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The scientific Nobels announced this week — in Physiology or Medicine, Physics and Chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago.
Katrina Miller has reported on the Nobel Prizes in Physics for the past three years.
Oct. 9, 2025, 6:35 p.m. ET
At least three different reporters on Tuesday asked John Clarke, one of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics laureates, how exactly we ended up with technology like the cellphone today from his obscure discovery of “macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization” 40 years ago.
He never did give a straight answer. Perhaps because there isn’t one, no easy throughline to draw from the lab to our everyday lives. Often that line is a culmination of expertise that outweighs the contributions of one or a few scientists; it is an idea here, a breakthrough there and many failed experiments in between, sometimes over the course of decades.
The scientific Nobels announced this week underscore that point. All three awards — granted each year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago. Some experts interpret the selections by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as representing the importance of slow, basic science, work pursued out of a desire to better understand the world.
In an age when government efficiency has been used to justify sharp cuts to scientific funding, the science Nobels offer a case for plodding curiosity: that esoteric, seemingly useless exploration can lay the bricks for a road to places we cannot yet see.
“It’s not just that it took a long time between the efforts and the prize, but that the effort itself was intergenerational,” said David I. Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They’re not things for which we can have even well-formed questions, let alone clear and compelling answers” within a specific time frame, he added.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists who uncovered why the body’s immune system doesn’t attack itself. One of those scientists initiated experiments in the 1980s that did not bear significant fruit until 1995, and the other two laureates carried on that research through the early 2000s. The knowledge they revealed has led to developments in cancer treatment and has become a foundation for more than 200 ongoing clinical trials.
