Nobel Prize Talks

”We didn’t care about salaries and having a nice car. We just cared about science and were really ambitious”, says May Britt Moser, 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, when describing her partnership in life and work with co-Laureate Edvard Moser. In this conversation she talks about the pure joy of exploring the connection between behaviour and the brain, and also discusses gender inequality in science.

How would you react if someone told you that you had been awarded the Nobel Prize? Meet all 13 of 2014's new Nobel Laureates and hear their initial thoughts in this special edition of the Nobel Prize Talks podcast.Learn more about the new Laureates at nobelprize.org

Imagine deciding what you want to do with your life by age seven or eight, being certain that you will succeed, and then having that vocation propel you to the point when you eventually receive the news that you've been awarded the Nobel Prize. That was Bruce Beutler's scientific path, and what was his first reaction on receiving the call from Stockholm? It was to google himself to make sure that it was actually true, and then to double check that he wasn't dreaming. In this conversation...

If we really understood things, there would be no sense of discovery. Tim Hunt, awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, looks upon biology in much the same way as life: in many cases we don’t really have a clue what’s going on, but we can try to learn more by playing around. In this conversation, recorded in London, he discusses his passion for science, and his talent for spotting good problems and asking good questions.

"The artist is a scientist." Eric Kandel sees the divide between art and science as artificial. In this episode, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine discusses his exploration of learning and memory and how the fields of neuroscience, psychology and art are all interrelated. He also talks about his childhood experiences of anti-semitism in Vienna, and how they made him understand how important social context can be for governing people’s behaviour.

Rather than ask whether people are 'creditworthy', should we ask whether banks are 'peopleworthy'? Muhammad Yunus, awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, sees a capitalist system where the rich get richer while large parts of the world’s population live under difficult conditions. In this conversation he talks about empowering people through microfinance and how the joint participation of women is necessary for any society to succeed. Yunus presents a vision of a future in which poverty and...

Is there life on Mars? NASA researcher John Mather, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2006 for mapping the traces of the first light emitted by the young universe, believes that where there’s water, there’s likely to be life. And he thinks that the chances of finding water on Mars are high - so reasons that signs of life on the planet may well be found, and during our lifetime too. In this conversation he also discusses how the new James Webb Space Telescope, ready for launch 2018, will...

How big is the universe? And how do you stay grounded when working in the mind-bending field of cosmology? These are questions for George Smoot, awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explorations of the remnants of the first light emitted by the expanding universe. In this conversation he also talks about how science today is a truly global enterprise, and explains how he ended-up pitting his wits against 10-year-olds in the television game show 'Are you smarter than a fifth...