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Chiachi Chang \/ NIH | Rockefeller University | University of Alberta<\/span><\/a> From the left: Alter, Rice, and HoughtonChiachi Chang \/ NIH | Rockefeller University | University of Alberta<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honored two Americans and a Briton for their work identifying the hepatitis C virus, which can cause serious liver damage and can lead to cirrhosis and cancer. In the 1970s, physician Harvey J. Alter, now 85, of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), identified a new virus, different to hepatitis A and B, transmitted by blood transfusions. Years later, a team led by British virologist Michael Houghton, 70, who worked at the pharmaceutical company Chiron in California at the time, used new molecular strategies to identify the pathological agent, which they called the hepatitis C virus. In the 1990s, virologist Charles M. Rice, 68, then at Washington University in St. Louis, confirmed that the virus alone was able to multiply and cause the disease, which affects around 70 million people worldwide and kills 400,000 a year.<\/p>\n Chemistry<\/strong><\/p>\n Alexander Heinl \/ Picture Alliance via Getty Images<\/span><\/a> Doudna and Charpentier (right<\/em>)Alexander Heinl \/ Picture Alliance via Getty Images<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Gene-editing tool<\/strong> Literature<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nDiscovered in 2012, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool has various possible applications in food production and medicine, not to mention its potential for treating genetic diseases. Based on the way bacteria fight viruses, the tool uses RNA molecules coupled with bacterial proteins (Cas9) that work as molecular scissors, capable of cutting DNA at selected points. This allows genes to be inactivated or corrected. For their work refining the tool, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, 51, of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, 56, of the University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA, received this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.<\/p>\nWikimedia Commons<\/span><\/a>The mythology of intimacy<\/strong>
\nAmerican poet and essayist Louise Gl\u00fcck won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her books have not been published in Brazil. Only translations of the occasional verse have been published in Portuguese, usually in literary magazines and newspaper culture sections. Known for its technical precision and objective language, her poetry often draws on Greek and Roman mythology to describe issues in the author’s own personal life. Gl\u00fcck, 77, has published 12 poetry collections, as well as books of essays. A professor at Yale University, she was the first from her family of Hungarian immigrants of Jewish origin to be born in the USA. Little known in Brazil, Gl\u00fcck’s work has received several awards in the USA, including a Pulitzer in 1993 for the book The Wild Iris <\/em>(Ecco, 1992).<\/p>\n