Born in 1939 under poor conditions in Jerusalem, Ada Yonath particularly remembers her curiosity to understand the principles of nature. After her father’s death – Yonath was only 11 years old –, she supported her family through several side jobs. Despite her conservative environment and traditional family values, her mother supported her daughter’s scholar ambitions. After her compulsory military service with the medical corps of the Israeli Army, Yonath studied chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Weizmann Institute of Science where, after an intermezzo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she established the first Israeli laboratory for biological crystallography – an important step towards her scientific merits of the crystallization and crystallography of ribosomes leading to the Nobel Prize. Today, Yonath is still working at the Weizmann Institute.

The first door to the ribosome machinery – its structure and working process – has been picked by Yonath in over two decades of research: through a detailed X-ray crystallography, a method outlining atomic and molecular structures. Beams of X-rays are diffracted inside the crystal, producing angles and intensities from which its composition can be computed. The crux in this had been the size of the ribosomes which was considered too complex to be crystallized – until Ada Yonath managed it by developing appropriate methods. In 1995, she succeeded in generating significant data by inserting markers into the ribosomes’ subunits. On 24th April at 7 p.m., the biologist will illuminate TU Dresden’s central lecture hall with this inspiration that made her manage the ribosome crystallization within the Max Planck Ribosome Structure Working Group. The knowledge on the cellular protein factories is used, amongst others, for the production of effective antibiotics that attack pathogens’ ribosomes.

Not only his parents, both physicians, but also his family’s preference for anthroposophy and Waldorf education shaped Thomas Südhof’s childhood. His grandmother acquainted him with Goethe and Kant and taught him the importance of education and the spirituality of values. Südhof was interested in almost all school subjects as well as classical music, and calls his bassoon teacher the most influential teacher of his school days. After leaving the Waldorf School Hannover, he decided to study medicine as, in his own words, he did not feel confident that he had sufficient talent to succeed in the difficult areas of music, philosophy or history. He got close to his future research field at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen where he was researching in neurochemistry as an assisting scientist, enjoying wide freedoms in his experiments and studies. After graduating from university, Südhof moved to Dallas, Texas, where as a postdoc he benefited from an optimistic and enthusiastic scientific culture – ending up to found a laboratory there in 1986 in which he went on doing his Nobel-honored research.

The biochemist was looking for the substances driving the molecular machinery of the synapses. He aimed to understand how and why the synaptic vesicles release the messenger substances they contain at the right point of time. Südhof found Calcium ions triggering chain reactions inside the cells, ending up in the vesicles setting free the neurotransmitters into the neighboring cell. Südhof found these processes and many of the proteins included by the synergy of various contemporary molecular biological and electrophysiological methods, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 together with Randy W. Schekman and James E. Rothman. Medicine owes him a profound base for the research on diseases with failures in nerve cells, such as schizophrenia, depressions or diabetes. Since 2008, Südhof has been Professor for Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. On 26th April at 6 p.m., Südhof will make the synapses in the TU Dresden’s central lecture hall glow.

His father’s Jewish ancestry made Michael Kosterlitz’ family flee from Germany to Scotland where he was born in 1943. He attributes his talents in physics and mathematics to the necessity of compensating his unreliable memory. Due to his joy in chemical experiments, the school’s laboratory had to be evacuated more than once. In Cambridge, he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry and biochemistry, and discovered his passion for climbing which cost him quite a few hours of studies and academic successes. Despite his joy in the experimental discipline of chemistry, Kosterlitz chose – amongst others because of a red-green deficiency making problems in the chemical laboratory work – physics. After his doctoral degree in Oxford and an intermezzo in Italy, he applied for a job at the University of Birmingham where he met David Thouless – and the ideas about two-dimensional crystals, vortices and topology that led to his Nobel research.

Phase transitions make materials’ properties change drastically – for example the aggregate states, magnetic, electrical or elastic properties. These transitions are of special interest when it comes to surfaces or materials of few atomic layers. In these effectively two-dimensional systems, material properties fluctuate in an intensity that suppresses phase transitions. Michael Kosterlitz and David J. Thouless identified important exceptions: In certain cases, stable vortices form on the quantum level; a phase transition takes place when the interaction of these vortices changes significantly, as it does, amongst others, in superconductors, causing their electrical resistance to decrease. Topology makes it possible to calculate if such vortices can or cannot occur. This mathematical discipline describes the global properties of objects that remain unchanged even when the object is compressed, extended or distorted. Its application on physics could, as an example, make robust quantum computers be realized. Kosterlitz is now working as a Professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. On 15th May at 7 p.m., he will electrify the TU Dresden’s Central Lecture Hall’s audience.

Takaaki Kajita grew up in the countryside in the north of Tokyo. His youth passion Kyudo, the Japanese archery sport which aims to realise truth, goodness and beauty within one bow shot, continued to play an important role in his academic life. Kajita studied physics at Saitama University, focussing early on experimental particle physics. On the advice of a fellow student, Kajita got involved with the Kamioka Nucleon Delay Experiment (Kamiokande): a Japanese pioneering experiment of nuclear physics in whose construction the future Nobel Laureate assisted – as he did in the construction of the experiment’s successor Super-Kamiokande where he worked on his prizewinning research.

In a zinc mine, 1,000 metres underground, Kajita traced the neutrinos in 50,000 tons of ultrapure water. Here, he analysed the particles caught in the tank – and found the ratio of the various kinds of neutrinos to diverge from calculations. His explanation: The muon neutrinos expected must have had turned into tau neutrinos that stayed invisible to the tank’s sensors; this transformation is known today as neutrino oscillation and only possible for particles that have a mass. The neutrino obviously having a mass, however small it is, queries the standard model of particle physics and opens up doors to find solutions for conflicts in physical theories. On 3rd July at 7 p.m., the Nobel Laureate will share ground-breaking and fascinating insights into our cosmos with the audience in the TU Dresden’s central lecture hall.