Another year, no woman has ever been awarded a Nobel laureate in science. Three men won medicine Monday. Three other males received the physics on Tuesday. And three other men have been awarded with the chemistry today. Since the year 1901, the Nobel prize winners 18 times women and 581 men. They have only received 3% of the science Nobel laureates.
By category, the number of males is triggered in physics, with 2 women and 205 male winners (more than 99%). The figures also squeak in chemistry: 4 Women and 174 men (almost 98%). And in medicine, with 12 scientists compared to 202 scientific (more than 94%).
Several researchers appear year after year in the pools to receive an award the absence of women is not for lack of candidates. Researcher Arlene Sharpe of the Harvard Medical School (USA) was in the betting for the Nobel prize in medicine for her work to take advantage of the human body’s own defenses to fight cancer. French Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna were also favorites for developing the crisper genetic editing technique, which promises to save millions of lives with its revolutionary DNA manipulation.
In physics, the Dane Lene Vestergaard Hau, with a lab at Harvard, was in the betting for slowing down the speed of a light beam to 17 meters per second. In chemistry, the American Carolyn Bertozzi, Stanford University, featured in the pools for illuminating communication between cells, essential to understand processes such as cancer.
Other Nobel candidates have recently died without taking him away. The American astronomer Vera Rubin, the woman who brought the first proof of the existence of dark matter, died in December 2016 at 88 years. The American Deborah Jin, who sounded as a Nobel in physics despite her youth, died of cancer at 47 years in September last year, after studying the properties of matter at near-zero temperatures. And this same year he died at 86 years American engineer Mildred Dresselhaus, known as “The Queen of carbon Science.” He was a pioneer in the study of the electronic properties of the materials.
