As we mourned, 2025 Nobel prize winners were named

The demise of Raila Odinga overshadowed the announcement of this year’s Nobel prizes. Why can’t a Kenyan sponsor such prizes and immortalise his or her name?

What are our national prizes for those who excel in sciences, economics and peace building? What other category should we add, unique to Kenya?

Farming? The Kenyan economy and politics have been liberalised since the early 1990s. We should liberalise prizes too; we need competition on who gives the best prizes for achievements beyond state honours.  

Don’t we have public and private sectors competing for the supply of goods and services, ranging from health to education and lately, roads? Why not compete on giving prizes? We should learn from the arts with their Oscars, Emmys, Pulitzers, Grammys and BAFTAs, among others.

Who are Kenya’s top educators, engineers, lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, butchers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, preachers, writers? Barbers?  Shopkeeper etc? Who does not like recognition? Remember those awards in high school? We need a framework for recognition of non-political achievements. After all, only a tiny minority will ever become politicians.

Back to Nobel prizes. It’s been 20 years since Kenya won a Nobel; that’s a long time. Who won this year? What was unique about their work?

Let’s start with peace. María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician with an engineering and finance background, got it. She was schooled in Venezuela but had a stint at Yale. Some think it was a slight for President Donald Trump, whose efforts in pacifying Gaza should have been rewarded. 

The award is more than meets the eye. Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and the US are not on good terms, with a $50 million (Sh6.5 billion) bounty for his capture. Machado’s opposition to the Venezuelan government and its policies may have won her the coveted prize.

The Nobel committee noted the motivation, “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.” Sounds familiar?

The medicine award went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.” 

They identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T-cells, which could lead to “treat or cure autoimmune diseases, provide more effective cancer treatments and prevent serious complications after stem cell transplants.” Mary studied at the University of Washington and Princeton. Fred Ramsdell studied at the University of San Diego and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). Sakaguchi studied at Kyoto University in Japan.

In chemistry, the prize went to another Japanese, Susumu Kitagawa, from Kyoto University, where he also went to school. It was shared with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia and a graduate of Oxford.

Third among the winners is Omar Mwannes Yaghi, from Jordan and now at UC Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, State University of New York at Albany and Hudson Community College. Very humble academic beginning.

 Their work on “Metal–organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions”  In physics, the award went to another trio. “For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” Remember quantum computing? Michel H. Devoret, who studied in France, shared it with John Clarke, a graduate of Cambridge and now at UC Berkeley.

The third partner is John Matthew Martinis, who was a student of John Clarke at UC Berkeley. That should be the ideal student-teacher relationship.

It’s instructive to note that Devoret and Martinis have both worked for Google. The 2024 physics and chemistry laureates have a connection to Google. Take a deep breath. The last Nobel Prize in economics went to a trio again. Note the importance of collaboration in research. The laureates’ work “shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”

Technology management

They explained how innovation and technology provide the impe­tus for economic progress. Remember Schumpeter’s creative destruction? That was music to my ears, one of my graduate courses is “Innovation and technology management.” The trio includes Joel Mokyr from the Netherlands.

He studied at Yale University and is a professor at Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University, Israel. Peter Howitt, a Canadian, studied at Northwestern University and is a professor at Brown University. 

 You may not know these laureates and may have got tired reading this story, but you will feel the impact of their work mostly through technology.   The biggest lesson is that we need to fund research and have a stream of new ideas; you never know which one will be the next big thing. Noticed California on the list?

Who knew quantum mechanics would have commercial value 100 years ago? Who knew T cells would one day help us cure cancer and autoimmune diseases?

Who thought that meta-organic frameworks would help in capturing carbon? How much do we appreciate innovation as a catalyst for economic growth beyond showing off new gadgets like our phones? 

While the rest of the world is focused on advanced research and economic dividends thereof, our focus is on political expediency. And we want to be a developed country by 2050?