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The impossible takes longer
Katalin Karikó*, Nobel Prize Laureate in Medicine 2023 ,and George Smoot, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics 2006, will share with us their approach to scientific research.
*Online participation


DATE: 27 June 2024
TIME: 18:30 - 20:30 (CEST)
VENUE: Fundación Ramón Areces - salón de actos. Calle Vitruvio, 5. 28006. Madrid.
Free admission until full capacity is reached. Necessary previous online registration. Limited capacity.
This event will be streamed for those who cannot attend in person. Photographs, videos and audios will also be taken for public dissemination. All recorded material will be available free of charge on the Foundation's channels. But please note that the material can only be used for editorial purposes, not any marketing or commercial purposes.
Nobel Prize Conversations in partnership with
Nobel International Partners
Event information
Just sometimes, everyone else is wrong. They insist that your idea won’t work, your finding is wrong, your scheme is mad. For many Nobel Prize laureates, that was the starting point. But, ignoring other peoples’ preconceptions about what is possible, they went ahead anyway. And, eventually, the results made history. Treading a solo path can, however, be a lonely business, and you need confidence, strength and resilience to persevere.
In this conversation we will bring together two Nobel Prize laureates to explore the dangers of always trusting received wisdom and the strategies that can help you survive and flourish if you decide to go your own way.
The evening will feature George Smoot (2006 Nobel Prize laureate in physics), who detected the seeds of the first galaxies in the echoes of the big bang, and, joining us online, Katalin Karikó, (2023 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine), who pioneered the development of mRNA vaccines, so essential in combating the Covid-19 pandemic.
This will be followed by a panel discussion with Mara Dierssen, a world expert in the field of Down syndrome research who heads the Cellular and Systems Neurobiology group of the Systems and Synthetic Biology program at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona.
Moderating the conversation will be Adam Smith, host of the Nobel Prize Conversations podcast from nobelprize.org, which this season investigates the lives and works of the 2023 Nobel Prize laureates.
Speakers
Katalin Karikó
2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Katalin Karikó is a professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she has worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982.
For four decades, her research has focused on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications sup-press immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA have been used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by Bi-oNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic.
For her achievement she received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Franklin Award, the Princess Asturias Award, the BBVA award, Jiménez Díaz Prize, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
George Smoot
2006 Nobel Prize in Physics

George Smoot was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He has been involved in the Planck and Euclid missions.
George Smoot was co-awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for "discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." Smoot received dual bachelor's degrees (1966) in mathematics and physics and a PhD (1970) in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Smoot has been at the University of California Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1970.
In April 1992, Smoot announced that the COBE DMR team he led had detected the long-sought variations in the early universe which are the seeds that - under the influence of gravity - grow to be the galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters that are observed in the universe today. NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite mapped the intensity of the radiation from the early Big Bang and found very small amplitude variations. These variations are also relics of creation.
Smoot has authored more than 600 science papers and is also co-author (with Keay Davidson) of the popular science book 'Wrinkles in Time' (Harper, 1994), which elucidates cosmology and the COBE discovery. Smoot's essay "My Einstein Suspenders" appears in 'My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man', His Work, and His Legacy' (Ed. John Brockman, Pantheon, 2006).
Smoot has continued his research in cosmology and he has been involved in the Planck and Euclid missions. The Planck mission is the third-generation mission to exploit the CMB fluctuations discovered by COBE DMR. Euclid is a mission to understand the dark energy causing the current expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Mara Dierssen
Group Leader at CRG

Dr Dierssen (MD, PhD) is medical doctor (1985) and obtained her PhD from the University of Cantabria in 1989. She heads the Cellular and Systems Neurobiology group of the Systems and Synthetic Biology program at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona.
The goal of Dierssen research is to understand mechanisms underlying cognition and behavior and their perturbation in mental disorders. She is a world expert in the field of Down syndrome research and her contributions have been published in more than 2020 peer-reviewed papers, including high impact factor journals such as Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry, Lancet Neurology, among others. Dierssen has received many awards for her work including Ramón Trias Fargas, Jaime Blanco or Sisley-Lejeune awards and the National Science Award from the Government of Catalonia.
She is past-president of the Spanish Society of Neuroscience, of the International Behavioral and Neural Genetics Society, member executive committee member of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) and president of the Trisomy 21 Research Society. She is member of Editorial Boards (Genes Brain and Behavior, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, among other) and acts as evaluator of different Scientific Committees and Boards such as the National Evaluation Agency, Spanish Ministry of Science, or Panel Expert for European Research Council.
She is fellow of the Academia Europaea, the Royal Academy of Medicine, the European DANA Allianze for the Brain, Distinguished Alumni of the University of Cantabria, and Distinguished Fellow, and Silver Medal of the College of Medicine.
She was Associated Professor of the University of Cantabria and the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona.
The Dierssen lab has made important contributions to the understanding of the neuropathology of Down syndrome and genetic mental illnesses. She is also a strong advocate of science at the public level.
She is lead vocalist of a rock band devoted to solidarity projects and science communication.
Raimundo Pérez-Hernández y Torra
Fundación Ramón Areces General Director

Raimundo Pérez-Hernández y Torra, diplomat and ambassador, he has been Director General of the Ramón Areces Foundation since 2008. A Law graduate from the Complutense University in Madrid, he joined the Diplomatic Corps in 1976.
Until he joined the Ramón Areces Foundation, his professional career was in Public Administration, where he held the positions of adviser at the Spanish Permanent Delegation to the United Nations; economic and trade adviser at the Spanish Embassy in France; Head of Protocol in the Spanish Prime Minister's Office, with the rank of director-general; executive chairman of the Organising Committee for the Spanish Presidency of the European Union Council, with the rank of under-secretary; Ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations and other international organisations based in Geneva; chairman of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He has served as Spanish Ambassador to the Republic of Austria and Chief of Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAEC), with the rank of ambassador.
Adam Smith
Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach

Adam Smith is Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. After fellowships in molecular biology, neuroscience and physiology in Oxford, Harvard and Heidelberg, he pursued research in developmental neuroscience at Oxford University before moving into science publishing. At Nature Publishing Group he launched ‘Nature Reviews Drug Discovery’ as chief editor and then, as publisher, ran Nature’s biopharma portfolio of journals. Prior to joining Nobel Prize Outreach, he was journals publishing director at Informa Healthcare.
In his current role, his projects include directing the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative, an educational programme that takes laureates to meet and inspire the next generation of scientists around the world, curating the content of Nobel Prize Outreach’s global science and society meeting series, the Nobel Prize Dialogue, and hosting the ongoing Nobel Prize Conversations series of podcasts.
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