The 2025 Nobel Prize Winners

Podcast Transcript

Every year, the Nobel Prize committee awards the Nobel Prize in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel.

Save for the years where there have been world wars, the prize has been given annually since 1901.

The 2025 prizes have just been announced, and each recipient has made a unique contribution for which they have been recognized.

Learn more about the 2025 Nobel Prize recipients and the work that they were recognized for on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded every year, and each recipient has a unique story behind their recognition.

I figured this would be a good annual tradition for the podcast to review the recipients each year and provide a summary of the work they did to receive the prize.

In many cases, especially in science awards, their work is often not understood by most people.

So, I figure I’ll take that job upon myself.

Let’s start with the oddball award in the Nobel Prizes, the prize for Literature.

The winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature is the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.

The reason why the literature prize is such an oddball is that the Nobel committee has to recognize work that is done all over the world. In the case of literature, that is difficult because there are so many different languages that authors write in.

Almost every year, no one has heard of the winner in literature because, unless you speak that language, you’ve probably never heard of them.

The Nobel Committee recognized Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Krasznahorkai is often described as a kind of “epic” writer in a Central European tradition going back through writers like Franz Kafka, whose style is marked by what critics call “absurdism and grotesque excess.” His novels frequently follow characters in decaying, marginal communities or in circumstances of collapse or disorder.

Perhaps his best-known work is Satantango, written in 1985, which explores a collapsing rural community in Hungary, portraying disintegration, deceit, despair, and yet the persistence of human connection. That novel became a landmark in Hungarian literature and was also adapted into a film.

The book was also awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 for its translation into English.

By all accounts, he’s a great writer, but not that many people speak Hungarian, so he isn’t well known outside of Hungary.

The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela.

Maria Corina Machado received the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for leading a broad, largely nonviolent movement to restore democratic rights in Venezuela after years of repression under President Nicolás Maduro.

The Nobel Committee’s press release describes her as a brave, committed champion who kept the flame of democracy alive by insisting on free elections, accountable government, and the right of Venezuelans to choose their leaders.

It highlights her decision to remain in the country despite threats, legal disqualification from the 2024 presidential race, and an active arrest warrant, framing her struggle as a push for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Peace Prizes tend to fall into one of three buckets.

The first are diplomats or politicians who bring about a peace or some end to hostilities. This is how Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Yassir Arafat, and Theodore Roosevelt were awarded their peace prizes. However, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to give these sorts of prizes away.

The second bucket is the general do-gooders. They are usually involved with some international organization, are a global organization, or just generally promote something considered good. This is how Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, and the International Red Cross were awarded prizes.

The final category includes people who are fighting against an authoritarian country, and the Nobel committee selects them to send a message. Recent recipients from China, Russia, and Iran fall into this category, as does Maria Corina Machado. This is the Nobel committee sending a message to Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

The 2025 Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, not one of the original prizes, was awarded to three recipients: Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, Philippe Aghion of the London School of Economics, and Peter Howitt of Brown University.

Collectively, they were awarded for showing, from different angles, how invention and the spread of new ideas power long-term growth and rising living standards.

The committee split the prize in two parts.

Mokyr received one-half for explaining the historical conditions that allow science and practical know-how to reinforce each other and keep progress going. He used evidence from events like the Industrial Revolution to argue that growth is not automatic.

It depends on a culture that tolerates new ideas, open exchange of knowledge, and institutions that do not punish change. In short, he identified the preconditions that make continuous technological advance possible rather than rare.

Aghion and Howitt shared the other half for building a formal theory of what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. In their model, researchers and firms invest in new technologies that replace older ones. That replacement raises productivity and incomes over time, yet it also creates disruption that policy must manage.

Their work shows why competition, entry of new firms, and incentives for research and development matter, and why policies that block rivals or protect outdated production methods can slow economic growth. The model helps explain real-world patterns, like why countries that invest in education and research, keep markets open to newcomers, and regulate monopolies carefully, tend to grow faster in the long run.

The 2025 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Mary Brunkow, and Fred Ramsdell of the Celltech Corporation, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University.

Their work had to do with bettering our understanding of the human immune system.

Our immune system has a big job: it must fight off infections without damaging our own tissues. If that balance fails, the immune system might attack the body itself, leading to autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on.

Before this work, scientists knew that some immune cells are eliminated early in life through a process called central tolerance, which removes immune cells that strongly target the body’s own proteins. But that did not fully explain why many people never develop autoimmunity, and how the immune system restrains itself later, in the body’s tissues.

The concept of peripheral tolerance is that even after immune cells mature, there must be checks that prevent them from attacking the body.

Sakaguchi was the first to propose and experimentally show that a special class of immune cells acts like internal “peacekeepers” in the body. In the mid-1990s, he found that in mice, when a certain subset of T cells was missing or removed, the mice developed autoimmune disease.

But if he gave those mice the missing cells from healthy animals, the disease went away. That led him to postulate the existence of regulatory T cells, which suppress or restrain other immune cells from attacking the body.

Later, Brunkow and Ramsdell made a key advance by identifying the genetic control behind those regulatory T cells. In mice with a lethal autoimmune disorder known as “scurfy,” Brunkow and Ramsdell found a mutation in an X-chromosome gene encoding a protein they at first called “scurfin” and later named FOXP3.

Why is this important? It brings us a step closer to understanding autoimmune diseases and how to possibly cure them.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley.

The three laureates developed and refined a new kind of “molecular architecture” called metal-organic frameworks, often abbreviated MOFs. These are crystalline materials built by combining metallic atoms and organic molecules in a repeating, lattice-like pattern.

What is special is that these frameworks contain internal cavities or empty pores through which other molecules, like gases or water vapor, can flow, enter, exit, or be stored. The outer shape of the material may look solid, but inside, it has a huge internal surface area filled with spaces.

The idea is that by picking which metal and which organic “linker” molecules to use, you can control the size, shape, and chemical properties of those pores so the MOF can selectively trap or release certain molecules. In that sense, a MOF is like a highly customized sponge or network of tunnels at the molecular scale.

Why is this important?

Because MOFs have huge internal surface areas and controllable pores, they can interact with many molecules in ways that conventional solids can’t. They could potentially capture CO2 molecules, particulate pollutants, or even water from the atmosphere. They can also potentially be used as catalysts in chemical reactions.

The final prize, which was actually awarded first, is the prize for physics. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke of the University of California, Berkeley, Michel Devoret of Yale University, and John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The prize committee said the award was given “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

Ok. What does that mean?

Particles at the quantum level behave very differently from things that we are used to dealing with at the macroscopic level.

In particular, in quantum physics, a particle sometimes “tunnels” through a barrier it shouldn’t be able to cross in classical physics.

What Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis showed is that under the right conditions, this behavior can manifest at scales larger than the quantum level.

The setting for their experiments was a superconducting circuit. If you recall from a previous episode, a superconductor is a material that, when cooled to extremely low temperatures, allows electric current to flow without resistance.

In their design, they used a special element called a Josephson junction, which is two superconductors separated by a very thin insulating barrier. Normally, current can’t flow through an insulator, but in quantum mechanics, tunneling can occur.

The experimenters took a superconducting circuit and then measured how it behaved under different electrical biases and microwaves. The circuit was small, but big enough to be seen in a microscope, and still much larger than the quantum level.

They observed two major things:

First, the circuit sometimes “jumped” from one side to another by tunneling through the barrier, something that should be impossible in classical physics.

Second, when they applied microwaves of certain frequencies, the circuit absorbed energy only in discrete amounts, showing quantized energy levels. If you remember back to my episode on the ultraviolet catastrophe, discrete amounts of energy mean it can be at one level or another, but not in between.

So, why is this important?

First, they bridged the gap between the quantum world and larger “macroscopic” systems. Before these experiments, many physicists assumed that quantum effects like tunneling or discrete energy levels would be unobservable in large systems because of all the “noise” or interactions.

Their work proved that, at least in carefully engineered systems, it was possible to preserve quantum behavior even at scales large enough to be used in devices.

Second, their experiments laid foundational groundwork for quantum technologies, especially quantum computing, quantum sensors, and quantum cryptography. The circuits they studied are closely related to the superconducting “qubits” used in many of today’s quantum computer designs.

Third, this work helps improve ultra-sensitive measurement devices. The ability to observe quantum effects in circuits helps build sensors that can detect extremely weak signals or changes because quantum systems can be extremely sensitive. That has implications in fields like magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, precision measurement devices, and possibly new kinds of detectors.

There have often been controversies in the awarding of Nobel Prizes. However, I think the 2025 selections are pretty good. Some of the awards, especially in the sciences, might have a role to play in shaping our future in the years to come.