Nobel Prize Conversations

"Try to follow your enthusiasm and do what you are really passionate about and what you really love to do.” As a child, Benjamin List thought chemists held the keys to the secrets of the universe. Luckily, by the time he learned this wasn't so, he was already hooked on doing chemistry experiments he found in books. Even today, he still feels passion for the field, and tries to surround himself with passionate researchers.Benjamin List was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with David MacMillan, for his work in developing asymmetric organocatalysis, a tool for building new molecules, in cleaner and more efficient ways.Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

”An amazing number of economists have extremely paternalistic ideas. They just want to tell people what to do.” Don't worry. David Card, 2021 laureate in Economic Sciences, doesn't want to boss you around. Instead, he's made a career trying to understand the economic choices people make. He shared the prize with Josuhua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their empirical contributions to labour economics.Professor Card talks about growing up on a dairy farm, about the need for more diversity in PhD programs and his reluctance to become involved in policy-making. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some people manage to retain the relentless curiosity of a child into adulthood, keeping them on a constant quest of exploration. Meet Giorgio Parisi, who tells us about his journey of curiosity, which started by learning to read numbers at the age of 3: “I was reading the number of the bus when the bus was arriving.” At an early age, he also started to read the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, as his parents’ large library encouraged reading. Parisi describes his life journey and how he ultimately decided to dedicate his life to physics as that topic made more sense to him than mathematics. In 2021 he was awarded the physics prize "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales." He shared the prize with Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meet economist Joshua Angrist who believes that to be a good labour economist, you should have had some real-life job experience. In conversation with our podcast host Adam Smith, Angrist tells us about his disinterest in school and how as a teenager he was more interested in earning money and maintaining his car. His later surprising and instant connection with economics led him to dedicate his life to his research: “I never stop thinking about my work.”Angrist was awarded the 2021 prize in economic sciences and speaks about how the award has affected his life; “It was wonderful to win the Nobel Prize, but I am the same guy I was on October 10th.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I think there's a little bit of romanticism in science still. I find that the dreamers are usually the ones that make it.” Practical work, like conducting experiments and gathering data, might be central to a scientist’s job. But there is also room for dreams and imagination – which can help us find the gaps in our knowledge, and dare to ask unexpected questions. Ardem Patapoutian received the 2021 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine together with David Julius for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch. In this episode, Patapoutian discusses the importance teamwork and diversity in the lab, and the art of learning from experience – and from failure. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, meet football fan and chemist David MacMillan. Together with podcast host Adam Smith, he speaks about the importance of storytelling and his strong belief that “science is supposed to be about having fun, it is not supposed to be about intimidating people.” MacMillan shares his journey from a family where no one had gone to university to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. He was awarded the chemistry prize in 2021 for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis. We also hear about how his upbringing in Scotland shaped him as a scientist and why his parents insisted that he went to university. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"One minute I was a teenager and the next minute I was a woman.” – Leymah Gbowee shares her heartbreaking life story of a happy childhood cruelly interrupted by the Liberian civil war. Nobel Prize Outreach's Adam Smith is your host as Gbowee also talks about her constant and tireless struggle for women’s rights and peace in her home country. Her never-give-up attitude has been a constant in her life and work, and something she tries to instil in young people, encouraging them ”to believe that they can do whatever they put their mind to”.Leymah Gbowee shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her peace work.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This special live episode features a conversation with Klaus Hasselmann, the 2021 physics laureate. Before that we will also present some highlights from this year’s announcement telephone interviews. Hear Klaus Hasselmann alongside his fellow 2021 laureates David Julius, Benjamin List, David MacMillan and Ardem Patapoutian – and relive some of the moments of disbelief, shock and excitement from the calls.From the stage of Nobel Week Dialogue in Gothenburg Sweden, podcast producer Karin Svensson reprises her guest role as host of the show, asking Adam Smith about the new crop of 2021 telephone interviews. Then, Nobel Prize Outreach’s Adam Smith takes the helm for a conversation with Klaus Hasselmann. Klaus Hasselmann received the Nobel Prize in physics for developing climate models to reliably predict global warming. He shares the prize with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi. He is a professor emeritus of the University of Hamburg and a former director of the Max Planck institute for meteorology.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

”Sometimes I make a mistake during the lecture, I'll make an argument that's not quite right and not even notice it, and a student will catch me. I just love it when students do that.” – Economic sciences laureate Paul Milgrom loves being a teacher. He also loves when his students correct him and ask him hard questions that he doesn't know the answer to. In this podcast episode the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith speaks to economist Milgrom about his own school years and what type of teacher he aspires to be.Paul Milgrom shared the prize in economic sciences with his PhD advisor Robert Wilson for their research on auction theories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I won the Nobel Prize so I built a much bigger house than I ever planned.” — Wole Soyinka envisioned a small cottage on a large plot of land as a retreat for his writing, but a phone call from Stockholm made it possible to super-size his plans with rooms for many artists to dedicate themselves to their work. Literature laureate Wole Soyinka, who only very occasionally grants interviews, speaks to the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith about his photographic memory, his creative process and the question of who he writes literature for. His home of Nigeria figures prominently in his writing, and he looks ahead to the future of his country. Wole Soyinka also tells us about his passion for space and space travel, or as he puts it, "I am a space nut!"Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1986 and in 2021 he published his first novel for almost 50 years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.