William Nordhaus and Paul Romer shared the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize for adapting economic theory to take better account of environmental issues and technological progress.
Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State shared the with Denis Mukwege. Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq and for refugee and women's rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. Murad said she shared the award with all Yazidis with all the Iraqis, Kurds and all the minorities and all survivors of sexual violence around the world.
Denis Mukwege is a doctor who helps victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congo city of Bukavu. The clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence. He has performed surgery on scores of women after they had been raped by armed men, and campaigned to highlight their plight. He also provides HIV/AIDS treatment as well as free maternal care. Mukwege dedicated his Nobel award to all women affected by rape and sexual violence.
Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology became the fifth woman to win a chemistry Nobel. She shared the award with George Smith and Gregory Winter. Arnold, Smith and Winter won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for harnessing the power of evolution to generate novel proteins used in everything from environmentally friendly detergents to cancer drugs. She was awarded half of the $1 million prize while Smith and Winter shared the other half
Gregory Winter was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His works include the world's top-selling prescription medicine -the antibody injection Humira sold by AbbVie for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. Humira, or adalimumab, was the first drug based on Winter's work to win regulatory approval in 2002. Winter shared half of the prize with American George Smith.
George P. Smith developed a method using a virus that infects bacteria to produce new proteins while Gregory Winter used the same phage display technique for the directed evolution of antibodies, with the aim of producing more effective medicines. Other antibody drugs at the cutting edge of medicine use the same technology, including a number of treatments that have proved highly effective against cancer.
A trio of American, French and Canadian scientists won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for breakthroughs in laser technology that have turned light beams into precision tools for everything from eye surgery to micro-machining. Donna Strickland became the third woman to win a Nobel for physics, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963. Strickland is the first female Nobel laureate in any field in three years.
Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories in the United States won the other half of the 2018 physics prize for inventing "optical tweezers". Ashkin's work was based on the realization that the pressure of a beam of light could push microscopic objects and trap them in position. A breakthrough came in 1987, when he used the new optical tweezers to grab living bacteria without harming them. At 96, Ashkin is the oldest ever Nobel prize winner
Frenchman Gerard Mourou shared half of the physics prize with Strickland, for work on high-intensity lasers. The inventions by Mourou, Strickland and Ashkin date back to the mid-1980s and over the years they have revolutionized laser physics. Mourou and Strickland's research centered on developing the most intense laser pulses ever created by humans, paving the way for the precision instruments used today in corrective eye surgery and industrial applications.
American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer. The scientists' work in the 1990s has led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat. Allison and Honjo showed releasing the brakes on the immune system can unleash its power to attack cancer