What the 33 Science Nobel Prizes of 2016 to 2026 Were For, from Gravitational Waves to mRNA Vaccines to AlphaFold

Between 2016 and 2026 the Nobel committees awarded 33 prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine, to 85 people. They cover the first detection of gravitational waves (physics, 2017), the CRISPR gene-editing tool (chemistry, 2020), the mRNA technology behind COVID-19 vaccines (medicine, 2023) and the AI system AlphaFold, which predicts the shape of proteins (chemistry, 2024).

The table lists the laureates. The sections after it say what each prize was for, following the Nobel committees’ own press releases.

The 33 prizes at a glance

Physics, 2016 to 2025

Thouless, Haldane and Kosterlitz won in 2016 for using topology, a branch of mathematics about properties that change only in whole steps, to explain strange states of matter such as superconducting films.

In 2017 Weiss, Barish and Thorne were honoured for LIGO, the pair of laser detectors that on 14 September 2015 caught gravitational waves from two black holes colliding. The Academy said the waves took 1.3 billion years to arrive and that the instrument measured a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus. Our piece on hearing black holes collide covers what the detectors have found since.

Ashkin shared the 2018 prize for optical tweezers, laser beams that hold tiny objects, including living bacteria, without harming them. Mourou and Strickland got the other half for stretching a laser pulse, amplifying it and squeezing it back down. The Academy says the technique is used in millions of corrective eye operations every year.

Peebles won half of the 2019 prize for a theory of the universe that, by the Academy’s account, shows only about 5 per cent of it is the matter we know, with the rest dark matter and dark energy. Mayor and Queloz shared the other half. In October 1995 they announced the first planet found around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b.

Penrose won in 2020 for proving in January 1965 that black holes follow from Einstein’s general relativity. Genzel and Ghez led two separate teams that tracked stars at the centre of our galaxy and found an invisible object of roughly four million Sun masses packed into a region no bigger than the solar system.

In 2021 Manabe and Hasselmann were honoured for climate modelling. Manabe showed how more carbon dioxide raises surface temperature, and Hasselmann developed methods to pick human “fingerprints” out of the climate signal. Parisi, who shared the prize, found hidden patterns in disordered materials.

Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger won in 2022 for experiments with entangled photons, particles whose results stay linked even when far apart. Their tests showed that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a hidden-variable theory. The Academy ties the work to quantum computers and encrypted communication.

Agostini, Krausz and L’Huillier, the 2023 winners, made flashes of light lasting attoseconds. An attosecond is so short that a second holds as many of them as there have been seconds since the universe began, in the Academy’s comparison. Such flashes let researchers follow electrons moving inside atoms.

Hopfield and Hinton took the 2024 prize for work behind machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hopfield built a network that stores patterns and recovers them from damaged copies, borrowing the maths of atomic spin. Hinton built on it with the Boltzmann machine, which learns to recognise features in data.

The 2025 prize went to Clarke, Devoret and Martinis, who showed in 1984 and 1985 that an electrical circuit big enough to hold in the hand can tunnel through a barrier and absorb energy only in fixed amounts. The Academy links it to quantum computers and sensors.

Chemistry, 2016 to 2025

Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa won in 2016 for molecular machines. Sauvage linked two ring-shaped molecules into a chain in 1983, Stoddart threaded a ring onto an axle in 1991, and Feringa made a molecular motor in 1999 that spins in one direction. The Academy likened the motor’s stage of development to the electric motor of the 1830s.

The 2017 prize honoured cryo-electron microscopy, in which biomolecules are flash-frozen in water that solidifies without forming crystals, then imaged with electrons. Dubochet, Frank and Henderson made it work, and the Academy notes that atomic resolution arrived in 2013 and that researchers have imaged the surface of the Zika virus this way.

Arnold shared the 2018 prize for directed evolution of enzymes, a lab version of mutation and selection first done in 1993. Smith and Winter won for phage display, a way to evolve antibodies. The first drug from it, adalimumab, was approved in 2002 for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and bowel inflammation.

Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino won in 2019 for the lithium-ion battery. Yoshino built the first commercially viable version in 1985, and the Academy says the batteries entered the market in 1991 and now run phones, laptops and electric vehicles.

Charpentier and Doudna won in 2020 for the CRISPR/Cas9 “genetic scissors”, which can be steered to cut DNA at a chosen spot. Charpentier found part of a bacterial defence system in 2011, and in 2012 the pair turned it into a programmable tool. On 8 December 2023 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Casgevy, which it describes as the first CRISPR/Cas9 therapy it had approved, for sickle cell disease in patients aged 12 and over.

List and MacMillan won in 2021 for organocatalysis, using small organic molecules to speed up reactions where metals or enzymes had been the only options. It lets chemists build just one of two mirror-image molecules, and drug makers usually want only one.

Sharpless and Meldal developed click chemistry, in which building blocks snap together quickly with few by-products, and Bertozzi made versions that work inside living cells. They shared the 2022 prize. The Academy says the methods are being used to improve how cancer drugs reach their targets, in clinical trials.

Bawendi, Brus and Yekimov won in 2023 for quantum dots, specks so small that their size sets their colour. They now light some TV screens and LED lamps, and the Academy says they can help surgeons see tumour tissue.

Baker, Hassabis and Jumper shared the 2024 prize. Baker designed an entirely new protein in 2003, and Hassabis and Jumper presented AlphaFold2 in 2020. The Academy says AlphaFold2 has predicted the structure of virtually all of the 200 million known proteins and has been used by more than two million people in 190 countries. Our AlphaFold explainer goes into how it works.

Kitagawa, Robson and Yaghi won in 2025 for metal-organic frameworks, crystals with large empty spaces that gases can flow through. Chemists have built tens of thousands of them, and the Academy lists uses such as pulling water from desert air and separating PFAS chemicals from water.

Medicine, 2016 to 2025

Ohsumi won alone in 2016 for working out autophagy, the process by which cells break down and recycle their own parts. He found the genes involved in baker’s yeast in the early 1990s.

Hall, Rosbash and Young won in 2017 for the molecular clock inside cells. Working in fruit flies, they found a gene whose protein builds up at night and breaks down by day. The Academy connects this clock to sleep, body temperature and jet lag.

Allison and Honjo shared the 2018 prize for cancer treatment that works by releasing the brakes on the immune system. Each found a different brake protein on immune cells, and the Academy says the work established a new principle for treating cancer.

Kaelin, Ratcliffe and Semenza won in 2019 for showing how cells sense oxygen and adjust their genes when it runs low. The Academy says the work opened routes to new treatments for anaemia, cancer and other diseases.

Alter, Houghton and Rice won in 2020 for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, the cause of the blood-borne hepatitis cases that remained unexplained after the A and B viruses were found. The Academy says it made blood tests and new medicines possible.

Julius and Patapoutian shared the 2021 prize for finding the sensors in our nerves that respond to heat and to touch. Julius used capsaicin, the burning compound in chilli peppers. Patapoutian used pressure-sensitive cells.

Pääbo won alone in 2022 for sequencing the Neanderthal genome and discovering the Denisovans, an extinct human relative. He also showed that genes passed from these groups to modern humans about 70,000 years ago, and the Academy says some still affect how our immune system reacts to infections.

Karikó and Weissman won in 2023 for the mRNA vaccine breakthrough. They found in 2005 that chemically modifying the bases of lab-made mRNA stopped it from triggering harmful inflammation, and later papers showed it also raised protein production. Two such vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 were approved in December 2020 after reported protection of around 95 per cent. The Academy puts the total of COVID-19 vaccine doses of all kinds at more than 13 billion.

Ambros and Ruvkun won in 2024 for microRNA, short RNA molecules that dial genes down. They found it in a 1 mm roundworm, and their 1993 results were first seen as a quirk of the worm, until a second microRNA, found in 2000, turned up across the animal kingdom. Humans carry genes for more than a thousand of them.

Brunkow, Ramsdell and Sakaguchi won in 2025 for regulatory T cells, the immune system’s “security guards” that stop it attacking the body. Sakaguchi identified the cells in 1995, Brunkow and Ramsdell found the Foxp3 gene in 2001, and treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease based on the work are in clinical trials.

What was announced on 5, 6 and 7 October 2026

The medicine prize came first, on 5 October, to Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel for optogenetics, a way to switch nerve cells on with light. Hegemann and Nagel found a light-sensitive protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga in the early 2000s. Deisseroth put its gene into rat nerve cells, published in 2005 that blue light could trigger a nerve signal, and in 2007 made it work in the brains of living mice. Researchers now use it to trace circuits behind memories and feelings, and the Nobel Assembly says some are trying it to restore sight.

The physics prize followed on 6 October and went to Halzen alone, for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Neutrinos are particles that pass through the Earth almost untouched. Halzen first proposed catching them in the clear ice at the South Pole in 1988, and IceCube, a cubic kilometre of ice fitted with light sensors, was finished in 2011. It has since found neutrinos that must come from far outside our solar system.

The chemistry prize, on 7 October, went to Kagan and Soai. Amino acids come in two mirror-image forms, yet living things use only one. Chemists long wondered how that one-sidedness arose. Kagan showed in 1986 a way of getting more of one mirror image than expected, and Soai in 2003 produced a reaction that yields only one of the two, a feat the Academy says no one but life itself had achieved before.

Where India fits in these 33

The Nobel Foundation’s database returns 12 laureates born in India across all categories since 1902, some of them born in places that are now in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Nobody on the 2016 to 2026 science list is among them. The last India-born winner in physics, chemistry or medicine was Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who won the chemistry prize in 2009. The only India-born laureate in any category since 2016 is Abhijit Banerjee, who won in economics in 2019, with the 2026 peace and economics prizes not yet announced.

The nearest link is to the 2017 physics prize. LIGO Laboratory announced on 17 February 2016, six days after the first detection was made public, that the Union Cabinet had given in-principle approval to LIGO-India, a third detector to be built in the country by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology. The three nodal institutes named in 2016 were in Pune, Indore and Gandhinagar. The LIGO-India website still describes the observatory as planned.