Nobel week: poetry, protein and the testimony of the hibakusha

The Nobel week of 2024 distributed its honours with a coherence that the prize rarely achieves, and the pattern, read across the six awards, said something about the moment. The literature prize went to Han Kang, the South Korean novelist, the first Asian woman to win it, honoured ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’; the peace prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese federation of atomic bomb survivors, recognised ‘for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again’; the chemistry prize went to the protein designers, David Baker and the two DeepMind scientists Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, whose work on the structure of proteins has given biology a tool it lacked for half a century; and the economics prize went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, for their account of how institutions shape prosperity. The medicine prize honoured the discoverers of microRNA, a mechanism that regulates gene expression in all complex life.

The week’s prizes have been read, separately, as the usual parade of achievement. Read together, they compose a quieter argument. The literature and peace prizes both pointed at the duty of witness: Han Kang’s novels, beginning with The Vegetarian and reaching its fullest form in Human Acts, the novel of the Gwangju massacre, are works of testimony about violence and its survivors, and Nihon Hidankyo has spent seven decades turning the memory of the bombings into a political demand. The two prizes, awarded days apart, honoured the same idea from different directions: that the past must be carried into the present, and that the carrying is itself a form of politics.

The science prizes told the other half of the story. The chemistry prize recognised a transformation in how biology is done: AlphaFold, the program that predicts protein structures, and the generative design of new proteins, have collapsed the time between asking a question about life and finding its answer, and the work is already changing medicine, materials and the design of enzymes. The economics prize returned to the older question of why some nations prosper and others do not, and the answer, in the work of the three laureates, is the institutions that the countries build: the rule of law, the property rights, the constraints on power. The two prizes, in their different languages, were both about the structures that make outcomes possible, the molecules on the one hand, the institutions on the other.

The prizes also carried their share of controversy, as the prizes always do. The literature award to a novelist from the country of the candlelight vigils and the martial law of the past was welcomed across the region; the economics prize was criticised, as that prize always is, for its particular definition of institutions; and the peace prize’s choice of the hibakusha, at a moment when the nuclear arsenals are being modernised and the treaties weakened, was read by many as a warning rather than a celebration.

The week that began with the chemistry of proteins ended with the economics of nations, and between them lay the poetry of trauma and the testimony of the survivors. The Nobel committees, which usually follow their own logics, seemed this year to be describing a single landscape: life, fragile and intricate at every scale, and the human arrangements, molecular and political, that determine whether it thrives or is destroyed. The honouring of the hibakusha, in a year of wars and arms races, was the week’s most pointed reminder of what the witness testimony is for.