The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and the Karolinska Institutet have announced the recipients of the 2025 Nobel Prizes, honoring pioneering achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economic sciences. The awards recognize discoveries ranging from the fundamental mechanisms that prevent the immune system from attacking the body’s own tissues to the development of molecular cages that can capture carbon dioxide and the demonstration of quantum physics in large-scale electrical circuits. The prizes, each amounting to 11 million Swedish kronor, celebrate individuals and groups whose work has conferred the “greatest benefit on mankind,” fulfilling the vision of Alfred Nobel.
This year’s laureates include researchers from the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, a Hungarian author, and a Venezuelan political leader. The science prizes highlight decades of foundational research that has opened entirely new fields, leading to practical applications in medicine, computing, and environmental science. The prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of regulatory T cells, a breakthrough in immunology. The Physics prize honored work from the 1980s that is now central to the race to build quantum computers. In Chemistry, the laureates were recognized for designing and synthesizing metal-organic frameworks. The cohort of winners also includes a novelist whose work explores apocalyptic themes, a pro-democracy activist, and three economists who have explained the engines of modern, innovation-driven growth.
Guardians of the Immune System
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japanese researcher Shimon Sakaguchi for their seminal discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Their work identified a crucial set of immune cells, known as regulatory T cells (Tregs), that act as the body’s peacekeepers, preventing the immune system from launching devastating attacks against its own tissues and organs. This mechanism is vital for preventing autoimmune diseases.
Pioneering Discoveries
The foundation of this discovery was laid in 1995 when Shimon Sakaguchi, of Osaka University, first identified this population of suppressor T cells. He demonstrated that these “security guards” were essential for maintaining order within the immune system. A few years later, in 2001, Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell made a critical breakthrough by identifying the master gene that controls the development and function of these cells. They found that mutations in the gene, called FOXP3, led to a rare and catastrophic autoimmune disease, proving its essential role in immune regulation. Sakaguchi later confirmed that FOXP3 is the key factor that directs the formation of Tregs.
Together, their discoveries have revolutionized the understanding of immune self-tolerance and have paved the way for new therapeutic strategies. This research has spurred more than 200 ongoing clinical trials exploring Treg-centered treatments for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and arthritis, improving organ transplant success, and developing novel cancer therapies.
Making Quantum Effects Macroscopic
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for experiments that revealed quantum mechanical phenomena in macroscopic electrical circuits. Their work in the mid-1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that strange quantum behaviors, such as tunneling and discrete energy levels, previously thought to exist only at the atomic scale, could be observed and controlled in engineered systems.
Superconducting Breakthroughs
The trio conducted their experiments using a device called a Josephson junction, which consists of two superconductors separated by a thin insulating layer. While working together at Berkeley, with Clarke as the professor, Devoret as a postdoctoral fellow, and Martinis as a PhD candidate, they meticulously designed circuits that exhibited quantum properties. They were the first to demonstrate macroscopic quantum tunneling and to show that energy in such a circuit is quantized, meaning it can only exist in discrete levels, much like the energy levels of an atom. This validation that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to larger, human-made systems laid the essential groundwork for the field of quantum computing. Their research forms the basis for the superconducting qubits used in many of today’s most advanced quantum processors.
Chemistry’s Molecular Architecture
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi for the design and development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These materials are a revolutionary class of porous, crystalline solids built from metal ions linked by organic molecules. The result is a highly ordered, three-dimensional structure with vast internal surface areas, akin to a molecular hotel with countless rooms that can be tailored to trap specific molecules.
Frameworks for a Better World
The laureates’ foundational work established the principles of this new form of molecular architecture. Between 1992 and 2003, Kitagawa and Yaghi, working independently, made a series of groundbreaking discoveries. Kitagawa demonstrated that these frameworks could be flexible and allow gases to flow in and out, while Yaghi created exceptionally stable MOFs and showed they could be modified through rational design. Their work has since led to the creation of tens of thousands of unique MOFs. These frameworks have immense practical potential, with applications in capturing carbon dioxide from the air, storing hydrogen for clean energy, harvesting water from arid desert environments, and protecting against toxic gases.
Honors for Literature and Peace
The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The committee cited him “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Krasznahorkai is renowned for his demanding and complex style, characterized by long, intricate sentences and a bleak, absurdist worldview that has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka. His notable works include Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989).
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado of Venezuela for her persistent and courageous campaign for democracy in her home country. She was recognized “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Machado has been a central figure in unifying a once-fractured political opposition against the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro. Despite being blocked from running in the 2024 presidential election, she has remained a powerful advocate for free and fair elections, embodying, as the committee noted, “the hope of a different future.”
The Economics of Innovation and Growth
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to three economists for their work explaining how innovation drives sustained economic growth. Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University received one half of the prize, with the other half shared jointly by Philippe Aghion of Collège de France and Peter Howitt of Brown University. Their research provides a framework for understanding the unprecedented and sustained prosperity experienced globally over the last two centuries.
Knowledge and Creative Destruction
Mokyr, through detailed economic history, identified the continuous flow of “useful knowledge” and institutional support for technological progress as essential prerequisites for the Industrial Revolution and modern growth. Aghion and Howitt developed a mathematical framework for Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” Their models, first published in 1992, describe a process where new technologies and products constantly emerge, displacing older, less efficient ones. This dynamic, while disruptive, is the core engine of long-term economic progress and improved living standards.