NOBEL PRIZES WENT TO WOMEN

The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded 119 years ago, and this year for the first time in its history, two women won without having to share the prize with a man. Their groundbreaking development may shift the perception of women in scientific roles, and continue to disrupt the centuries-old mindset that women are second to men in innovation or in any field. 

Dr. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at UC Berkeley and French researcher Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planch Institute accepted the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors, a technology that can rewrite DNA in cells. This enables treatment of diseases such as sickle cell anemia and muscular dystrophy through making corrections in the cells of tissue, according to Doudna.

“I really hope this is breaking that glass ceiling so that in the future it’s not surprising that two women or more win awards,” Doudna said. 

Dr. Andrea Ghez, an astronomer and physics professor at UCLA also made a mark as the fourth woman in history to win a Nobel Prize in Physics—a prize first won by Marie Curie in 1903. 

“I’m delighted to be part of the change—the change being more women visibly succeeding because I think that’s an important way in which we encourage the next generation,” Ghez said. 

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna will share the 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

On other field The Nobel Prize in Literature was this year awarded to Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Glück, whose name rhymes with the words “click” and "clit" has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older.

SILFS (Società Italiana di Logica e Filosofia delle Scienze / Italian Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science) Prize for Women in Logic and Philosophy of Science Awarded this year to Anne Sophie Meincke and Anela Lolic

Anne Sophie Meincke — A Process View of Pregnancy Since Aristotle, substances have enjoyed a sort of ontological primacy, and this has shaped our language and thought. Anne Sophie Meincke asks us to look at the world around us in terms of processes rather than entities, and thus at a pregnant individual as a process—a “bifurcating hypercomplex process”. This innovative perspective appears able to open promising research directions and generate fruitful debates, not only in the domain of the metaphysics of pregnancy, but also in the fields of philosophy of biology, ethics and bioethics.

Anela Lolic — Towards the Analysis of Mathematical Proofs: Cut-Elimination and Herbrand’s Theorem in Presence of Induction The work proposed by Anela Lolic belongs to an emerging research line, dedicated to the analysis of mathematical proofs based on the methods of structural theory of proof. The work is characterized by originality, a remarkable formal sophistication and an expert fusion of established methods of mathematical logic and recent methodologies.