He had just turned 34 when his name appeared on one of science's most prestigious lists: the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Since then, he has gone down in history as one of the key researchers of the 20th century, both for the discovery of the structure of DNA and for his leadership of the Human Genome Project (1988-1992), but also for the numerous controversies he has been involved in. This week, at the age of 97, the American biophysicist James D. Watson died in a New York medical center from undisclosed causes, as confirmed by his son. New York TimesWatson, who was born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago, was a gifted child. He entered the University of Chicago at age 15 in a program for exceptionally talented students and studied zoology. He later earned a doctorate in genetics from Indiana University, and in 1951 moved to the United Kingdom to work at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he met the British biologist and university professor Francis Crick. It was at that time and in that laboratory that the collaboration began which led them both to decode DNA, the genetic blueprint of life. Just two years after joining forces, Crick and Watson published an article in the journal Nature proposing that deoxyribonucleic acid has a double helix structure. That is, it is formed by two chains that coil around a common axis, forming a twisted ladder.

American researchers Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi have been distinguished with the Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded this Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to describe how the immune system regulates itself to prevent us from harming ourselves. Specifically, their work established the concept of peripheral immune tolerance, a mechanism that controls our defenses so that they don't attack us as an external threat. This has allowed us to better understand how the immune system works and has opened the door to the development of new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

As a young man, he was passionate about Ancient Egypt, and his insatiable curiosity about the past eventually made him one of the fathers of paleogenetics, a discipline that studies human evolution through ancient DNA preserved in fossils. Biologist and geneticist Svante Pääbo (Stockholm, 1955) won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for having deciphered the genome of Neanderthals, a species extinct 30,000 years ago, a milestone that opened the door to research into the foundations of our genetic makeup. The researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology is in Barcelona this Monday to receive the fifth European Hypatia Science Prize, awarded by Barcelona City Council and the BCN Knowledge Hub of the European Academy.