The Nobel Prize highlights the revolutionary advancements which humanity has made in multiple fields. This year, vaccine science and minuscule lasers won the prestigious prize for medicine and physics.

Before COVID-19, vaccines seemed less important when they only came up during flu season. The pandemic brought more attention to the incredible work done by scientists in the field of vaccinology. Ultimately, the development of the COVID-19 Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine let us all reunite with friends and family and reconnect with society.

Researching at Penn Medicine, Dr. Weissmann and Dr. Karikó spent most of their careers developing mRNA vaccines to address humanity’s worst diseases. MRNA works very differently from a normal vaccine; while traditional vaccines inject a small part of a living disease into the body, letting the body break it down and learn how to counteract a real infection, mRNA vaccines tell the body what to build in case of a certain infection.

The discovery of mRNA vaccines is revolutionizing medical science by significantly shortening the time needed to develop a vaccine, allowing faster distribution. On average, traditional vaccines take a decade to synthesize; now, a vaccine can be made for a newly identified disease in months, potentially saving millions of lives.

Because of the incredible work done in this field, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó were awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for their remarkable work in developing an mRNA vaccine.

This year has also seen breakthroughs in physics with the discovery of extremely small lasers which move in attoseconds. These lasers can influence the direction of electrons and give a closer image of what happens at the subatomic level.

Physicists Pierre Agostini, Anne L’Hullier, and Frenec Krausez have been working in the field of attosecond physics for ten years, trying to create these incredibly short-pulse lasers that can interact with electrons.

Currently, information can only be transmitted in nanoseconds, one billion times slower than an attosecond. This discovery has the potential to create computers that process information at incredibly fast speeds, advancing not only physics but also computation.

Along with the work of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian playwright revolutionizing prose, Narges Mohammadi, an activist fighting against the subjugation of women in Iran, and Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov, chemists developing small OLED dots that can display light at subatomic levels, this year’s Nobel Prize recipients have pushed the bar of human capability.