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Sunil Amrith, professor of History at Yale University, will be awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2022. The award honours his search for the historical origins of the great inequality that exists between and within countries as well as the connection that he has identified to the impact of climate change. 

The Heineken Prizes are the Netherlands’ most prestigious international science prizes. Every two years they are awarded to five distinguished researchers. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. During the first week of June, a 2022 laureate will be announced every weekday. Previous laureates of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History include Lorraine Daston (2020) and John McNeill (2018). The award was established in 1990 by Alfred H. Heineken.

About the study
Amrith studies the history of South and Southeast Asia. He is interested in the transnational connections between these two regions, focusing mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among other things, he has studied the large-scale migration around the Bay of Bengal, and the circulation of cultural, religious, and political ideas that followed. He also focuses on the history of the environment in this region, and the relationship between climate and water cycles around the Indian Ocean. He recently wrote the book Unruly Waters, in which he explains why monsoons and rivers play such an important role in the history of South and Southeast Asia. The recurring theme in his work is the effect of imperialism and colonialism on the inequality between and within countries.  Again, he makes the connection to environment: Amrith is researching how climate change affects socioeconomic issues such as migration and inequality. He explains: ‘Our current environmental crisis is best understood in relation to a history of increasing inequality, both between and within countries. Moreover, we can better equip ourselves to understand the challenges we all face if we listen to and learn from the widest possible range of voices, including those that have been marginalised or silenced.’ 

Jury praises Amrith’s new perspective on environmental history
‘Unruly Waters is an extraordinary broadening of the history of the Indian subcontinent, from a whole new perspective,’ says the jury, with chair Judith Pollmann, historian, and professor of early modern Dutch History. Amrith combines political, social, and cultural insights, micro and macro perspectives. In doing so, he combines administrative and popular sources, such as film and drama. In addition, he ties his research to the perspective of the individual and the way in which life is affected by climate. For example, he makes a connection between colonial exploitation and climate change in India. This new approach to issues such as ecology, migration, politics, health, and climate makes Amrith a leader in the field of environmental history. 

About Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith (Kenya, 1979) grew up in Singapore and then moved to the United Kingdom to study history at Cambridge University. He received his PhD in history from the same university in 2005. After working briefly as a researcher at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was appointed lecturer at Birbeck College, part of the University of London. In 2015, he was appointed Mehra Family Professor of South Asian History at Harvard University. Since 2020, he has been Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. In addition to the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History, awards he has received include the John F. Richards Prize, the Infosys Prize in Humanities, and the MacArthur Fellowship.

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Vishva M. Dixit, vice president of Early Discovery Research at Genentech, will be awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2022. The award honours his pioneering biomedical research on apoptosis, the process of programmed cell death, and necrosis, where cell death is caused by factors outside the cell such as infection or trauma. His discoveries have provided mechanistic insight for new clinical treatments, including immunotherapy in cancer patients.

The Heineken Prizes are the Netherlands’ most prestigious international science prizes. Every two years they are awarded to five distinguished researchers. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. During the first week of June, a 2022 laureate will be announced every weekday. Previous laureates of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine include Karl Deisseroth (2020) and Peter Carmeliet (2018). The award was established in 1989 by Alfred H. Heineken.

About the study
Dixit studies how the cells of the body die, and how our bodies regulate the process of apoptosis. Every second, your body replaces about a million cells because they are old, damaged or mutated. As the biomedical researcher himself explains: ‘We live because we are continuously dying.’ Dixit discovered which enzymes are involved in apoptosis, and how they activate each other in a chain reaction. This knowledge could be used, among other things, for enhancing immunotherapy in cancer patients, with immune cells initiating this chain reaction, killing cancer cells.

In addition to this ‘silent’ form of cell death, there is also ‘loud’ cell death: necrosis. This occurs, for example, in the case of a cut, burn or infection. Dying cells alert immune cells to come and clear away the danger: they trigger an inflammatory response (inflammatory signalling). Dixit discovered that cells have different sensors for specific forms of danger, but that they trigger the inflammatory process in the same way. The discovery of one of these so-called receptors, NLRP3, is of importance for treating inflammation that is not caused by pathogens (bacteria, viruses or fungi) and that can contribute to degenerative conditions such as arthritis, atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. Dixit’s research group discovered drugs that specifically inhibit NLRP3. This will make it possible to treat sterile infections in the future, without reducing resistance to pathogens.

Jury praises significant contribution of clinical treatments
Dixit’s early findings revealing the fundamental mechanism of apoptosis form the basis of advanced therapies now used in clinics. The jury, with chair René Medema, director of Science Policy at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, said it was confident that Dixit’s future research would have a similar impact on the treatment of numerous diseases, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, and infections. In addition to these important scientific discoveries as a ‘leader in apoptosis research’, the jury says Dixit is a highly dedicated mentor for postdocs and his students. The jury is awarding the prize to Dixit because of his drive to disseminate knowledge about the immune system to a wide audience. The fact that he actively promotes science education in low- and middle-income countries also factored into the jury’s decision.

About Vishva Dixit
Vishva Dixit (Kisii, Kenya, 1956) studied medicine at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In 1981, he moved to the United States for a medical residency training programme at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1986, he joined as an Assistant Professor the Pathology Department at the University of Michigan, where he was appointed full Professor in 1995. Beginning in 1997, he held various positions at the biotech company Genentech, and he has been vice president of Early Discovery Research since 2005. Between 1999 and 2008, he was also a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California. Dixit has more than fifty patents to his name. In addition to the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine, awards he has received include the Vilcek Prize, the Gutenberg Research Award, and the Dawson Prize in Genetics.

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Visual artist Remy Jungerman will be awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2022. The jury praises the artist for the way he interweaves the cultures of the countries that define him: Suriname, the Netherlands, and the United States. By using geometric patterns and horizontals composed of panels varying of length, width, and colour, Jungerman creates a unique style and an extensive layering in his work. This form and connection of traditions offers the audience a new visual language that initiates a dialogue between disparate cultures.

The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art is the biggest visual art prize in the Netherlands. The award was established in 1988 by Alfred H. Heineken to honour and encourage top talent in the arts in their development and to enhance their international prominence as artists. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. Previous laureates include Ansuya Blom (2020) and Erik van Lieshout (2018).

Jungerman creates sculptures, paintings, and installations in which he combines elements from different cultures. Materials, traditions, and rituals from Africa and North and South America form the basis of his work and he incorporates them in a modernist way. Specifically, he draws much inspiration from the Maroons of Suriname, descendants of escaped enslaved people. He uses textiles from the Winti religion, which Maroons, among other beliefs and practices, adhere to, and kaolin, a porcelain clay used in this culture during rituals to purify bodies and objects. In his large installations, he also uses other materials from rituals. He wants to use the aesthetics of these materials to tell new stories. 

Jury praises combination of different traditions
The jury, chaired by Patricia Pisters, professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam, is impressed by the body of work that Jungerman has steadily built up. In his installations, sculptures, paintings, and prints, he repeatedly manages to combine visual elements from different traditions in original ways. Although visually abstract, the jury describes his art as simultaneously physical and grounded. For example, in his work Visiting Deities, an installation around a long table of kaolin-treated blue-and-white and black-and-white chequered textiles, he uses Dutch river clay and water samples from the Amstel, Hudson, and Cottica rivers. Rivers on the three continents between which Jungerman travels. This layering makes the viewer think, according to the jury. Jungerman explains: ‘I thought it was important to install this table at the Venice Biennale. The Giardini, where the Biennale is held, has always been a glorification of the colonial past. There, all the rich countries could exhibit the wealth they had amassed from free labour through their colonies. As someone who comes from former colonial territory, I wanted to use the table to purify the space, and in doing so, to start the conversation.’ 

Follow-up research into Gee’s Bend quilts
Jungerman will receive €100,000 funded by a private fund, the Dr. A.H. Heineken Foundation for the Arts; half of this is earmarked for a publication and/or exhibition. The award will allow Jungerman to broaden his field of work. For example, in the United States he plans to research Gee’s Bend quilts, a type of blanket made by women from the isolated African-American community of Gee’s Bend. They use similar geometries to the early Maroon shoulder cloths from the previous century. Jungerman wants to discover what the similarities are and, in doing so, tell the great story of that geometric journey from the African continent to North and South America.

About Remy Jungerman
Remy Jungerman (1959, Moengo, Suriname) is a visual artist. He studied at the Academy for Higher Art and Culture Education in Paramaribo in Suriname and continued his education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He was an artist-in-residence at Art Omi in New York in 2013 and at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, also in New York, in 2018. Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2019 with the exhibition The Measurement of Presence, with artist Iris Kensmil. Jungerman has exhibited frequently at home and abroad, including at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Prospect 3, the New Orleans Contemporary Art Triennial, the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Havana Biennial. In late 2021 and early 2022, he curated a major solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, titled Behind the Forest.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the 2020 Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics to Bruce Stillman, President of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the state of New York. Stillman is receiving the prize for his ground-breaking research on the way DNA is copied in eukaryotic cells, a process of fundamental importance to life on earth.

Stillman discovered various proteins that are involved in DNA replication
Bruce Stillman started to become interested in DNA replication when doing his PhD research on how the DNA of adenoviruses is copied. He later switched his focus from adenoviruses to the polyomavirus simian virus 40 (SV40), a DNA virus with the potential for causing tumours, and he ultimately used a yeast as the model system.

Stillman discovered numerous important factors that are involved in DNA replication in eukaryotic cells. These cells have a nucleus. Virtually all multicellular organisms — such as plants, animals, and humans — are eukaryotes. Stillman co-discovered the RPA protein (Replication Protein A), which binds to a strand of DNA to prevent it from winding back on itself so that the enzyme polymerase can copy the strand of DNA. He also discovered Replication Factor C and the CAF1 molecule that helps packaging proteins to bind around the DNA that has just been copied.

In his later research Stillman focused on the start of replication: where on the DNA does the copying process start and which protein molecules are involved? He discovered one of the binding factors, ABF-1, that binds at locations where copying starts. He also discovered the crucial molecular complex — the Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) — that determines the exact starting point, and unravelled how this complex ensures that the replication process is initiated in a controlled manner.

Stillman’s research has led to important insights that allow us to understand how our hereditary material is copied, and how this relates to many other processes within the cell. He opened an entirely new and important field of research. His research contributes to a better understanding of the origin of mutations that can lead to hereditary conditions such as cancer.

About the laureate
Bruce William Stillman was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1953. He studied at the University of Sydney and earned his PhD in 1979 at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University for his research into replication of the adenovirus DNA. He then continued his career in the United States, where he started as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Stillman was appointed professor in 1985. He became the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1994 and nine years later its President, positions he still holds today.

Stillman is a member of the American National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Royal Society in London, a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize (2004), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2005), the Herbert Tabor Research Award (2014), and last year the Canada Gairdner International Award.

The international jury of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2020 has awarded the prize to visual artist Ansuya Blom. She will receive 100,000 euros, half of which is intended for a publication and/or exhibition. The jury described Ansuya Blom’s work as intimate, engaging and poetic.

Artist
Ansuya Blom (Groningen 1956) lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and Ateliers ‘63 in Haarlem. Blom has been working in various art forms, including drawing, painting, photography, film, text, collage and sculpture, since the late seventies. In 1981 she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting. Her films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, IDFA Amsterdam and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of museums, including the EYE Filmmuseum, Tate Modern and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. She has had solo exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and recently the Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. Blom also holds a master’s degree in psychoanalysis from Middlesex University in London and is an associate member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London.

Ansuya Blom is an advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and was a guest advisor at art institutions in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Suriname and Indonesia in 2019. She is a regular speaker at public lectures, and in interviews and panel sessions, most recently at the Nola Hatterman Institute in Suriname, the EYE Film Museum, the Casco Art Institute and De Appel.

Jury report
Her work does not clamour for attention, nor does Ansuya Blom herself. She chooses to stay in the background and lets her work subtly penetrate. For more than forty years Blom has been steadily working on an oeuvre that explores the boundaries of the inner world of experience. In films, drawings, paintings, installations and texts, she always manages to get under the skin and portrays humankind’s struggle with itself and the environment in an engaging and poetic way. 

Blom’s work radiates a great social and societal commitment. With her interest in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, her work offers a space for the voices of those who are often not heard: the marginalised or forgotten people. The artist asks critical questions about the position of the individual, collective and society. At a time when much debate is polarised, her work is characterised by subtlety. Blom offers a look into the human soul, in all its fragile vulnerability, and does so authentically and autonomously. 

The jury also praised her generous attitude in the Dutch art world, where Blom repeatedly takes on the task of mentoring young artists. The Heineken Prize for Art comes at an important time, during which a new generation of artists and curators is rediscovering Blom’s oeuvre and becoming very interested in it. The prize increases this momentum and will enable Blom to make new connections.

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2020 to Karl Deisseroth, Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University in California, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, USA. Deisseroth is receiving the prize for developing optogenetics — a method to influence the activity of nerve cells with light — as well as for developing hydrogel-tissue chemistry, which enables researchers to make biological tissue accessible to light and molecular probes. Both discoveries play an important role in current brain research.

Deisseroth took brain research a decisive step further
Deisseroth discovered that it is possible to use light of a certain wavelength to switch on a certain group of nerve cells, and if desired at the same time switch off another group with light of a different wavelength. This capability enables spectacular effects, such as influencing an individual subject’s perceptions and movements, and even higher brain functions. One can, for example, alter learning and memory, or change the motivation of an individual for specific actions. Already used around the world for scientific discoveries, optogenetics marks the onset of a true revolution in both basic science and neuropsychiatry, leading to mechanistic research and understanding of crippling conditions such as blindness, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, addiction, and depression.

The light-sensitive and transparent brain
Deisseroth first published on his optogenetics discovery in 2005. It had been known for many decades that some microorganisms have light-sensitive ion conduction (through pumps and channels). For example, certain algae are dependent on light to guide movement; when light shines on them, ion channels open and positively-charged ions flow into the cell, causing the single-celled alga to swim towards the light. In July 2004, Deisseroth succeeded in implanting the DNA that encodes these channels into rodent nerve cells and causing light-sensitivity, and over the next decade he developed ways to target specific nerve cell types — and even single cells — in living mice. As a result the targeted cells in the brains of mice could be stimulated with light to control behavior, far more precisely than with medication or electrical stimulation which affect multiple groups of brain cells.
In 2013, Deisseroth and his colleagues introduced another important technology, hydrogel-tissue chemistry. The initial form, called CLARITY, is a way of making brain tissue transparent and accessible to molecular labels, thus allowing researchers to see more clearly how the brain is constructed. Conventional microscopy techniques show nerve cells in detail, but these are two-dimensional images of wafer-thin slices. Some scanning technology, such as MRI and CT, displays three-dimensional images, but shows no details of cells. Achieving transparency through creation of a hydrogel-tissue hybrid, researchers can search through intact brain tissue and investigate which cells are connected and what kind of information they transmit; hydrogel-tissue chemistry variants have also allowed visualizing proteins anchored deep within tissue, reversibly changing tissue dimensions, and labeling and sequencing of RNA molecules in cells within native environments. Widely used for scientific discovery, these methods have also been applied by Deisseroth and colleagues to human tissue, including in patients with autism, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease.

About the laureate
Karl Alexander Deisseroth was born in Boston (Massachusetts) in 1971 and studied biochemistry at Harvard University. He works one day a week in the clinic as a psychiatrist, spending the rest of his time on fundamental neuroscience research. Deisseroth has a tremendous record of achievements, as appears from his many discoveries and publications. In 2010 the journal Nature Methods proclaimed optogenetics to be its “Method of the Year”. Over the past ten years, Deisseroth has received more than 80 patents for his development of optogenetics and related technologies.
Deisseroth has won dozens of fundamental science prizes, including the McKnight Foundation Scholar Award, the National Academy of Sciences Lounsbery Award, the Breakthrough Prize, the Else Kröner Fresenius Prize for Medical Research, and the Kyoto Prize. Last year the journal Nature Biotechnology declared him the Number 1 “translational researcher across all fields”. He is an elected member of all three US National Academies (Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering).

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2020 to Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Daston is receiving the prize for her study of the development of the concept of objectivity and the transformation she has brought about in the history of science.

Daston offers new perspective on “truth” and “objectivity” in science
Lorraine Daston is considered one of the most eminent historians of her generation. From the outset, her publications have had a major influence on the research agenda in the discipline of the history of science. She has shown how the scientific approach to acquiring knowledge is highly dependent on the period in which it is developed. Her entire work is an investigation and clarification of the moral economy of science.

History of objectivity
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (1998), the book Daston wrote together with Katharine Park, investigates the role of passions such as wonder, curiosity, pleasure, or horror in the study of nature. It opened up the discipline of the history of science to cultural history, the arts and literature, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, and led to the authors receiving the Pfizer Prize.

In the also award-winning Objectivity (2007), Daston and co-author Peter Galison studied the historical development of what were considered to be the right ways to acquire knowledge, from the eighteenth century to the present day. They did so on the basis of illustrations in scientific atlases from a wide range of disciplines. In their book, which was widely acclaimed in both the humanities and the hard sciences, the authors show that the core scientific concept of “objectivity” has a history and that principles regarding the formation of knowledge have developed in interaction with ideas about what characterises a scientific researcher.

In 2018 Daston published her essay Against Nature, in which she attempts to explain why people appeal to nature in order to justify moral arguments. We view nature as a model and ideal, from which we wish to derive standards and values. Deviations from natural order are considered unnatural and often wrong. According to Daston, this is a persistent misconception: all standards are based on an order, but nature is too multiform for us to derive a clear-cut order from it.

Rules and the modernity of science
Daston’s current projects include a “history of rules”, which traces how rules evolved from models to algorithms over many centuries. She is also re-examining the relationship between science and modernity, posing the question how the sciences and modernity became so strongly associated with each other, and with what consequences for their public image.

About the laureate
Lorraine Daston was born in East Lansing, Michigan in 1951. She studied the history of science and philosophy at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She has held various visiting positions, including in Paris, Vienna, Oxford, and Chicago. From 1990 to 1992, she was a professor and director of the Institute for the History of Science at the Georg August University of Göttingen (Germany). For the next five years, she was Professor of History and History of Science at the University of Chicago. From 1995 to 2019 she was the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Although she now officially holds emerita status, Daston is still very active in both Berlin and at the University of Chicago.

Her work has been recognised by numerous awards. She received the Pfizer Prize on two occasions, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Luhmann Prize of the University of Bielefeld. In 2018 she received the Dan David Prize. Daston is a member of several academies including Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences 2020 to Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England).
Le Quéré is receiving the prize for her interdisciplinary research on the interaction between climate change and the carbon cycle.

Le Quéré shows impact of climate change on CO₂ uptake in the oceans
Corinne Le Quéré has meticulously kept track of the role of the oceans in absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) by charting the processes involved. Human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation now cause annual emissions of 43 gigatonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. About 30% of this is absorbed by trees and plants. The world’s oceans absorb about 25% because CO₂ dissolves in water at the air-sea interface and is transported to the deep ocean by currents. The remaining 45% stays in the atmosphere and causes climate change.

Together with colleagues, Le Quéré has identified why the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere varies on different timescales. Some of the variations are caused, for example, by changes in marine productivity during ice ages and by changes in oceanic CO₂ uptake from varying ocean currents. Le Quéré was the first to identify a possible weakening in CO₂ uptake in the Antarctic Ocean associated with ozone depletion, and to quantify the impact of climate change and variability on global CO₂ uptake in the oceans in recent decades.

Le Quéré is the Chair of France’s High Council on Climate, an independent advisory body set up by President Macron to advise the French government on how to deal with climate change. During the corona crisis, the High Council presented eighteen recommendations to learn from the crisis, better prepare and reduce the risks of future health and climate crises. Le Quéré argues that the pandemic and climate change share common causes, in particular the untenable pressure we exert on the natural environment.

About the laureate
Corinne Le Quéré was born in Canada in 1966 and holds British, French, and Canadian nationality. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Montreal in 1990. She received her master’s degree in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University (Montreal) two years later. She completed her PhD research in oceanography at the Sorbonne University in Paris in just 2½ years. She conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany), then directed the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research before she was appointed Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England) in 2019.

In 2004, Le Quéré initiated the annual publication of the Global Carbon Budget, an international initiative of the Global Carbon Project to provide up-to-date information on carbon emissions and their distribution among the atmosphere, land, and oceans, including their main drivers. These publications have a major impact on climate science and climate policy. Le Quéré is the author of the third, fourth, and fifth reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2020 to Robert Zatorre, Professor of Neuroscience at McGill University in Canada and researcher at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital). Zatorre is receiving the prize for his contribution to the discipline of music cognition. He studies how our nervous system ensures that we can make and enjoy music.

Zatorre sets the tone for scientific approach to music
Robert Zatorre has made ground-breaking discoveries about the way people perceive sound, especially speech and music, the most important modes of human communication. Understand­ing how our brain processes music and speech will teach us more about how the brain works. Zatorre is one of the pioneers in the field of music cognition.

Impact of music
In February this year, leading journal Science published Zatorre’s findings that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the lyrics of songs, while the right hemisphere registers the melody. Researchers have known for a long time that damage to the left hemisphere affects under­stand­ing of speech and that damage to the right hemisphere means that you can’t hear music properly. Zatorre’s group recently discovered why that is, using fMRI scans to show that each hemisphere is specialized for distinct acoustical features of sounds that are relevant for speech or music.

In another much-discussed series of studies, he and his students showed that the reward system in the brain is activated when people listen to emotional music. He subsequently discovered that when people listen to “emotional peak moments” in music — moments when they feel a “shiver of pleasure” — brain cells release the neurotransmitter dopamine.

The brain releases dopamine during behaviour that is essential for survival, such as eating, but also when listening to music, which is not in fact necessary for survival. Zatorre currently studies whether music can help us cope better with the stress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Application of music processing
Zatorre took the lead in research in this field by combining the application of cognitive neuro­science with the study of music processing. He and his team have worked on the idea that musical training helps people to understand better what another person is saying (i.e. speech processing). He showed that musicians have a stronger coupling of auditory and motor areas than non musicians when processing speech, especially in noisy conditions. These findings might be relevant for alleviating speech perception problems (i.e. problems with processing what another speaker is saying). These problems are more often faced by the elderly and by people with hearing impairments.

About the laureate
Robert Jorge Zatorre was born in Buenos Aires in 1955 and studied psychology and music at Boston University. He also trained as an organist. He held a postdoc position at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada and worked as a neuropsychologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital for several years. In 2006, together with Isabelle Peretz, he founded the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS) in Montreal. His lab is dedicated to the neuroscience of auditory cognition, especially music.

Zatorre has received various awards for his work, including the IPSEN Foundation Neuronal Plasticity Prize, the Hugh Knowles Prize, and the Oliver Sacks Award. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2017.

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The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Heineken Young Scientists Award in the Medical/Biomedical Sciences 2020 to Meta Roestenberg, an internist-infectiologist at Leiden University Medical Centre. She is receiving the award for her research on the development of a malaria vaccine.

The jury describes Meta Roestenberg as an international pioneer in the field of human infection models for the development of vaccines against poverty-related infectious diseases. The research involves healthy subjects being infected with, for example, malaria parasites while receiving a candidate vaccine, so that the researchers can safely investigate the efficacy of the vaccine. Roestenberg is someone who has been able to accelerate development of new vaccines and medication for malaria in an unrivalled manner. Her research is clinically challenging and highly innovative from the scientific perspective. She is a true university researcher; highly active in the research, teaching and clinical fields, with a view to applying innovations in patient care both in Europe and beyond.

Research on a malaria vaccine
Together with colleagues in Nijmegen, Roestenberg developed a candidate vaccine using malaria parasites that have been genetically modified. As a result, the parasites are unable to develop effectively in the body of the host, namely humans. These do not fall ill, but their immune system does thus come into contact with the parasite, meaning that they develop immunity. Because the parasites cannot develop properly, the infected person can then not act as a source of infection for new mosquitoes that can go on to spread the disease. The candidate vaccine developed by Roestenberg and her colleagues is the first genetically modified vaccine in the world. It was announced in May this year that it works reasonably well but not yet optimally. Roestenberg will carry out further development in the coming years.
With some 228 million cases and more than 400,000 deaths each year, malaria is one of the world’s most serious infectious diseases, affecting young children in particular. The deadliest form of malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is transmitted from person to person by mosquitoes. Over the past five years, the number of deaths has been rising again. A vaccine can be a decisive factor in combatting the disease, but even after decades of research, there is only a single vaccine that is now being tested in three African countries and is not yet optimally effective.

About the laureate
Meta Roestenberg studied medicine at Maastricht University, graduating cum laude in 2004. She did internships in countries including India, Namibia, and the Philippines. She also completed her PhD research at Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen cum laude. In her dissertation she showed that if healthy volunteers are bitten by malaria mosquitoes and at the same time receive malaria medication, they are protected against the disease for a lengthy period.
In parallel with her PhD programme Roestenberg specialised as an internist-infectiologist. Since 2014, she has combined clinical work in travel medicine and tropical diseases at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) with research on new vaccines for infectious diseases that have a major impact on global health, such as schistosomiasis (bilharzia), hookworms, and clostridium. She also heads the Leiden Controlled Human Infection Center.
Roestenberg is an internationally recognised expert in the field of human infection models and vaccine development. She is also a highly sought-after speaker, a member of the WHO’s malaria vaccine Advisory Committee, and a contributor to global (ethical) guidelines for these complex clinical trials.