Peace prize, mRNA vaccines, quantum dots, literature: Here is all you need to know about Nobel Prize 2023 winners

The Nobel Prize recipients recently announced shine a spotlight on some of the world's most prominent thinkers and innovators. The awards, most of which date to 1901, are intended to go to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind," founder Alfred Nobel (above) wrote in his will. Past recipients include the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Martin Luther King Jr. Here's a list of this year's winners:

Hungarian scientist Katalin Kariko and US colleague Drew Weissman win Nobel for COVID-19 vaccine discoveries. In 2005, Kariko and Weissman developed so-called nucleoside base modifications, which stop the immune system from launching an inflammatory attack against lab-made mRNA, previously seen as a major hurdle against any therapeutic use of the technology.

After a chance meeting over the photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania 25 years ago, Kariko worked closely with Weissman, 64, an immunologist who saw the potential for the technology to create a new kind of vaccine. Today, the power of messenger RNA is obvious: It is the backbone of coronavirus vaccines that were developed in record time and have been given billions of times. But for decades, the idea this fragile genetic material could be a medicine was a tantalising, unlikely possibility dangling at the margins of mainstream science.

Kariko and Weissman's complementary knowledge helped to unravel a way to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a useful medical technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been administered billions of times.

French-Swedish physicist Anne L'Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz won the Physics Nobel for looking at electrons in fractions of seconds. The three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for studying how electrons zip around the atom in the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.

Anne L'Huillier | L'Huillier is the fifth woman ever honoured with a Nobel in physics. She was teaching at Lund University when her phone rang several times Tuesday, and she finally answered the call from the Academy. "The last half hour of my lecture was difficult to do," she said by phone during the Nobel news conference. "I am very touched at the moment. As you know, there are not so many women who get this prize, so it's very, very special."

Ferenc Krausz | Electrons are workhorses in the physical processes of the world as we know it. Still, they are small and elusive entities with the head-scratching quality of appearing to act like a particle and a wave. At this incredibly tiny scale, the physical world has been challenging to describe except with approximations, but the three laureates found ways to track elections with new technologies.

Pierre Agostini | The work honoured comes from a discipline known as attosecond physics, so called because the pulses of light used in the experiments last only an attosecond, a period so brief that scientists say there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the dawn of time roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

Moungi Bawendi, of MIT; Louis Brus, of Columbia University; and Alexei Ekimov, of Nanocrystals Technology Inc, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on quantum dots in electronics and medical imaging. Three scientists in the United States won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on quantum dots — particles just a few atoms in diameter that can release very bright coloured light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

Alexei Ekimov | The quantum dot technology, which enabled high-definition QLED TVs sold by Samsung, Sony or TCL, traces its roots to early 1980s work by Ekimov. At the time, he discovered that the colour of glass changes with the size of copper chloride molecules and that sub-atomic forces were at play. 78-year-old Ekimov, born in the Soviet Union and later moved to the US, marvelled at the latest flat screen technology, something he did not envision during his early pioneering work. "Remember what a TV was back then!" he said, laughing.

Louis E. Brus | A few years later, Brus extended the work to fluids. In 1993, Bawendi revolutionised the production of quantum dots and improved their quality. Among other uses, the research enabled LEDs that shine more like natural sunlight, avoiding the bluish neon light they were previously shunned for.

Moungi Bawendi | In 1993, Bawendi revolutionised the production of quantum dots and improved their quality. Among other uses, the research enabled LEDs that shine more like natural sunlight, avoiding the bluish neon light they were previously shunned for. Bawendi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brus is professor emeritus at Columbia University, and Ekimov works for Nanocrystals Technology Inc. Brus was hired by AT&T Bell Labs in 1972, where he spent 23 years, devoting much of the time to studying nanocrystals. Bawendi was born in Paris and grew up in France, Tunisia, and the United States.

Jon Fosse gets Nobel Literature Prize for giving 'voice to the unsayable' Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable," the award-giving body said on Thursday. Born in 1959 in Haugesund on Norway's west coast, Fosse is best known for his dramas, though his writing spans poetry, essays, children's books and translations.

Fosse, seen as a long-time contender for the prize and among this year's favourites in the betting odds, said he was "overwhelmed and somewhat frightened" by the award. The 64-year-old is the fourth Norwegian and the first since 1928 to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Jailed Iranian activist won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting women's oppression. Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of her tireless campaigning for women's rights and democracy and against the death penalty.

Mohammadi, 51, has kept up her activism despite numerous arrests by Iranian authorities and spending years behind bars. She has remained a leading light for nationwide, women-led protests sparked by the death last year of a 22-year-old woman in police custody. Those demonstrations grew into one of the most intense challenges ever to Iran's theocratic government.

Gender gap economist wins Nobel Prize. American economic historian Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel economics prize for her work examining wage inequality between men and women, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

Goldin, who in 1990 became the first woman to be tenured at the Harvard economics department, is only the third woman to win the Nobel economics prize. Goldin's 1990 book "Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women" was a hugely influential examination of the roots of wage inequality. She has followed up with studies on the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, women's surnames after marriage as a social indicator and the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates.