Nobel Minds 2018

Hello, I'm Zainab Badawi. Welcome to the Concert Hall in Stockholm, where this year's Nobel Prize winners received their awards from the King of Sweden. This is in recognition of their outstanding contributions to science and economics, which have brought great benefits to humankind. And this is the first time that they are appearing together in discussion on TV here on Nobel Minds. And they're joined in the audience by some of their family and friends, as well as students from across Sweden. Well, Nobel laureates, ringing applause and richly deserved. It's been quite a hectic week, I think, for all of you. Just give me some of your highlights. Professor Donna Strickland. Well, I'm the one who had the privilege of sitting beside His Majesty, the King of Sweden, for the banquet. And it was thrilling for me. And he was just so much fun. And we had a great time having a conversation. And you talked about girls just want to have fun in your speech. So fun seems to be the watchword. That's right. I like to have fun. Professor Moreau. The highlight, you know, was last night, you know, when we were really having receptions at the Royal Palace. And it was really amazing to see these tables and so on. And I was I had the privilege to sit next to a princess, Crown Princess Victoria. Yeah. And we had a great, great discussions about about everything. So mixing with the Royals, a highlight for you. This is something you don't do many often. Professor Honcho. Well, the same with me. I had lots of interesting conversation. So I really enjoyed last night. So it sounds like the banquet so far has been the highlight. Was it for you, Professor Francis Arnold? Well, I have to admit, the banquet was really quite special. But coming from Southern California, I have to say snow. It snowed the night of the ceremony. And that was just beautiful. Jim Allison. For me, the most special moment was when after the King presented the medal, I looked out for my family was sitting and saw my wife and son wiping tears out of their eyes. Oh, and you got all your bowels right. Yeah, I got all my bowels right. Quite a procedure. Yeah. George Smith. Well, I hate to be a party pooper, but actually, frankly, I think the highlight was the Nobel lecture. It's the thing that will last on as the memories of this celebration begin to fade. Professor Bill Nordhaus. The highlight for me was to bring my grandchildren here, my grand, my granddaughters, and to bring them to the banquet. And then when they were interviewed by the news that they were asked, was it too long? And they said, no, it was too short. Oh, wow. Because they're quite young, aren't they? And their mother was teaching them how to sit upright. Yes, but not run around in front of the kids. But all the adults were getting tired and they were just beginning to get revved up. Paul Romer. All of these parts were wonderful. I liked getting to know a few people here in Sweden. The Alexander who took our pictures when we were doing the portraits, it was just fascinating to see how he did his job. I also loved getting to know my driver, who was a woman and also a bodyguard. And she's she's pretty cool. Because I mean, you really are feted and celebrated, aren't you? So driven around in your own personal limos and so on. Well, anyway, well, let's start talking about why you won some of these prizes, and we're going to start with the economists, Bill Nordhaus and Paul Romer. But let's just have a quick look at what you won your prize for. By studying how nature and knowledge are affected by markets and economic behavior, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer designed economic models that address some of today's most fundamental and pressing issues. Long term sustainable growth in the global economy and welfare of the world's population. Professor Nordhaus has developed tools that project the economic impacts of climate change and provide approaches for slowing its progress. Professor Romer has explained how knowledge and ideas can serve as engines for long term economic growth and why government policies play a critical role in fostering technological innovation. Paul Romer, so just explain a bit more to us about the link between innovation and economic growth. When people look back on this time, what are they going to remember? Things like the discovery of electric light, antibiotics, the transistor, maybe maybe cancer immunotherapy that could be as big as antibiotics. In the long run, those kinds of innovations just make all the difference in the quality of life. But do they actually boost economic growth? They do. And, you know, we get we get income, but we also get quality of life that isn't always measured in income. The thing to remember is that we need as a society to steer the direction of innovation. There's some innovation that we don't want. Somebody could find a way to get coal out of the ground at very low cost. We don't want that kind of innovation. What we want is more of, say, innovation that helps reduce the cost of low carbon, zero carbon energy. But you say it's got to be steered. So markets are not enough to ensure that we have that innovation. Now, the way to think of the market is the market works for us. You know, it's not the boss. We're the boss. But don't forget the things that work like cities work. There's a technology for getting millions of people in a pretty small area. So just copy the parts about cities. What about intellectual property and all that kind of thing? And people putting up, you know, protectionism. Think of intellectual property as we always give these two handed answers. On the one hand, you could use intellectual property. But on the other hand, you could use science. You subsidize the research and you you give the results away. You know, President Truman said he wanted a one armed economist because he was so tired of on the one hand. But but but it's still important to remember that that system of science that we all participated in is a very good way to produce discoveries and get them out into wide circulation. So Bill Northouse, I mean, your research looks at how the causes and consequences of climate change and what can be done in economics to try to tackle climate change. I mean, what does your research tell us about what's doable, that climate change is bad for the economy and that tackling it is good for the economy? Well, I'll just start where Paul Romer left off with innovation. So we often think of innovations and inventions in terms of the things my my friends here have done. But let's just say that this was this was in this ballpoint pen was actually historic innovation in about 50 years ago. But these often we think of these gadgets, so to speak, or more fundamental ones. But also there's a whole nother class which are called institutional inventions where we invent new institutions. And in this field, I think the most important invention would be a fiscal system to steer the economy, whether it's a tax or another way of raising the prices of carbon fuels. This will steer the economy. But this this is actually we think it's obvious, but actually this was an invention of an institutional kind that has been made over the last 60 or 70 years. So you're an advocate of carbon tax, which just basically makes the use of fossil fuels, dirty fossil fuels more expensive and incentivizes producers and people through government policies or subsidies, whatever, to try and turn to renewable fuels. But is that really doable in practice? What what you economists may determine is desirable is sometimes not politically expedient, is it? Well, the thing I would emphasize is not the carbon tax, but the carbon price that you need to raise the price of CO2 emissions and thereby raise the price of fuels and all the products that the fuels are embodied in. So it isn't just burning the fuels, but it will be embodied in our electricity, in our air travel, in our ballpoint pens. So in in in proportion to the amount. And it doesn't have to be a tax. But does your research, Bill Nordhaus, actually show that it makes economic sense to tackle climate change? Yeah, you can do it and have sustainable long term growth. So in a in a broader framework, what we know is that the way we measure our output, which is the gross domestic product, mismeasures it because it doesn't incorporate the damages that are outside the market, such as health. Health is not included whether we die early or die young, whether we're sick or healthy. That is not included in our economic measurements. So when we include that, then we see we would actually have higher incomes in this real inclusive, comprehensive sense if we include measures that reduce the damages. It's not just climate change. It's also particulates from burning fuels and so on. Paul Romer, I mean, you've worked as a chief economist to the World Bank, advising governments and institutions. And you come from a political family. Your father was a former democratic governor in the state. I became a scientist, a politician's job is too hard. Well, this I was going to ask you. I mean, so yeah, but you economists can say, look, it makes sense to do this and to do that. And we need to direct market forces and so on and so forth, as you've been saying. But it's not easy for the politicians to always do what you think is right. No, I kind of like Churchill's quote about the United States is just applied to all humans. They always do what's right after exhausting all the alternatives. So you just have to be a little bit patient. But just staying with this idea of, you know, what governments can do. Professor Moreau, you live in Paris now, and we've seen the gilets jaunes, the protests against President Macron's desire to have these green fuel taxes, which he says are in part to try to combat global warming. Look at the problems he's had. He's abandoned the idea. Absolutely. These guys, you know, he's trying really to do something innovative. He's trying to push the people ready to save. I mean, there's no way we are going to to keep this style of living, you know, high standard. We have to do something. We really have to do something and and we have to introduce some incentive to do it. So I think the tax is and not an economist, OK, but I understand that maybe the tax is really the only way to put some pressure on the people and say, hey, you know, you you have to reduce your consumption. So how would you recommend that we we avoid the yellow jersey movement in if we raise the if the price of of carbon is raised because it hurts people? Well, I think the first thing is you make it comprehensive rather than focusing on fuel, and that's actually the most politically insensitive tax in the world is is a gasoline tax or a fuel tax. You make it comprehensive. If you make it comprehensive, it's more like a value added tax. It gets built into the chain of production. And then the other thing is you start at a low level and you build it up gradually. You need not to have only to have the tax, but you need to have the institutions. You have to have people who can accept this and realize it's part of our system is part of the solution. So I think just hitting people trying to do it as a kind of kind of shock therapy is actually politically the wrong way. You need to start small, start comprehensive, start universally across countries and build up gradually from there. If I can jump in, I think partly start small. Big government programs often almost always start small and get bigger. The other thing is we need to have the whole machinery of carbon taxes ready. We need to talk about it. But then at some point, there'll be some huge hurricane, some huge fire, something that becomes a crisis. And then all of a sudden, politicians are going to say, what are we going to do? And if we've done all of our homework, then they'll say, OK, let's let's do it. Anybody else want to come in on this? Well, the the raising the the price of these fuels and materials is critical, I think. But another way to come at the problem is to invent new technologies and lower the cost of the alternatives. So that's where scientists like us can contribute. We can invent those and improve on those technologies. And at the same time, then we're joining forces with the institutions that you create. That will bring us into chemistry, because Francis Arnold, you awarded half of the prize in part for finding green solutions to some of the world's problems like climate change and so on. So let's just see what the chemistry laureates won their prize for. And then we'll pick that up. Inspired by the power of evolution, Francis Arnold developed new biological material in the form of enzymes, catalysts that accelerate chemical reactions. Her work is currently being used in the environmentally friendly manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and the production of renewable fuels. George Smith was studying the biology of viruses that infect bacteria known as phages when he conceived a way of evolving the viruses to generate new molecules with desirable properties, an essential part of all living organisms. Greg Winter then harnessed this technique to create new antibodies, immune proteins that attack bacteria and viruses. The work of George Smith and Greg Winter has successfully been used to combat autoimmune and inflammatory bowel diseases and metastatic cancer. So, Francis Arnold, as we saw just there, your work has led to a multitude of potential uses. And what exactly is it being used to develop? Do you know? Well, chemistry of the biological world is is amazing. Biology is the best chemist on the planet because she knows how to take abundant, renewable resources and convert them into an array of chemicals and materials, some of which we've used for hundreds of years, thousands of years. Imagine if we could use biology to make most of the things we need, including fuels or agents that can be used for crop control. These things are happening now. You've made institutions that will make that possible by having the the price reflect the true cost of many of these products. But we are inventing the technologies that will make that possible. I use evolution to do it. Evolution has made everything in the biological world until today, and it can help us move forward. So I breed molecules like you breed cats and dogs. And I mean, give us an idea of what your work could really open up in terms of its potential uses. Well, the little workhorses of life that do all this chemistry are called enzymes. You have them in your laundry detergents, your consumer products. They make your blue jeans look nice. Many of the things that you use in your daily lives are developed with enzymes. I make them better than what nature did for human purposes. So, for example, we as several students and I started a company about 15 years ago that makes renewable jet fuel for airplanes, comes from plant materials, agricultural waste products or trees, for example. That you can use then to take those sugars and make jet fuels. So biofuels. Biofuels. That's one of the examples. And there are many other examples. And also, for example, the production of pharmaceuticals. You've also that can be used to detoxify the process, as it were. All sorts of applications. You can replace toxic chemical processes that use expensive metals, for example, that are environmentally hugely unfriendly to mine. You can replace all those with clean biological processes. I like to say you replace chemists with bacteria. You're actually a mechanical engineer, aren't you, by the way? I mean, did you always have a very clear vision of the kind of path and what you wanted to achieve? Well, in some ways, yes. I was always interested in doing something that would help humans and the planet. I think it's a pretty nice planet that we live on. And I'd like to see much of the natural world as possible be conserved. We won't do that if we don't learn how to make what we need in our daily lives in a much more efficient way. How you did that, I had to figure that out through a meandering path, which eventually brought me to evolution. You know, to describe to my students what a wonderful world we live in. I used to tell them, think of the cow as the best chemical refinery you could ever build. You know, like it takes renewable resources, it makes milk, it builds a new one when it wears out. You know, it's like it doesn't get any better than that. Well, yeast do better. But that we can make something like a cow out of just atoms. I mean, who'd have thunk? Or a yeast that takes sugar and makes alcohol. Oh, wow. Milk and alcohol. So George Smith, just staying with the chemistry prize, you were studying the biology of viruses that infect bacteria and worked with phages as phage display and so on, as we thought. So just explain a bit more to us. It's a way of creating a huge amount of variety of structures and a way of an investigator choosing a goal and selecting from that huge array of structures the few that can meet that goal. This is evolution up and down. This is what evolution does. It doesn't have a goal in mind. But if we mimic it in laboratory, we ourselves can have a goal in mind and no idea in detail how that goal can be achieved. Phage display, your work on that, which really allows us to generate human antibodies, was then built upon by Sir Gregory Winter, who is not with us in this discussion. But he used that and it went quite a way to helping tackle rheumatoid arthritis and metastatic cancer. So, you know, something which has really been remarked on greatly. I wonder if you could just mention that link there. Greg mentions libraries of 100 billion structures, selecting from among those the rare ones that will meet a goal. So the goal in that case was antibodies that would be fully human could be used in therapy without provoking an immune reaction against the antibodies themselves because they come from a foreign source like a mouse. So Greg set out to create a library of human antibodies artificially, a huge, huge libraries and devise a way of selecting those that would have a specificity for a desired target that has therapeutic importance. Can I just draw the link to the Literature Prize, which was awarded this year? Voorhees has this famous story, the Library of Babel. Do you know? Yes. Yeah. I mean, what you're describing is really just like what Voorhees describes in the library. I actually used that in my Nobel lecture. Yes. It's a nearly infinite set of possibilities. And what the phage display does and to a lesser extent, what enzyme evolution does is give you a way to search through that library that Voorhees didn't have that way to do it. But evolution can take us through that infinite set of possibilities to find the ones that are useful for life and for us. And if you think if we keep looking for a vaccine for malaria, do you think we'll find it? Because we've only explored a few, a very small part of the space. Well, maybe you would fund my grant. You can do the finance. Professor Smith, make your pitch. Why not? You're on television. Well, I'm retired now, so I'm not searching for grants. But yes, it's specifically the approach that I had suggested was a way of finding many more vaccine candidates so that we didn't depend on 10 or 12, but perhaps on 200 candidates that would have a pretty good starting chance of meeting the goal of a vaccine. It seems that a vaccine should be possible. You've all harnessed the power of evolution in your work. And we've talked about cancer, which remarkably, it's the first time that a Nobel Prize has been awarded for advancements in the treatment of cancer. The medicine or physiology laureates will come to you in a moment. But let's just have a look at what you won the prize for. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo discovered how to unleash the body's immune system to attack cancer cells. James Allison identified a protein that acts as a brake on the immune system and realized that by reversing it, the system would be able to attack cancer cells. Independently, Tasuku Honjo discovered another protein, which also operates as a break on the immune system, but with a different mechanism. It's the first time the development of a cancer treatment has been acknowledged with a Nobel Prize. Professor Jim Allison, so did you set about trying to find a cure for cancer? No, not really. I was trying to understand the function of T-cells, which are a product of evolution and ultimately that are cells that go throughout your body, looking for things that oughtn't to be there. We've developed this system of cells, a way of making receptors on them that can recognize nobody knows how many different things. T-cells are a type of white blood cell. White blood cells that have antigen receptors on them, they're called, they can recognize almost anything that nature throws at you because they create in your body a library, such as we've heard about it, that consists of, probably you have, not as big as some of these libraries, but you've probably got somewhere between 70 and 100 million different T-cells in your body that can recognize, you know, most anything. So you set about trying to understand the immune system better. Exactly. We found that there was a molecule called CTLA-4, anyway, that was the brakes on that system. And it's what a large part of what it does is stop T-cells from proliferating. And one of the ideas that I had was for some other ideas after we figured that out was that maybe the reason that the immune system isn't so good at attacking cancer is because that it stops the T-cells before you have enough to kill all the tumor cells. And so if we just disable the brakes for a time, we could let them keep going until they, you know, eliminated all the cancer cells. And so that was the idea, pretty far-fetched, because at the time, everybody thought that T-cells divide, then they die. It's not that. This is an active mechanism whose job tells the T-cells to stop it. So that was your work. But what about you, Professor Tasuku Honjo? I mean, you were working independently and also discovered how to kind of release the brake in the immune system, which stops it from attacking cancer cells. But did you set about trying to just understand how the immune system works better, or did you think to yourself some treatment for cancer would be a really good ambition? Well, in the bottom of my heart, because I'm a medical doctor originally, I wanted to have some hope to cure the cancer or any diseases. But when I started working on the PD-1, it was just a molecule we accidentally identified starting the T-cell selection or regulation of the T-cell again. But when we found this is a different break than Jim just mentioned, and why the immune system is working so well against the cancer? Because cancer just accumulates mutations. They become different from our body. So that's one reason why we can attack. Professor Honjo, I mean, there are hundreds of types of different cancers. Yes. So when we talk about treating cancer or curing cancer, can we actually cure cancer? And can we cure all sorts of cancers? Or are we just talking about some specific ones? Well, at this moment, there are several cancers which we can cure, some which are very difficult. There are several reasons. One is the immune system cannot approach to the site where the tumor is located. But some cancers do not express so many different molecules than normal cells, meaning the mutation rate is low. So at this stage, we cannot say we conquer the cancer. It's just the beginning of the whole story. So we need lots of research. Professor Jim Anderson, I know that you personally have had a lot of experience with cancer. You yourself have had three types of cancer. You lost your mother at the age of 10 to cancer, a brother, uncles, cousin. And so it's it's something that you, you know, have experienced firsthand. But I want to bring in one of your patients who was suffering from melanoma, Sharon Belvin, who's traveled all the way to Sweden to be with you at the celebrations of the Nobel Prize. And Sharon Belvin, I wonder, so give us your story, because you've been suffering from or you had cancer. What what happened? So I was 22 just out of grad school, and I found out that I had stage four melanoma. So lungs, lymph nodes and brain pretty much as I was a child, I didn't even know what life was like at that time. Every single conventional therapy for melanoma, like Dr. Allison said, I mean, not very effective. It was a death sentence at the time. We tried it all until I was offered a clinical trial for an immunotherapy, and it worked textbook. I got one round of treatment and I have been in remission ever since. I was diagnosed in 2004 in remission since 2006, 2018. That must be very important to you. That's. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When I first that happened, Sharon told me that she's tumor free. And I don't know, I cried a lot along with her, along with her. And that was 14 years ago. And well, let's turn to the physics prize, because that's also had some medical applications and Professor Donna Strickland and Gerard along with Arthur Ashkin, who couldn't be with us. And he is, in fact, the oldest Nobel Prize recipient at 96 by some measure. We'll talk in a moment. But let's just have a look at what you won the prize for. Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland paved the way for the highest intensity laser beams ever created. Their optical pulse technique is now used in millions of corrective eye surgeries every year and in many other industrial and medical applications. Arthur Ashkin created optical tweezers, precision tools that enable scientists to grab tiny living cells in laser beams without harming them. His work has transformed the way researchers are able to study microscopic life. So, Donna Strickland, along with your supervisor, Gerard Mourou. Not anymore. Not anymore. No, she's turned the tables, maybe. You won half of the prize. Donna Strickland, you said you saw your first laser at the age of 10 and it was love at first sight. There are many societal applications for your work, but you're a great advocate of science for science sake, aren't you? Why? That's right. I mean, there are now applications of what Gerard and I did. But at the time, we were trying to do pretty basic atomic physics with our laser. And we also knew that when we changed the laser intensity by orders of magnitude, it would change how light interacted with matter. And but we couldn't exactly tell how it would change. But we knew that it had to change because we were going to be beating those atoms to death. So. But and then down the road, that leads to discovery and innovation. But my big thing is that we have to remember to always try to push for fundamental science, because without that 20 years down the road, there can't be more innovations if we don't keep trying to understand the world at a very small level. Do you agree with that? Or is the most useful science the best science? I think it's funny, and I think that in my case, it all came from basic science to trying to understand how T-cells work. I think if somebody had just said how we're going to kill tumors, there's no other found another way of pushing on them. But they wouldn't have discovered that there's the part that's important to take the brakes off. And then they'll they'll do their job. I take a slightly different view. It's kind of like this notion of diversity. I think you need a lot of different kinds of activity, some of which are very problem focused, some of which are very basic. Basic. One of the things we say is that thermodynamics did. Sorry, the steam engine did more for thermodynamics than thermodynamics did for the steam engine. So sometimes it's not the basic science that comes first. George Smith, have you got a view on this science for science sake or the best science is the most useful? No, I absolutely no, I don't believe that the best the best science is the most useful. I mean, I I would analogize innovation to the phages that I work with, which infect promiscuously in the the the cells that they that they that they infect. They can be combined with each other, make new versions that go on to infect. And I think ideas, intellectual progress is like that as well. The applied science steals from the basic science. All the tools that we use in applied science to solve a problem were developed by basic scientists so that you cannot have one without the other. And basic science goes back and uses the new tools that come along. So it's a back and forth. In fact, it is back and forth. And it's not always the basic that comes first. I mean, remember the steam engine. So that's right. So I think that's right. So Donna said it goes back and forth. Some donor said, I'm going to create a hundred million dollar prize to come up with a vaccine that's effective against malaria. Would that be a bad thing? I mean, you are talking about life science. And this is where, you know, I think we differ, because for me, from life life science, it's not really fundamental science. For me, it is. But the steam engine. Oh, I mean, I'm sorry. I think we get a hundred million dollars. You said, I want you to develop a vaccine for malaria. You'll get a vaccine for malaria, maybe. But you won't learn anything about how to treat cancer. You'll learn anything. That's not true. That's not true. When Pasteur was trying to solve the problem of just how do you carry food for the French army that doesn't spoil? He invents microbiology. Well, and in fact, in evolution is a great example. No one knows how to design an enzyme, but evolution finds the solutions. And then we reverse engineer the solutions that work in order to understand the basic principles. So in that example, you're exactly right. It's got to be a diversity in the biology. We are in a very primitive stage, so we don't know where the real good is. You know, if you know which direction you go, you get something great. If that happens, it's great. But at this stage, I think all we have to do is dig many places and somebody hit the goal, somebody hit something. And then we have to think. I just want to reemphasize this in these points in terms of science policy, because often the people who pay for our science ask us to do applied science. They say, what is the application? What is the use of this? And if you're doing something that isn't obviously useful, then it's more difficult. It's not just an individual project, but sort of in terms of this whole streams there, we need streams in different areas. And there's a there's a story that may or may not be true. But when Queen Victoria visited Faraday in the laboratory and said to him, what is the use of electricity? And which is like a stunning, stunning question. And he said, Madam, someday you will tax it. Which which may or may not be true, but it's a good example of how difficult it is to for and fundamentally difficult, as all of you have been saying, to forecast what direction the science. You're talking there of Michael Faraday, the British scientist in the 19th century. Donna, I think the point I was trying to make is that if somebody came to me and said, what we need is a better tool to cut an eyeball back in 1985, until we understood that the work that we did actually changed how we understand that the atom in the light sees each other would have always stayed a thermal process because it was the only way we understood it. And now it's not a thermal process. And so this is you can ask for someone to have a cutting tool, but we couldn't have come up with it from being asked to do it. At least this would not have been the way it happened by accident. And maybe relate the story because laser eye surgery, which was cited in your prize as being one of the benefits, along with how to tackle space debris as well as nuclear waste, reducing its radioactive properties by hundreds of thousands of years. But it came about by accident. And that was in Gerard's lab, though. Yeah, that was my lab. It's exactly what we what we were talking about. Yes. And we were doing fundamental science, but it's trying to understand the interaction of light matter, OK, which is very complicated things. And and when my student, you know, aligning the laser, got the laser in his eye. We took it, you know, to the to the ophthalmologist. Look at the look at the students and the eye of the student. And then he said, wow, you got hit with the laser. Indeed. But what kind of laser do you have? And the student said, you know, why are you asking me these questions? I say, well, because your damage is perfect. And now you have millions of people each year, you know, getting your eye fixed by the femtosecond laser. So Donna Strickland, in the end, your approach to pure fundamental science was actually very useful. Yes. But it took this 10 year gap there. That's that's what I'm saying is that you can't necessarily hope for an application right away. And I'm not saying that I don't agree with you. You can come at it from all sides and you have to have everybody working on all levels of it. But sometimes I get a little frustrated that the science that just doesn't have an absolute application seen down the road does not ever get the million dollar funding. And maybe it would be nice if people would just sometimes say, I have a million dollars for you to do whatever the heck you might want to do. That's all I'm trying to say. Donna Strickland, it's been much remarked upon that you're the third only the third ever female physicist to win the Nobel Prize. And the first in 55 years. And you have talked about an implicit bias against female scientists. You were told, weren't you, when you were interested in science and math, that these were boys subjects? I was told by a high school teacher that at some point and I was stunned. And I thought that was such a ridiculous thing to say that. And I couldn't say that to a teacher. So I turned to my friend who was a male and said, do you know you're into girl subjects? Because he was so good at English. We're starting, I think, most institutions to understand and be taught about implicit bias and the fact that you might not think you're prejudiced against one type of thing or another, but that somehow your background ideas come into play and that you have to learn to get around that. And so I think with effort, things keep changing. And I'm sure it won't be another 55 years. Francis Arnold, I mean, one of you would want to comment on this. The fact is, if you just look at overall, 95 percent of all Nobel prizes since it was started in 1901 have been won by men. Is that because you think the women are doing the work and not being recognized or they're just not being encouraged in sufficient numbers to go into sciences? Well, in the past, of course, the numbers were very low. And that that is certainly reflected in the dearth of women, winning Nobel prizes. But I agree with Donna, that's going to change and it's going to change fast because women are doing science at the highest levels and they make up 50 percent of the most brilliant minds. So and they're doing science now. So I'm looking forward to a much better future. Professor Moreau, actually your supervisor, not only was your student a female that shares the prize with you, but your supervisor was a supervisor. Yes, I did. At that time, I did not think anything wrong about it or weird about it because maybe because the French, I think we have historically, you know, always accepted women. I mean, you see Marie Curie, for instance. Yes, of course, the first Nobel prize. Exactly. And usually, you know, when we were going to a meeting, to a conference, you were saying you were seeing a scientist and often, often, often, you know, it was she was a French, you know, if you saw a woman, if you saw a woman science in our field, it was the one they were French. Well, it's changing fast in part because in the biological sciences, at least over half the students now are women. I think in the medical field, certainly doctors. It's half or even more than that. So are we going to soon worry about why men don't do it? Maybe we should eventually. Well, come to the end of this discussion. Just want to ask you all and you've reached what some regard as the ultimate accolade, receiving a Nobel Prize. What next, George Smith? Well, I'm retired, so I've long since thought of what next. I took a couple of months of retirement from my retirement just now. But I guess the first one thing that's next is I have to learn that I don't know everything the way Nobel Prize laureates are encouraged to think of. But my future is really not specifically in science, but maybe in political activity. Professor Maru. Well, for me, I don't think anything is going to change because what I like is race science. And so it's not because I get this Nobel Prize that I'm going to change my habits. I think, on the contrary, I think I'm going to to do it better because now, of course, you know, when when someone with another prize speaks, people listen, you know. And so I'm going to try to do the same thing. But better than what next? Well, I'll continue to work on the things I've worked on recently, which are climate change. But actually, I began working in much the same area. Paul Romer did his work, which was on technology. And technology has brought has been miracles. I mean, we're living here rather than caves because of technology. But just as economic growth has side effects of dark side effects like climate change, I also think technology has dark sides. And I particularly am concerned about its dark side on our institutions, on our democracies. And I'm particularly concerned about the role of social media like Facebook on on our institutions. Professor Jim Anderson. Well, I think that we've shown now that we could cure some patients with cancer. I have the goal of trying to get that rate close to 100 percent possibly can and and as many different kinds of cancers we have. And I'm hoping that the prize again will give me a bit of a soapbox first. It's shown that immunotherapy works, which everybody was skeptical about before. And hopefully it'll help bring more more funding and help us get the work done. But also two other things that may not be so obvious. One of them is to let patients, you know, have hope that they're, you know, death can't the diagnosis of cancer isn't necessarily a death sentence. And, you know, they can actually some at least can be can be cured. And the second and the final one is that I think I hope that the prize will inspire more patients to participate in clinical trials, which will help us progress faster. Professor Taskew, Andre. Yeah. So I had actually two drinks. One is to get the Nobel Prize. But the other one is the age shoot in my golf games. Beautiful. France's own. Well, after this week, I have to say my immediate goal is to get some sleep. But I'm very excited about the future of evolution and how I have one good idea in the 1980s. And I've worked it ever since. But there are such amazing things that we can use to move into the future. And the combination with machine learning and artificial intelligence is a frontier that I'm going to ride to the next level. Don't switch them. Well, I mean, I have to say that my life has been turned upside down because of a Nobel Prize and everybody wants to hear from a Nobel Prize. So I'm already booking into 2020 at this point. But I agree with George that some some of the people that actually want to hear from me all of a sudden are the politicians. And I do have some public policy work that is not about my own research, but about photonics in general and how important it is. And I'm getting that opportunity to speak to government leaders and try to explain that. And in particular, we think photonics has a huge role to play in environmental measurement and monitoring. So we can try to do all these things for climate control, but we have to know that we've done them. And so we think photonics has a huge role for that. And so that's one of the things that I'm out there pushing in public policy. And Paul, we get to bring 14 people to the events here at the Nobel Ceremony. And I brought along Professor Caroline Weber and her parents and my family. And we got married this week while we were here in Stockholm. Looking forward. I'm looking forward to a honeymoon where we can turn off the phones, turn off the devices, just just read. With that on that joyous note, double congratulations to you, Paul Romer. Renewed congratulations to all of you. That's all from this year's Nobel Minds. Thank you very much indeed to all the Nobel laureates, to our audience and of course, to you wherever you're watching in the world. For me, Zainab Badawi and the rest of the Nobel Minds team from the concert hall here in Stockholm, Sweden. Goodbye.