At its best, science uncovers the extraordinary. It reveals wonders of the natural world that we could never have imagined: the trembling interactions of individual atoms, the movement of molecules that convey our sensations, the jets of hot gases that rush from a supermassive black hole.
In labs and in the field, at microscopes and telescopes, scientists strive for such breakthroughs. Every two years, The Kavli Prize honors scientists who manage to blaze new trails time and again. To find out how they do it, Scientific American Custom Media obtained exclusive early access to three scientists who this week were named Kavli Prize laureates in nanoscience, neuroscience or astrophysics.
Each of these researchers distinguished themselves by coaxing nature to give up tightly held secrets, whether by probing the evolution of galaxies, sharpening the images that electron microscopes produce, or revealing the elegant neural mechanisms that ensure animals, and humans, receive warnings from their sense of pain. To uncover what sets scientists of this caliber apart, we asked the laureates for their perspective on how award-winning science happens.
The stories they shared demonstrate how preparation, mindset, technical innovation, and grit—combined with curiosity, passion, and some luck—can transform the sometimes pedestrian process of science into a transcendent journey of discovery.
Recipient of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics: Andrew Fabian, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University
By examining X-ray data from supermassive black holes, Andrew Fabian revealed how they convert matter into energy, which they then spew into the galactic space that surrounds them. A believer in the power of serendipity, Fabian recalls how chasing down an unexpected observation led him to discover that matter plummeting into a black hole can produce sound waves, a process that influences how galaxies evolve.
Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind. Maybe you notice a glitch in the data—something that isn’t quite right, that looks slightly different from what you had predicted. If you’re prepared, you can recognize when you’re seeing something genuinely new that might send you along a different path.
Around 2000, we started using the Chandra X-ray Observatory to look much deeper, in much greater detail, at the Perseus cluster. When I looked at the Chandra images we collected in 2002, I spotted subtle concentric ripples in the brightness of the intracluster gas. I realized they resembled strong sound waves. The spacing of those ripples was just right to account for the energy emitted by the X-rays we observed. This meant that the sound waves were transferring energy from the region near the supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster out into the surrounding gas.
This was something we’d never considered before. When you take a book and drop it, its gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, and when the book hits the floor, a small amount of that energy is converted into sound. In the Perseus cluster, you’re dropping matter down the deepest hole you can find—a black hole. This generates enormous amounts of energy, which can push gas out of the galaxy and prevent star formation.
The universe is full of wondrous things—and the more closely you look, the more you find.
Co-recipient of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience: Ondrej Krivanek, Co-founder and President, Nion Company
Ondrej Krivanek shared the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with the team of Harald Rose, Maximilian Haider, and Knut Urban, for independent advances that sharpened the resolution of electron microscopes, enabling scientists worldwide to visualize and analyze materials atom by atom. For his part, Krivanek designed hardware to correct image-distorting aberrations produced by the lenses that focus the microscopes’ electron beam. The achievement required remarkable grit—and an ability to engineer a solution one step at a time.
Our first corrector went into a 20-year-old microscope. We just sliced it open, put our corrector in it, closed it up, and focused all of our efforts on the corrector. We were not looking for perfection. We were after a proof of principle—just showing that it will work.
We realized that once you correct the spherical aberration, all sorts of other little aberrations begin to pop out. We then had to analyze and fix each of them, one by one. That was an important lesson. You don’t want to have to fight five fires at the same time. For big projects, you have to divide your problem into smaller, independent steps to increase your chances of success.
Once we had a working corrector, we started to make our own microscopes. We saw spectacular results—results we could not have gotten if we had not sweated the details. When a new class of materials came along—a one-layer thick sample of graphene—my Nion colleague, Niklas Dellby, and I flew to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and got on the microscope we had sent there. It was probably 10 o’clock at night when the whole picture came in spectacularly clearly.
You could see every single atom. We could watch the atoms rearrange, all in real time. It was a revelation. I pushed back from the microscope and said to my partner: "We made a—there's a word that starts with an ‘F’—good microscope."
Co-recipient of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience: David Julius, University of California, San Francisco
David Julius shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Ardem Patapoutian for identifying the molecular mechanisms that underlie our ability to sense mechanical pressure and temperature. Using capsaicin—the chemical that gives chili peppers their kick—Julius identified a protein that protects us from injury by detecting heat, inflammation and pain, and that could lead to new and better analgesics. The discovery required a willingness to take a big risk to pursue something no one was even sure existed.
Who's not curious about knowing why chili peppers seem pungent? It's one of these things in science where you know that there's a mystery and if you solve it, it's going to be fascinating. I decided that if I'm going to get into pain biology, it would be very interesting to ask whether there really is a molecular receptor on which capsaicin works.
When Mike Caterina came to the lab as a postdoctoral fellow, I said, "Look, this is a risk, but if we do this, it’s going to be really exciting." Mike and I kicked around a bunch of ideas, then put together this cloning screen. It relied on the idea that if you took a non-neuronal cell and you were to transfer into it the gene that encoded the capsaicin receptor—and then activate it with capsaicin—it would let calcium into the cell. The late Roger Tsien had invented fluorescent dyes that enable you to detect such an event.
One day Mike said, "I want to show you something." We went into the darkroom. The cells were all sort of dark. And then he put on capsaicin, and boom, all of a sudden, a little cluster of cells just lit up and turned this beautiful sort of reddish color. And I said, "You've cloned it!" It was an amazing moment—and a great example of how scientists can use a natural product to understand a key signaling mechanism in our nervous system.
When you have a problem you’re passionate about, it’s always worth coming back to. Sure, there’s a certain art in knowing when to call it quits. But I think it’s worth taking a risk for something that could be really transformative.
To learn more about brilliant work of Kavli Prize Laureates, visit The Kavli Prize. To explore more of the biggest questions in science, click here.
