The Nobel Prize –
Featuring
Professor Thomas C. Südhof
Named
after Alfred Nobel, the Nobel
Prize is the annual international award to praise and
acknowledge individuals with outstanding contributions
in cultural and scientific research. Founded in 1901,
the Nobel Prize has since been regarded as the most
prestigious award for the six prize categories of Peace,
Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature
and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer,
inventor and entrepreneur in the 19th century. Among
his 355 patents, he was most famously known for
the invention of dynamite. The active ingredient
in dynamite, nitroglycerin is extremely dangerous
to work with as the highly unstable, colorless liquid
can be detonated by the slightest triggers of friction
or movement. Nobel discovered that by adding
kieselghur, a type of a naturally occurring sedimentary
rock, nitroglycerin became much easier to handle.
Along with his invention of dynamite and his other
patents, he set up various companies and laboratories
turning himself into a very wealthy man.
Toward the end of his life, he
became increasingly
c o n c e r n e d
a b o u t h i s
l e g a c y
a n d
how
he would be remembered. As a result, he specified
in his will that his amassed wealth would set up a
trust to create a series of prizes for those who confer
the "greatest benefit on mankind" in peace, physics,
chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature.
The Nobel Prize truly awards recognition and honor
to its Laureates. Prof. Thomas C. Südhof is a testament
to this. Prof. Südhof is currently the Avram Goldstein
Professor in the School of Medicine as well as a Professor
of Molecular & Cellular Physiology, Psychiatry, and
Neurology in Stanford University. He completed his
doctoral study in the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical
Chemistry in 1982, and began his postdoctoral
fellowship in the University of Texas Health Science
Center (now the UT Southwestern Medical Center) in
1983, under the supervision of two Nobel Laureates,
Joseph Leonard Goldstein and Michael Stuart Brown,
who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in
1985. Initially, he faced opposition to his ideas but
through his continuous hard work and perseverance,
he was able to prove his worth. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize in 2013 along with James Rothman and
Randy Schekman in medicine or physiology for their
research in cell organization and transport system.
Prof. Südhof’s Nobel winning work helps us to better
understand how nerve cells communicate. Nerves
are interconnected by numerous junctions known as
synapses that pass information via neurotransmitters.
Every action, emotion or behavior requires the firing
of millions of synapses simultaneously. Südhof began
his work on synapses in 1980s, with the realization that
synaptic transmission is the fundamental building block
of virtually all brain activity, determining the functions
and processes that happen in the brain. He was
ultimately successful in identifying the proteins
involved in this precise mechanism, revealing their
role in neurotransmission, which was previously not
well understood.
For Südhof, the greatest inspiration in research
was from an unusual channel – his classical music
teachers, in particular, his bassoon teacher,
where he learned that creativity is intimately
intertwined with hard work and scrupulous
attention to detail. To him, motivation comes
naturally in a field he finds “intrinsically interesting”
and useful to mankind. His advice for students who
are interested in science and research as a career is
to possess curiosity, energy as well as the satisfaction
and yearning to learn without becoming exhausted.
“Science really is for idealists”.
