LINK The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who used directed evolution to engineer cancer drugs and biofuels
maybe nature and evolution should share in the prize
Two Americans and a Briton won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for harnessing the power of evolution to produce novel proteins used in everything from environmentally-friendly detergents and biofuels to cancer drugs.
Scientists Frances Arnold, George Smith, and Sir Gregory Winter are sharing the prize for their research using directed evolution to produce enzymes for new chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The fruits of this work include the world's top-selling prescription medicine -- the antibody injection Humira sold by AbbVie for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.
"This year's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have been inspired by the power of evolution and used the same principles - genetic change and selection - to develop proteins that solve mankind's chemical problems," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1 million) prize.
Arnold, an American chemical engineer and biochemist at Caltech, will receive half of the $1 million, while Smith from the University of Missouri and Sir Gregory Winter from Cambridge will share the other half.
Arnold is the fifth woman to win the prize, which has been awarded to 181 people since 1901.
"I'm bouncing off the walls, but I'm trying to pretend to sound calm and collected," she told NobelPrize.org when reached by phone early Wednesday.
Arnold said her background as a mechanical engineer gave her the ability to tackle protein engineering in a totally different way from what others were trying.
"The way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed to failure," she said.
Instead, she tried a more "obvious" route: copying "nature's design process," that is, evolution.
"All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about through this one simple, beautiful design algorithm," she said. "And what I do is use that algorithm to build new biological things."
The Nobel committee is set to award this year's peace prize on Friday.
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Very cool but how is evolution involved?
Carin
Level 8
Oct 4, 2018
1
Scientist have long thought that once the language of DNA was cracked, we would be able to construct any protein at will. Unfortunately, that has proven very near sighted and wrong. This research has demonstrated that it is possible to use bacteria and microorganisms to solve genetic problems instead. Microorganisms multiply rapidly and use random mutations or genetic transfer to evolve quickly to solve genetic problems. By using this capacity, this science can direct the evolution of microorganism to solve for a protein (antibody) that can attach itself to a specific cancer target (for example). The way it's done is to let the microorganism lose to evolve then pick and chose the ones that are the most successful at partially solving a genetic target in a couple of generations and make them evolve to solve the problem completely then harvest the compound it has evolve to do. (a general explanation)
if you are interested this pdf explains the technique in more details: [nobelprize.org]
but this image is a good overview.
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