Nobel prize for medicine won by cancer researchers – as it happened

So there we have it. The 2018 medicine Nobel prize has gone to Tasuku Honjo at the University of Kyoto and James Allison at Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Their work on inhibiting the immune system to combat cancer is already considered transformative, but will doubtless prolong many more lives as therapies based on the breakthroughs are developed further. Tomorrow it’s time for the Nobel prize in physics. We’ll have live coverage of the announcement - due no earlier than 10.45am UK - from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Do join us if you can!

How often do we get the Nobel prize right? Twice in history, I’d suggest. And those were easy ones: the physics prize in 2013 for what has become known as the Higgs boson; and another physics prize, awarded last year, for the detection of gravitational waves. Why easy? Well, in both cases the key discovery came in the year before, and would have elicited a torrent of nominations in the run-up to the following year’s Nobel deadline in January. With the Higgs boson, it was Cern’s announcement of the discovery of the particle in July 2012 that made Peter Higgs and Francois Englert a shoo-in. In the case of gravitational waves, it was the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) team’s detection of a quiver in spacetime in February 2016.

But back to medicine. Who’s in the running this year? I’ll take a punt on James Allison at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He won the 2015 Lasker award – a good indicator of future Nobel fame – for demonstrating how the immune system can be unleashed on cancer.

There are plenty more candidates though. How about William Kaelin (Harvard), Peter Ratcliffe (Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute) and Gregg Semenza (Johns Hopkins) for discovering how cells sense and adapt to changes in oxygen, a process essential for life? Or Stephen Elledge (Harvard) and Evelyn Witkin (Rutgers) for discovering how DNA protects itself from damage?

The committee might plump for Crispr, a gene-editing procedure. Personally I think it’s too early: the tool has immense promise but has hardly transformed many people’s lives. And it may be more suited to the chemistry prize these days. There’s also the tricky problem of who to honour. At least four scientists have been key to Crispr’s development, namely Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, George Church and Fang Zheng, and we all know what the Nobel committees think of numbers greater than three.

The question gets asked every year, and not only by those who miss out on the prizes. Writing in the Observer, Robin McKie points out that Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society and joint winner of the 2009 chemistry Nobel, is critical of the awards in his book Gene Machine. The biologist argues they have “increasingly become a lottery” and are part of a global awards system “beset by cronyism”. In the same article, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, laments that only three sciences get Nobel awards. “Mathematics is ignored, as are computing, robotics and artificial intelligence as well as environmental sciences,” he says. Meanwhile Brian Keating, a cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego, takes on the “rule of three” – the maximum number of people named for a science prize. “Apart from leading to examples of scientific injustice, the rule of three reinforces the layperson’s impression that science is done by one or two lone geniuses – usually white males – working without vast support networks behind them,” he says.

And let’s not forget how few women get these prizes. Of 214 medicine laureates, only 12 are women. The last female winner was Youyou Tu in 2015, and before that, May-Britt Moser in 2014. Incidentally, the situation is far worse in physics, a field where a woman has not won the Nobel in 55 years.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the British astrophysicist who was passed over for the 1974 physics Nobel after she discovered pulsars, maintains that not winning has meant a whole load more parties. Last month, she landed the special Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, worth a Nobel-busting $3m (£2.3m). Bell, who is donating the whole pile to help students underrepresented in physics, told me:

I feel I’ve done very well out of not getting a Nobel prize. If you get a Nobel prize you have this fantastic week and then nobody gives you anything else. If you don’t get a Nobel prize you get everything that moves. Almost every year there’s been some sort of party because I’ve got another award. That’s much more fun.

The 2017 Nobel prize in medicine went to three US researchers for their decades-long effort to unravel the workings of the 24-hour body clock. Jeffrey Hall at the University of Maine, Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University and Michael Young at the Rockefeller University all witnessed first-hand disruption to their circadian rhythms when they heard they’d won in 5am calls from Stockholm.

In the words of Juleen Zierath of the Nobel academy, the scientists raised “awareness of the importance of a proper sleep hygiene”.

It’s that time of year again. Over the coming days, a select few scientists will receive a phone call from Sweden, fear it’s an elaborate spoof, overcome their disbelief, and finally accept that they have joined the elite club of Nobel laureates.

The annual handout of the world’s top gongs kicks off today with the award of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine from the Nobel assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

It’s the kudos that matters of course, the recognition of work deemed worthy, but let’s not forget the 9m Swedish krona (£775,000) that comes with each prize. It’s not what a millennial fashion blogger can earn on Instagram, of course, but what benefits, really, have scientists brought the world in discovering penicillin, HIV, and cancer-causing viruses; in developing treatments for diphtheria, tuberculosis, yellow fever and malaria; in understanding the immune system, hormones, the nervous system, human blood groups, fundamentals of vision and hearing, and the structure of DNA; by inventing MRI scanners, IVF and stem cell therapies?

Today’s announcement of the medicine prize is due no earlier than 10.30am UK time. It will be followed by the physics prize on Tuesday and the chemistry prize on Wednesday, both from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 10.45am UK on the day. Do join us for live coverage!