of Health, Michael Houghton of the University of Alberta in Canada and Charles Rice of Rockefeller University in the USA. In this "covid" year it is no surprise that the Nobel Prize goes to virologists. All three award-winning scientists took part in the discovery of the virus that causes hepatitis C (HCV). It is a very insidious virus whose infection often proceeds hidden and without symptoms, but which over the long term seriously affects the liver, which can lead to the development of cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma. The laureates named above turned their attention to HCV as early as the 1970s, when the hepatitis A and B viruses were already known but they noticed that there must be a third, mysterious virus.

It was not until 1989 that they conclusively proved this virus to be HCV, which until then had spread mainly through blood transfusion and was estimated to kill up to 500,000 people a year. The research of Alter, Houghton and Rice made it possible to introduce tests to detect it, which practically stopped the spread of HCV through blood transfusion, and to discover drugs that treat hepatitis C with roughly 50% success. Even so, around 150 million people live with HCV today (an estimated 80,000 in the Czech Republic) and a vaccine against it is still unavailable.

The laureates will share the prize of 1.1 million dollars equally. In the past Houghton turned down the Gairdner Award (100,000 dollars) because it was not shared with his two collaborators. It is also worth mentioning that Rice currently collaborates on virus research with the Institute of Parasitology of the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences in České Budějovice.

Julius Lukeš

Member of the Neuron Foundation's scientific council | Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences

At the centre of most galaxies there is a supermassive black hole

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is discussed by Dr Ondřej Pejcha, laureate of the Neuron Award for promising young scientists, of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University

Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in modern astrophysics and theoretical physics. The path of our knowledge, from the first ideas suggesting the existence of black holes, through robust theoretical models describing their structure, properties and origin, to confirming their existence by observation, has been a long one, and all the laureates played a significant part in it. Roger Penrose contributed substantially to the mathematical apparatus describing the spacetime of black holes and their formation.

A black hole is fully characterised by its mass, its rate of rotation and its electric charge. But even such a "simple" object can, through its gravitational attraction, dramatically affect events around it. The reason is the small size of black holes. To make a black hole from our Sun, for instance, we would have to compress it into a sphere with a radius of less than about three kilometres. Our Earth would become a black hole if compressed into a sphere smaller than one centimetre. The strong gravity in the immediate vicinity of black holes can cause the gas present there to radiate intensely, which astronomers can observe over great distances. Thanks to these observations we believe that at the centre of most galaxies there is a supermassive black hole. Direct confirmation of this hypothesis, though, only came with the precise measurements of the motion of stars in the immediate vicinity of the centre of our Galaxy, carried out by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez with their collaborators.

Ondřej Pejcha

Laureate of the Neuron Award for promising young scientists | Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University