On September 23, international scientists Franz-Ulrich Hartl, Ralph Steinman, Rosamond McKitterick, David Tilman and Michael Tomasello were awarded the Heineken Prizes for Science by His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander. A cash prize of $150,000 is attached to the prizes, which are awarded by the KNAW.
The five Heineken scientific prizes are awarded every two years to individuals who have distinguished themselves in the fields of biochemistry and biophysics, medicine, environmental sciences, historical science and cognitive science.
Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics
This prize goes to Professor Franz-Ulrich Hartl, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. He receives the prize for his pioneering work on the role of 'chaperone proteins' in the folding of proteins in a cell.
A protein can only control processes in the cell if it has adopted the correct three-dimensional structure. Thanks to Hartl's research, we now know that proteins do not fold spontaneously into those structures. He discovered that many proteins depend on chaperone proteins for this:proteins that help other proteins to fold and remain folded. Hartl's publications on this in Nature in the first half of the 1990s led to a drastic overhaul of the fundamentals of protein biogenesis, the fast-growing field that studies how proteins are formed.
A good understanding of protein folding and unfolding has major implications. For example, a disorder in the folding mechanism leads to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Huntington's. Hartl and his group continue to unravel these mechanisms. They hope to eventually make the power of chaperone proteins usable for combating diseases and for protein production in biotechnology.
Franz-Ulrich Hartl has won many international awards and is a member of the German Academy of Sciences, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts &Sciences and an honorary member of the Japanese Biochemical Society.
Heineken Prize for Medicine
This prize goes to Professor Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University in New York. He receives the prize for his discovery of the role of dendritic cells in the immune system.
When disease-causing bacteria or viruses enter our bodies, so-called T cells rush out to destroy them, while B cells produce antibodies. For a long time, however, it was unknown how this immune response started. Until Ralph Steinman and cell biologist Zanvil Cohn discovered an entirely new type of cell in 1973:the dendritic cell.
Dendritic cells act like sentries:as soon as a pathogen arrives, they destroy a few and present the fragments to other cells, which recognize the pathogen and then take action. Furthermore, they direct the reactions of T cells and B cells. Since Steinman uncovered the existence of dendritic cells, it has become increasingly clear how crucial they are as directors of the immune system. This insight is of great importance for research into and combating many diseases, such as infectious diseases, cancer, autoimmune diseases, allergies and rejection symptoms in organ transplants.
Ralph Steinman has previously received awards including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology.
Heineken Prize for Historical Sciences
This award goes to Professor Rosamond McKitterick, of the University of Cambridge, England. She receives the prize because she has brought about a fundamental recalibration of our image of the Carolingians and of the intertwining of politics, religion and scholarship in their time.
Historians have long assumed that, after a long period in which very few people in Northern Europe could read and write and culture was mainly transmitted orally, literacy once again flourished in the eleventh century. Rosamond McKitterick turned this view on its head, arguing that the revival of literacy took place three centuries earlier:in the time of Charlemagne.
McKitterick was able to demonstrate that during the Carolingians many children went to school and reading skills had descended deep into the social pyramid. It turned out that monarchs issued written orders, noblemen donated libraries to monasteries and former slaves were given written proof of their life as free men. From the scarce source material, she nevertheless managed to sketch as complete a picture as possible of Charlemagne and his empire, how they looked at their own past and how politics, religion and scholarship were connected.
Rosamond McKitterick is known as a brilliant yet accessible researcher and teacher. In fact, her name is associated with an entire branch of historical research that is known for its diversity in subjects and approaches.
Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences
This award goes to Professor David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in the United States. He receives the prize because he has made a fundamental contribution to ecology, a branch of biology that studies the interaction between organisms and their environment, through a combination of mathematical theories, laboratory research and field experiments.
If different species in an ecosystem compete for a limited amount of food, which species will survive and which will lose out? Food source competition theory makes predictions about this based on a mathematical model. The theory is largely due to David Tilman and has been an essential part of almost all textbooks on ecology since the early 1980s.
Tilman himself applied the theory to the plant kingdom and discovered that biodiversity makes an ecosystem more stable. In recent years, Tilman found that natural grasslands provide more bioenergy per hectare than ethanol from grain, or biodiesel from soybeans. Not only is extracting bioenergy from grass more economically profitable, it is also more sustainable:grass captures more CO2 from the atmosphere and it is not a food crop for humans, while grain and soy are.
The renowned Institute for Scientific Information twice named Tilman the most cited environmental scientist of the decade (1990-2000 and 1996-2006). He has held numerous board positions, including for the National Science Foundation, the National Research Council, and the White House Presidential Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science
This prize goes to Professor Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He receives the prize because his research has given us a much better understanding of cognitive processes in primates in general and language acquisition processes in humans in particular.
Tomasello's research field extends from cognitive processes in monkeys to developmental psychology and language acquisition in young children. According to Tomasello, the essential difference between humans and monkeys is that from an early age humans can do something that monkeys can't do, or at least much less well, namely put themselves in the shoes of each other and know what the other person perceives and thinks. According to Tomasello, the principle that people can grasp each other's intentions also underlies language acquisition.
Although the last word has not yet been said on the differences in abilities between humans and apes as well as on the way children learn language - and Tomasello himself is the first to underline this - his original ideas, both theoretically and empirically solidly grounded, are becoming common. recognized as a major and innovative contribution to a better understanding of cognitive processes.
Tomasello has received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and the Hegel Prize in 2009.
See also:
- People imitate language, not monkeys
Nobel Prize
The Heineken Prizes were first awarded in 1964. Then there was only one prize, only for biochemistry and biophysics. Other awards were added in the 1980s and 1990s. The Heineken Prizes are counted among the most prestigious international science prizes in the world. Eleven winners of Heineken Prizes for Medicine and Biochemistry and Biophysics later also received a Nobel Prize.