La hija del pastor de ovejas y la bordadora, en las quinielas to win the Nobel Prize

Spanish scientist Eva Nogales was one of the quiniels who won the Nobel Prize. His biography is unusual in this galardones. “Mi padre era pastor de ovejas y mi madre era bordadora. “We can’t learn basic education because you have to work from the age of 11 to 12,” explained Nogales, born at 58 in the Madrid city of Colmenar Viejo. Obsession with our fathers will be terrible for our children if they are students. Nogales entered the Facultad de Físicas de la Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 1983, en plena Movida madrileña. “Había muchas fiestas, mucha druga, mucho sexo, pero yo no tenía dinero y era una empollona. La Movida lost it to me, it was in the library,” was collected in the box. The investigator managed to collect a reward of more than a million euros, and Shaw entered Hong Kong and thought Oriental Nobel. One of our award-winning sites ended up winning a Nobel Prize.

All humans first have a unique cell that was born from the union of an egg and a sperm. This single cell has an exclusive DNA, a manual with sufficient instructions to multiply and transform into a unique human serum with 30 billion cells. The molecular machine that is DNA, and depending on the signals it has, the cell will turn into a brain neuron, a red blood cell, or any other type of cell. Nogales, which I found in the media at the University of California in Berkeley (United States), logrado was visualized for the first time, atom by atom, the structure of the main proteins found in DNA was recorded. This reading process, called transcription, is essential in life and death. If it fails, it could cause serious diseases such as cancer.

Estadounidense geneticist Francis Collins, a devout Christian and former director of the Human Genome Project, called DNA “the language of God.” At the Shaw Prize ceremony, Eva Nogales presented a retrato misma of her daughter at the first reception. “Yo tenía 10 años cuando murió (dictator Francisco) Franco. If we are all yelled at in religion, we accept all our days at school. We call upon the guardian angel and those who do so. There was a lot, I was a catechist, but I had a decisive moment when it became more critical and prevented it from escalating, even if it was from a theological point of view as a social one,” he explained. “Entre una cosa y la other, al final lo dejé. Religions exist in each of us because we want to feel our life and our life that asusta. Religion has paper. A mí me encantaría creer”, soistene.

Nogales, from Madrid to celebrate Christmas with his family in Colmenar Viejo, answered the preguntas of EL PAÍS in the hall of the National Center for Oncological Examinations, with which he collaborated.

—Usted studies the material of life at the atomic level. ¿How are we doing here?

—Pues de átomos, como todo lo demás. Nuestros atoms come from supernovas (star explosions) and so on. So we have all carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. The source of the DNA that forms part of the DNA is also important. In the end we have echoes of superimposed atoms, but combined thousands of different shapes.

American chemist Roger Kornberg won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for describing the structure of a protein involved in DNA reading. “Life is chemical, nothing more and nothing less, when people resist the idea,” Kornberg said in an interview with this newspaper four years ago. Eva Nogales, its biophysicist, agrees: “Life is chemical. Everything in biology is ultimately chemical”. A researcher has shown that the enormous complexity of all living proteins is constructed with just 20 amino acids, molecules that function like 20 different Lego pieces. “With only 20 tenemos today, the beauty of life, from the bacterium to the elephant, has passed through the sponge in the harbor,” Nogales said.

The Shaw Award was founded in 2004 by Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong film mogul and producer of kung fu films, as Avengers of Shaolinand world news, as Blade Runner. Shaw, eso rico fallecido of the decade that rewards and los científicos que illuminant los internal mysteries de la naturaleza, like Eva Nogales, que ha compartido el galardón with his colleague Patrick Cramer, president de la Sociedad Max. Planck, de de la Sociedad Max. Planck, de

Biophysicist Eva Nogales, photographed on the 21st at the National Center for Oncological Examinations in Madrid.JUAN BARBOSA

Nogales learned to operate the electron microscope, a revolutionary tool capable of photo Basic molecules for life at 180 degree temperatures with low carbon content. Our inventors won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nogales team took “a million photos” of the protein mist and combined the images with supercomputers to obtain the three-dimensional structure, atom by atom. This group at Berkeley also revealed the form of key proteins like those that formed eggs in the brain cells of people with Alzheimer’s; o telomerase, which is activated in cancer cells and causes them to multiply without stopping.

“You can’t adjust a vehicle if it’s not working properly, but you can’t run the engine under normal conditions. Y lo mismo ocurre con la naturaleza”, advises Nogales. The first major scientific experiment I learned about in 1998 was when my group discovered the structure of a test tube, a protein that acts as a cell scaffold. Discovering the topic of conducting a review Nature, escape from the world’s best science. “EL PAÍS lo contó en una pagina entera aquel domingo y me hice famosa en mi pueblo”, recuerda entre risas.

Eva Nogalesová received the Shaw Prize from the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, on November 12 in Hong Kong.
Eva Nogalesová received the Shaw Prize from the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, on November 12 in Hong Kong.Shaw Prize Fund

Biophysics also revealed the function of paclitaxel in 2014, a drug that has saved millions of lovely lives and has been effective against breast, ovarian and lung cancers, among others. The drug – based on an extract of the bark of the North American Pacific tree – attaches to tubulins and causes tumor cells to multiply. That same year, Nogales, along with her colleague Jennifer Doudna, diluted the structure of Cas9, the protein key to the revolutionary CRISPR gene-editing system. Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Mother Nogales, 87 years old, can move from 2021 to the street that has the full number of her children: avenida Evangelina Nogales de la Morena in Colmenar Viejo. His mistake antes de poder la verla. Biophysics was founded at Berkeley in 1993, but is still there. As we continue our interview for this newspaper, Nogales quedó with three professors of the colmenareño institute who have been passionate about science for more than 40 years: Ana Cañas, que le dio Classes de Física; Ana de Frutos of Biología; and Avelina Lucas of Matemáticas. Nogales suffered this scenario the day I received the Shaw Award in Hong Kong with manton from Manila purchased at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid: “Son preciosos y no se me ocurre un complemento más español!”.

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