To stay relevant in the fast-changing modern age has never been too great a challenge for the Nobel committee. Not even the state of world affairs that is decidedly cheerless now with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the famine in Sudan and unnerving thoughts about what more havoc climate change can wreak as hurricanes and monsoons rage in the Americas and Asia has deterred the committee from thinking about the core qualities of mankind that generate a positive vibe for life on the planet.
The choices this Nobel season may yet again have been predominantly male and Anglo-Saxon, mainly in the pure sciences, but the thinking aspects of the committee’s work in challenging times may have helped it decide on an unusual pick for the Nobel Peace Prize, which mercifully did not go to the likes of Donald Trump or the UN Secretary-General who were among the 197 individuals and 89 organisations nominated.
The Nobel Peace Prize, often withheld in times of strife, went instead to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, for its work towards a world free of nuclear weapons. How much of a different world this would be if only there were guarantees that the pain the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki endured would never be the lot of anyone else among the eight billion people who are inhabiting the earth now.
At a time when diversity is sought as an ideal in an increasingly multicultural world, the committee zeroed in on a popular pick in Han Kang, the South Korean writer of intense poetic prose “that confronts the historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
There was a distinct tilt towards rewarding current research that is helping humanity take a peep into the future, which is why those working on providing the building blocks of Artificial Intelligence were awarded the physics prize and three scientists for predicting and creating proteins, using AI, the chemistry prize. Similarly, the medicine Nobel went to a duo for their discovery of micro-RNA, a previously unknown genetic switch which could well pave the way for more medical breakthroughs.
Given the inequalities the world is suffering from, with the rich only getting richer and the poor poorer, it was a recognition of work towards correcting them that the economic sciences prize went to a trio for their work on the gaps in prosperity among nations and why this happens. If their studies help us understand how the inequities occur, they indeed will prove a blessing for humankind.
