From Wikipedia - Reading time: 5 min
The 2020 Nobel Prizes were awarded by the Nobel Foundation, based in Sweden. Six categories were awarded: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences.[1]
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, programming for Nobel Week was limited, with some ceremonies and events taking place virtually.[2]
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Penrose
(b. 1931) |
"for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity" | [3] | ||
| Reinhard Genzel
(b. 1952) |
"for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy" | |||
| Andrea M. Ghez
(b. 1965) |
||||
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emmanuelle Charpentier
(b. 1968) |
"for the development of a method for genome editing" | [4] | ||
| Jennifer Doudna
(b. 1964) |
||||
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harvey J. Alter
(b. 1935) |
"for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus" | [5] | ||
| Michael Houghton
(b. 1949) |
||||
| Charles M. Rice
(b. 1952) |
||||
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Louise Glück
(1943–2023) |
"for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" | [6] | ||
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| World Food Programme
(founded 1961) |
United Nations | "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict." | [7] | |
| Awardee(s) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paul Milgrom
(b. 1948) |
"for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats"[8] | [8] | ||
| Robert B. Wilson
(b. 1937) | ||||
The Chemistry Prize's awarding to Charpentier and Doudna provoked debates about who "discovered" CRISPR, with some arguing that scientists like Feng Zhang or Virginijus Šikšnys should have been properly credited.[9]
Each prize's awarding amount increased from 9 million Swedish krona to 10 million.[2]