The Nobel Prizes are awarded to those that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. These are the 2025 laureates.

On Monday, American scientists Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi from Japan won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments. They discovered regulatory T cells in the 90s. Since then thousands of research projects have explored their discovery.

The immune system is present in almost all living creatures, and is constantly on alert to protect us from bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins, and more. It’s vital that our immune system can tell friend from foe, healthy from disease tissue. The regulatory T cells are key to that. The findings led to the development of a range of therapies for autoimmune diseases that are now in early clinical development. “It was really a molecular slog to get to that exact mutation, because it was just a very small genetic alteration that results in quite a profound change in the immune system,” said Brunkow in a telephone interview shortly after the prize announcement. “It takes a bunch of different brains all working on it together.”

One winner, Fred Ramsdell, is currently on a mountain hike and no one has been able to tell him of this life-changing achievement.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists all from the University of California, for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics. John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis will share the prize for their discovery of a phenomenon called quantum mechanical tunneling in an electrical circuit, an advance that laid the foundation for quantum computing and other related technology. They demonstrated that quantum effects could be measured on ordinary sized objects, and not just the microscopic world. In the 80s they made computer chips that could instantly change from one state to another.

Clarke, taking questions at a news conference, said he was “completely stunned” to learn he had won the award. This is actually the typical response of Prize winners. They usually have no idea that work they did years ago is still considered important. “There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras… and fiber optic cables,” said the Nobel committee. More at the UC site

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025. They developed a new form of molecular architecture, metal ions linked by long organic molecules. To make sponge-like structures that can absorb other molecules. They’re from Kyoto University, Oxford, and University of California and collaborated long distance.

It all started in 1989, when Richard Robson created a metal crystal with space inside. Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi added carbon based molecules in the 90s and 2000s.

The discovery is like Hermione Granger’s seemingly bottomless enchanted handbag in the “Harry Potter” series, in that the frameworks may look small from the outside, but are able to hold surprisingly vast quantities within them.

Here’s our coverage of 2024 Nobel Prize Winners.