Nobel Minds 2014

Hello, I'm Zainab Badawi. Welcome to the magnificent concert hall here in Stockholm, where this year's Nobel Prize winners received their awards from the King of Sweden. This is the first time that they have come together on television and they're joined here in the audience by their family and friends, as well as students from all over Sweden. We'll be asking them if the best kind of science is useful science. Welcome to Nobel Minds and this year we have discoveries that help with our everyday lives, that bring light to poorer communities and reduce energy costs, that tell us how we know where we are and where we are going. The Chemistry Prize is about seeing. Now for the first time we have microscopes that can see molecules and the Economics Prize helps tell us how we can better structure markets to benefit the consumer and society. So that's the work of our Nobel laureates here. Congratulations and welcome to you all. Okay, so before we talk about your various activities and so on, I want to know how you all found out that you had become this year's Nobel Prize winners and it is wonderful to have a rare species with us today. A female scientist who has won the Nobel Prize, you won it in Medicine or Physiology, my Brit from Norway. So just tell us how did you find out? No, so I was at, it was a beautiful Monday morning and we had a lab discussion, presentation of some data and I was so excited by this data and then I got this annoying phone call and it was a number that I didn't recognise and I just know, I normally don't answer phones that I don't know the number of and then I suddenly got this female intuition, behave, answer the phone. Your reaction went viral when you realised why you'd won. You started dancing, didn't you my Brit? Yeah. Can you show us what you did? So we have the dancing Nobel Prize laureate here who danced for joy when she heard she got it. Edward, my Brit is your wife of course, you're a couple both and also your colleague Professor John O'Keefe who is not with us, you were given the prize in Medicine or Physiology but you were on an aeroplane I understand? That's right, so I actually got to know it after everyone else. I landed at Munich airport, I was going to Max Planck Institute and I was met by a woman, a representative from the airport that picked me up and I asked why did you come to the gate of the plane and she told me that I won a prize, I didn't take it and then she said it was a prize from the Max Planck Society so she mixed it up and then finally I started checking my phone and then hundreds of messages and then one from Joran Hansson. But not your wife? No, she was not there yet and he said that it's important, call me back and then I. So that's how you found out, okay and Stefan Hell, so you were, I think you were accessible weren't you? Yes, actually I had a project discussion with the postdoc because we have seen something new and exciting with our sharp light microscope. You were one of the chemist laureates I should say, yeah. Right and actually I wanted to know whether this has been seen somewhere else and I pulled down a paper where I felt that it could be perhaps mentioned there or not and I wanted to study the paper to see what was known and if that is totally new what we've seen and it turned out to be new. So and the phone rang when you were talking? The phone rang and I was surprised of what's going on. But you didn't dance? I didn't. You didn't dance, okay all right and your fellow chemist laureate here Eric Betzig, I think you were also at a conference in Germany. I was. So how did you find out? Well I think there's somebody here who can speak to that question better than I can. Really? Yes. Who's that? That would be my son Ravi, he's 15 years old. Oh so where's Ravi? Oh Ravi you've got a house, so hello everybody this is Ravi Betzig, so what happened? So keep in mind that unlike the others my father and I live in the States so the announcement is very early in the morning, our time 5.30am and I had woken up early to do some work and the phone rings I'm thinking who on earth is calling this early in the morning but I pick it up and they say it's a secretary and I say hello and she says yes is Dr. Betzig there and I say yes ma'am I'm Dr. Betzig and she's a little bit skeptical but she transfers the line to an older sounding man he says sir Dr. Betzig congratulations on winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry along with your colleague Stefan Helen W. Morner and I said sir sir yes I'm actually not Dr. Betzig Dr. Betzig is my father he's currently on business in Germany and here's his mobile number if you want to contact him there. That's amazing. One question for you Ravi is what were you doing awake at 5.30 in the morning? I had some schoolwork I wanted to finish. Oh right okay that explains it well thank you very much so that's how you found out then they called you on your mobile phone but yes but you can see I have a prize that's much more valuable than a Nobel. Yeah absolutely absolutely one of your four children I think is that right yeah and Professor W.E. Murner so what were you up to? I was in Brazil I had a conference a scientific conference getting dressed ready to go to the meeting and the first thing that happened was a text from my wife it says turn on your phone of course my phone didn't really work there so anyway she had gotten contacted first by the Associated Press and called me. So you knew it wasn't a prank call okay so two of the three Nobel Prize winners in physics because your colleague Professor Akasaki again is not with us Professor Nakamura so I think you live in California because you're at the University of Santa Barbara so it must have been an unearthly hour for you when you were told. Yes yeah so basically you know I got the phone call at 2 p.m so 2 a.m so 2 a.m is I was sleeping you know so and but one day before I know my colleagues told me you know you have to put the cell phone on maybe there are possibility you know so I yeah I left my cell phone next to my bed and at 2 a.m was the ceremony. So you were kind of forewarned so it wasn't a huge surprise for you what about your colleague here Professor Amano? Yeah in my case I was in the plane from nowhere Japan to transit Frankfurt and I saw many many email entitled congratulations congratulations but I didn't understand what the congratulations means so I moved to the final destination to France Lyon and found many journalists came the exit of a life of home and finally I'll find him. So you were actually in Lyon in France yeah where you found out so that's it and Professor Jean Tirole you are the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in economics this year now I think you missed the initial call didn't you because your phone was on vibrate were you working on some great new theory? Actually not I was I was working on a European Research Council grant with a collaborator. How mundane. Yes that's very mundane you we also have to get money with scientists and like my brain I didn't want to be bothered so I put my phone on vibrating mode so they kept calling and calling and calling and then I finally heard the phone vibrating and I looked at it and I said I saw 46 46 what is this oh 46 is Sweden what's going on so I took it and you get it and you wonder is that a joke and you know it was not a joke. No clearly it's not a joke because you're here now well let's carry on with you Professor Tirole because you were given the Nobel Prize basically for various theories that all come under one umbrella as it were of how to structure markets regulate them regulate big business and so on to better benefit the consumer and I know that when you were giving your ceremony I was listening to the citation they sort of compared your theories to a baker how a baker selling bad bread and has no competition is going to carry on selling the bad bread rather expensively and your theory helps tell us how we can tackle that kind of market abuse. Well that's right we there's always danger that firms which are non-competitive can raise price or offer low quality so you have to work through it in two different ways one is antitrust or competition policy you intervene to avoid abuses of dominant position or bad mergers which will raise price and lower quality or you can regulate directly telecoms and electricity and banks and the like so our work has been to apply game theory and information economics to that kind of situation so as to provide theories and empirical work that could help those authorities to deal with big firms. And can you see now areas where we have monopolies or oligopolies where they are kind of crowding out competition and they themselves perhaps are a bit inefficient and give expensive products for the consumer can you think that's quite a common problem in the world now? It's a common problem it has always been I mean with telecoms and electricity and railroads there are what we call essential facilities or bottlenecks which are extremely costly to reproduce so you have natural monopolies and you have to give access to create competition so part of our work was to think about how to create access to those bottlenecks but you also have you know in all those high-tech industries you're like you know you have like Google and Microsoft and there are large fixed costs of for example building a search engine or there are large network sites because there are lots of apps and people want to interoperate and so in the end you tend to have monopolies at some point of time but the important thing is that new firms which are more efficient can enter to replace those monopolies if needed. I want to go to the audience here because we've got a couple of questions from economic students we've one here just say your name briefly and then put your question please. Maria I wanted to ask what do you think it is more effective to regulate large entities like Spain or the United Kingdom or maybe smaller ones like Catalonia and Scotland? Okay before you answer that let's just see if there's any other question yeah young lady behind you just give us your name. My name is Gail you authored that your work don't have to be influenced by your political ideas but as economics and politics are closely related what are your recommendation for future economies to remain as much as possible political neutral? Okay do you want to answer that first of all is it easier is regulation easier when it's for because I mean that's it you know you can't just regulate parts of the financial institutions globalization means you need a global regulatory framework. I think Maria's question is a very important one for one thing lots of those firms now like the banks are actually multinational so we have to regulate at a broader level so in Europe for example you have the European the banking union which tries to actually regulate at the ECB level at the European Central Bank level and antitrust authorities also try to cooperate more and more with each other because it's hard you know Google is a worldwide enterprise of course so that's an important thing and you know climate change also it's you know it's an obvious thing that you have to regulate at the world level regulated at the country level is not going to help because then the pollution is going to migrate somewhere else so you need a world agreement for that. Again in your citation they said that you don't shy away from the politics and I know that you've been quoted in the press giving advice to the French government about its massive deficit and telling them that they have to reform or die and so on so you don't shirk the political area do you? Well I try to be neutral in the sense that I never comment on politicians and politics or you know support a candidate or anything like that I think it's very important because otherwise you are linked to a party or to some ideas and basically discredit because they will say you know you are saying that not because of your science but because you are you have those political leanings so actually when I got the prize all the journalists wanted to know whether for whom I voted and nobody was able to say and also they wanted to know whether I was a pro-market or anti-market person and they were unable to say and the reason you know is that I just say what my science says and you know whether I like it or not I just go for it and you know and then journalists didn't extrapolate of course you know they say you know they try to to say it's in support of this kind of this person or this party and that I dislike. So not party political so you are kind of unbiased and you stick to your science but you do have very strong political opinions for instance you've been quoted as saying that you think the euro is a flawed currency and you believe in what could loosely be described as a EU super state you're a big federalist. I'm a big federalist yes that's right I mean the eurozone institutions are a little bit weak so it's it's a currency union but at the same time you don't have the institutions which goes with a currency union like the US for example the US has a currency union but also has a common budget as common laws and we don't have that in Europe and I would like to have that in Europe as well. Now it's a bit difficult to do right now because there is such a difference between northern Europe and southern Europe that we should have done that earlier of course but but hopefully that will come. But you're you say you're a big federalist but I mean you know you look around European countries at the moment and you know you in the Front National in France did very well in the European parliamentary elections we have the UK independence party in the United Kingdom. Your opinions perhaps are slightly going against the tide of public opinion in Europe? Well I'm afraid so I mean it's true that I mean here in Sweden you see what's happening and and it's happening almost in every country in Europe where you really have xenophobic countries and parties and it's very hard to understand I mean we should we should understand what where history is leading you is leading us and and people just don't learn and also very bad economics and all those parties those extremist parties have terrible economics but people don't realize that. Edward let's turn to what you did you did it was divided into two the prize between your work and Professor O'Keefe's and since he's not here just sort of really paraphrase that he identified what are known as place cells working with rats which kind of tells us about the workings of the inner GPS in our brains that tell us how we know where we are and where we're going and how we store that information so we can use it for the next time yeah so tell us tell us more about and why his discovery was so significant you you migrate. You listen to the small electrical pulses in the brain in the brain cells because they talk about sending electrical pulses and one such pulse you can magnify so that it's ten thousand twenty thousand more in amplitude and then you can listen to it and then a place that would be silence silence silence and whenever the rat is coming back to a certain place in the environment you hear the same popcorn sound like a popcorn bag in a microwave oven and it's such a beautiful sound for us and we've got about half a million to a million place cells yeah in our brains in the hippocampus at least in the rat brain yeah yeah which is what somewhere near the temples is that right yeah just somewhere there you identified a separate set of nerve cells involved in navigation which are activated when a rat passes certain locations hence the grid cells so just you tell us about those yeah so the difference is that the place cells that O'Keefe discovered they are usually active at one location the cells that we discovered we call them grid cells because they are active at many locations and those many locations form a grid a very very periodic map of the environment so it's almost like a coordinate system where you have crossing points that are at regular distances sure and since we're talking about useful science this discovery helping us understand how the brain works but we know in illnesses like brain diseases like Alzheimer's that a sense of space and where you're going is one of the first things to go so what kind of application might your discovery help Alzheimer's and other mental yeah I would like to say two things about that first of all that area that contains those cells that's usually the first one to be affected in Alzheimer's disease and you get problems with navigation and so on but so it's very important for Alzheimer but I also say that it's perhaps even more important because it allows us to understand the basic principles of how the brain works so these cells are so easy to measure let's actually provide a window into the working principles of the brain and I think this is basic research we understand how the brain works and then in the future I can guarantee we'll also understand other diseases because we get to the fundamental principles of the brain like what are the diseases schizophrenia depression anxiety disorders the whole spectrum because they all depend on some rather small number of working principles that is used by the brain wonderful let's hope that happens yes and and the interesting thing is what Edward said here that if you have a window and you can put a window just remove part of the skull and put a window and use these guys microscopes and just we'll come to these guys microscopes in a let's go to the audience who's got a question for the morses this dynamic duo huh obviously the two of you working together was very successful but maybe you can tell us a little bit more how is it if your partner your colleague at work is at the same time your wife or husband if you see each other all the time I can tell you one thing at least I don't have to sit home and then get the critics why isn't the dinner finished but my bread you are as I said a rare species because there are very few women since I'm with scientists I will use more exact scientific precise language you are the only female amongst these Nobel laureates that's true and I often sit around this table when I've done this program in the past and there are no female science laureates so I have to ask you why is it that you know particularly at the top of the pyramid in the scientific community in academic institutions there are very few my brit morses even in your own country Norway no sir that's not part of my background and science so I I have to just speculate and of course when when when you need to when when you get such a prize you are sort of the top of a pyramid and in order to come to that pyramid you you need a pool and the pool you need is a lot of women here and then it's become sharper and sharper up to the top so it's just about we need to to get more women interested and also more women who can trust themselves so that they think yes I'm good enough to win a Nobel prize why not but to to be in science you have to work a lot you have to travel a lot and especially a mom and here is I might be biased but especially a mom doesn't want to leave her children because you've been to conferences when you're and girls were very small yeah and and leaving a baby while you are breastfeeding you don't do that it's it's painful I've tried it once never ever again any other comments from here Eric Betzig my wife and I met at Janelia she's a neuroscientist and same thing is is that it's it a two heads are even though she's in a different field than I am you know two heads are better than one there's there's sort of common principles that we can help each other out at work and we can help with the child rearing and tag team take off you know time is necessary for the kids but one thing we don't do is no pillow talk about science once we get home science is really we'll talk it's who's put the rubbish out and that kind of conversation we want a stress-free environment professor Murner your views on this what I see happening is some improvements in these numbers over time I bet if you looked at those numbers 10 years ago you see that they're better now because some of these new policies that are being put in place to help with child rearing that are help with sort of alternative ways of helping across this barrier so we're working hard on it we're working very hard to get more women in at high levels of the professorate at in the United States Stefan how I think it improved definitely in Germany I think the number of female students in physics and chemistry has gone up substantially so when I started out of 100 students maybe two or three were women now it's 20 your chancellor Angela Merkel is a scientist yes actually you think they've got a role model there yes and she worked as a scientist too didn't she didn't just study it yes that's correct what about the experience in Japan women scientists in Japan how do they do yeah in terms of the statistics we are still in the development only 80 percent of the full processor is women in my university in our university it's a national university so one of the top level university but still only eight percent of women professors are women yes in Nagoya university where you are yes thank you so let's turn to the chemist laureates so you basically working independently came up with a solution to make microscopes work much better so that now for the first time we can look inside cells to see molecules but how did you do that because I mean microscopes have been around for ages the prize recognizes a super resolution fluorescence microscopy and some people may not know what this fluorescence business is so I can illustrate it a little bit and give you a few of the key ideas here here's a liquid there are a lot of molecules in this vial maybe 10 to the 24th that's one with 24 zeros after it but inside this we also have some fluorescent molecules that and we want to be able to see these molecules so let me just illustrate the idea I have a green laser here a green laser pointer that's green very green but when I shine it through this solution the fluorescent molecules inside give you a more of a yellowish color and and you can see that I can just like a lightsaber only where the beam is going it's hitting the molecules and the molecules are sending light back that's what we mean by fluorescence and so what we are doing in these microscopes is using lasers and this property I just showed that the molecules themselves emit light back like little tiny light sources and it's because 25 years ago one of the ways to achieve super resolution relies on being able to see single molecules that's what I worked on and you can actually now in with your eyes look into a microscope and see the light coming from individual molecules so Eric I mean the the chemistry prize you know was awarded because it's about seeing but what does this seeing actually do what kind of diseases might it help us? I always feel uncomfortable when media tries to project us into applications of technologies it will have applications but it's very difficult to predict that's one of the things with technology in general is it's very difficult to predict what the ultimate ultimate benefits will be. Are you willing to predict Stefan? He's willing to predict thank you. He can send the question to us. I mean we have used the high resolution you know to find out a key processes going on for example in HIV so biology I'm quite quite confident will be strongly impacted by the microscopes that we have invented. Professor Moerner do you feel queasy about answering what kind of future applications? Well the the real point is you you see in much greater detail than what you saw before and you see surprises you see things that weren't necessarily expected and all of these super resolution methods are something like recognizing that that the cell is something like a little city where there are many molecules proteins that are moving around little motors and DNA and RNA and so forth but if you only look at it very very high up in the sky where it's only fuzzy you don't see what's going on the super resolution lets you see far more clearly that is a factor five ten or more better already and the point is then you see surprises things that we didn't understand about the cell biology. You've benefited from these guys discoveries haven't you? In general yes the the advances in microscopy and especially the advances that allow microscopes fluorescence microscopes to be used in in living animals so the resolution that the three laureates have worked on today it's even beyond what we can use at the moment but I think this will come. Professors Amano and Professor Nakamura along with Professor Akasaki you were all awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for your blue light emitting diode which made possible a highly efficient light source that's now replacing the incandescent light bulb that Thomas Edison gave us so we've had red green emitting diodes for what about 50 years and your blue one has been around for about 20 years you combine the blue with the red and the green and perhaps you can show us what happens Professor Nakamura. Yeah basically without the blue blue light we cannot make white. Big advantage of the LED lighting is a point light source so we can use lens to make any kind of shape of the light you know for example this is circle but we put the some kind of filter it become rectangular shape this is the best lighting for the art art you know. So this kind of light is amazing because it's brought the potential of a cheap source of energy for communities all over the world that don't have access to light yes and it's also bringing down energy bills yes because it's a more efficient use of yes this is can be operated by battery mobile lighting cell phone ipad all kind of mobile device have to use this lighting to make displays and also most importantly third country third country there are no electricity only available energy sources like sunlight solar power yeah solar power so solar power charge the battery daytime and night time we can operate led lighting so you have solar power yeah this kind of device and a battery with the blue led giving the the white light yeah and it's how much would that cost as a device i think now less than ten dollars about ten dollars yes so a person could use that ten dollars yes with the source of solar power and how long would that last for without this is three years three years yes that's amazing yeah can i explain in this special situation of japan electricity generation um maybe you remember that in 2011 then the big earthquake attacked japan so the about that the all the nuclear power plants stopped now so the nuclear power uh plants uh supplied 30 percent of the electricity but now it all stopped so we have to adapt the another way so the led is very important to reduce the energy consumption what the nobel prize said is that electricity lighting accounts about 20 percent of global energy use yes through the use of your white led in time that could come down to five percent not only do these light bulbs last 100 times as long as the incandescent bulb they also contain no mercury and one application also is the ultraviolet light can be used to clean polluted water yes uh ultraviolet is useful basically to kill bacteria like the ever vice kill ever vice by that ebola virus and also to pure pure water and pure pure purified uh air basically we can uv light we can kill bacteria it's amazing it kill bacteria yeah purify light and so on but professor nakamura you had a very publicized fight with the corporation that was funding your research you felt that your you weren't properly remunerated for the research that you did to develop the blue led you were given what a bonus of 180 dollars yes and they went to and you could potentially make millions and millions out of this invention yes basically yeah in 2000 i moved to the united states so my fulcrum company started a lawsuit against me using infringement of trade secret so i became so angry about my to my former company so as a counter lawsuit i started a lawsuit against my former company using japanese patent law article 35 that one is even if i could invent something for company as an employee patent right belong to me so the patent rights in japan belong to the inventor not the company that employs the inventor yes that was lucky for you yeah if i have any agreement you know so in my case no agreement so but uh but uh court uh in a court judge says you know patent rights belong to the company even if there are no agreement of document but the judge also same time told me you have a right to get the reasonable compensation fee i won't say what it is but it was very reasonable wasn't it okay yeah but you were happy with it yeah it made you a millionaire a multi-millionaire i said about eight million dollars eight million dollars not bad at all i mean how do all of you feel around the table here that in terms of you intellectual property and patent rights and whether your inventions are used in the future in a way which is basically a money spinner do you feel that you should we have a number of patents for our stuff uh most of them are infringed on left and right and frankly we don't care you know i mean you can either spend your time talking to lawyers all the time and be miserable or you can get back in the lab and invent something else but you worked for your father's tool company i mean would he not have appreciated it if you invented some wonderful tools well yeah well i did invent things for his company they just sold poorly stefan in my case very unusual i started out my scientific career is writing a patent in 1990 before i had a postdoctoral job and this turned out to be extremely helpful because at the later stage in my career um i ran out of support institutional support and so i used this patent um and basically licensed it to a small company in finland that gave me money a hundred thousand dollars in return and i used this money in a very critical period to do my research and that nine months of research that was funded by by the hundred thousand dollars really got me further i'm so glad to hear that yeah that was very can be absolutely life-saving yes what about what about here this you can't really patent yours is just knowledge isn't it that's out there hard luck that's all right anybody what about you two i think for us it's important to say that neuroscience is a big family and we share a lot both ideas and data so from our lab we put data on the internet so that other people can analyze it and the two reasons one is that we give very good data and the second thing is then we don't need that many animals since we do animal research so we've got a question from the audience yeah my question relates to research in africa we know that huge successes have been made in the west and in my opinion there is a lack of collaboration with researchers in africa which has resulted to the outbreak of ebola for example how could this be explained and what threat does this pose to global health okay thank you we'll take another question from the floor my question was a little bit related to his question is in experimental science because highs are our main tool how do you identify that sparkle that will turn into a fire because so many time researcher lands on something and then because they don't have enough elements to pack it up sometime they tend to just put it on the side but how do you what does it get to get the nobel prize how do we identify it ah well all right eric betzig there are a few points there and you know because i have opinions on all of them but i don't want to take them everybody well just touch on it but you're a very interesting story because here you are a nobel laureate in chemistry but i think in your own words you said i was lousy at chemistry i sucked at chemistry that was my exact yeah and in fact none of you is a chemist and yet well well yeah you are you are sorry the chemistry department you're in your head of the chemistry physical chemistry but you're a physicist and you're more like a physicist but anyway with that but uh the the committee cited two specific papers for me to get the prize and both of them happened while i was unemployed so um but but the in terms of the spark thing i think what what you want to do is you want to immerse yourself in problems and try to not sweep problems under the rug but focus on problems and outstanding problems and try to put pieces of a puzzle together to solve these and if a good scientist i think gets this monomaniacal focus on the problem and you may not have all the problems but at least in my case the solutions have come when i'm not directly looking at the problem but through the subconscious mind either i was pushing my daughter around in a stroller or so poincare talks about this in his book about how you have to just starve your mind of everything except the problem so the subconscious is forced to work on it and then he was taking a vacation stepping on a bus and then all of a sudden he had this flash of insight it's it's kind of for me i have great confidence in my subconscious mind i've described you as a kind of reluctant chemist and how you were not good at chemistry at school but you also had a bit of a kind of disdain for academia and you know life in the ivory tower and in fact you quit academia research and went to work for your family's tool business right right so so i i still don't think i would ever be comfortable in a standard academic environment in some ways um i've always just wanted to work at the bench and in some ways the standard model seems to me an incredibly inefficient way to do research because you train somebody to excel at bench science through their postdoc and then you make an assistant professor out of them and rip that all away from them and stick them in an office and make an administrator out of them i've been fortunate both at bell labs and then where i work now they believe in in allowing scientists be scientists and not administrators and people begging for grants and so i can be in the lab and and be more productive stefan yeah we also had that question about um you know ebola for instance and other viruses and so on and we're told all the time now that antibiotics are not as effective as they used to be does your work in any way relate how would you answer that question in the context of your work because before you can cure something you have to understand it exactly exactly and i think microscopes allow us better to understand what's going on including the deceased cell and of course i i think to some extent below to allow to understand much better how drugs work and i can imagine that seeing things now at a cellular level will affect treating diseases substantially so in conclusion all of you do you think that the best science is useful science and all these budding nobel laureates we have around us here what's your final word of advice to them okay edward yeah i want to get back to the question basic science i really think it's so important that we also spend efforts on understanding things where we don't know what it will be useful for because the and especially perhaps i see that in neuroscience i mean you understand you don't understand the brain enough to know actually what is useful but i i think as we get more knowledge about how the brain works i know that it will be important for for the whole range of psychiatry neurology and so on and for us professor there's there's many ways in which these two two ideas are intermingled uh absolutely i agree that basic science is very important but sometimes basic science can be driven by some technological need and there's many examples of of where the technology hasn't has something new that needs to be embedded and that sort of gets people's mind thinking i can come up with an idea that might might make that work and then new science comes out of the ability of that new method to see new things the original single molecule work came from work at ibm on exploring an optical storage scheme and the fundamental limits of a completely different optical storage scheme completely out in the left field and and we we saw single molecules as a result and then that blossomed into you know applications in biology it's you just have to have both but you have to have some interplay between them and stable continued funding for the basic science professor tyrol what about your advice to budding noble scientists because i mean and economists because you're a real superstar now in france wherever you go you're stopped you know photographs and written and we know the prime minister manuel val said that this was a poke in the eye to all those people who were being anti-french gallic bashing and so on are you happy being a french it's very nice to i mean there's a lot of pride in my country about this uh you know at the concert in my honor i took and so here and then there was a big banner on the city of my city you know 12 meter by 15 on the city hall for two weeks and people stopped me in the street but in the end you know it's flattering but the thing i want to do is to go back to my lab and just carry on with your work and and the japanese i mean the japanese media have been really huge in their presence in stockholm with three japanese nobel laureates i mean you're superstars aren't you although you professor nakamura i mean you said you know your battle with the japanese corporation you left in disgust and went to the united states because you felt that you could develop your work better there but yeah how do you feel pulled in two directions japan is claiming you as their great one of their great stars i i don't know but uh but i began boarding in japan so that's that is i moved to the united states to challenge new things always as a scientist i i have to do new thing new challenge so that is i moved to the united states and but uh but i am now i'm a u.s i have a u.s citizenship so after finding japanese people finding my u.s so they become a little bit angry so now i'm a noble lord for united states not japan oh my goodness oh i think what do you think about what your colleague professor nakamura said then no more prize for the united states i have a little bit different opinions yeah in my case it's like engineering science and the for in my part the most important thing is to imagine the future system or imagine the future for example the microsoft bill gates like so the it's like invention oriented of course i understand that the fundamental basic study is very important but for for us the most important thing so basic study is the which direction should we go so yeah all right stefan i think it's best to concentrate on problems that seem to be very difficult to solve i think those problems are the most interesting problems the most rewarding problems but there's of course the risk in taking and tackling such problems and therefore i think we have to embrace not only taking risk but also we have to embrace the failures especially also to honor those people who try hard do their best but fail but don't start with this is a problem in the world i want to fix it that may be like that but and sometimes you you get an idea of what you want to do and that comes out of the blue and with intuition of course and usually if you if you do it out of intuition you do it with passion and then you have to be passionate about what you do my bread no it is about passion and you need a vision so you you want to have a burning question and if you have a burning question whatever it's microscopes or leds or economy or neuroscience then that is the star that is leading you forward and then you don't care about methods or if you have a salary or whatever you have because it's so burning you can't stop is it a passion or an obsession obsession also you're a psychologist you should know all about obsessions and so on eric betzig what would your advice be to the potential well it's just been said passion um but a lot of times i see kids in high school or college who are in science who are in some ways pushed into science and and sometimes their motivations are to please their parents or something else and if you would rather be a rap star or rather be a painter or rather be something else just follow your passion because in the end the purpose of the passion is get you past the failures and to get you so that you work hard because every field of endeavor it comes down in the end to hard work and and hard work is kind of like compound interest in a bank if you work 10 harder than the other guy it actually multiplies year by year until all of a sudden your experience is twice or triple the other guy and then you can excel in your field and then you win a nobel prize well who cares if you're lucky it cares about that so you heard it here folks passion i'm all for passion that's the end of this exclusive program with this year's nobel laureates we've looked into the minds of some of the greatest brains working currently in their fields that's all from the concert hall here in stockholm thank you to our audience here family and friends of the laureates as well as students from all over sweden thank you to you wherever you are watching this from me zaynab badawi goodbye