The new Nobel Prize winners Svante Pääbo and Anton Zeilinger have more in common than this prestigious award: In 2014 both were on stage at the DLD, an international digital conference organized by Hubert-Burda-Media.
DLD has always stood for bringing the stars of tomorrow onto the stage at an early stage. “Because they are the ones who will decisively change the world and surprise us with groundbreaking innovations,” Steffi Czerny, DLD Managing Director, is convinced.
This is currently confirmed by the Nobel Prize awards for Svante Pääbo and Anton Zeilinger: The Swede Pääbo received the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday for his research on the evolution of humans and their extinct relatives. The Austrian Zeilinger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in the field of quantum physics. As early as 2014, Czerny and her team brought Pääbo and Zeilinger to the stage of the DLD conference in Munich for a joint panel.
Just last year, the Filipino journalist Maria Reesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – almost two years after she wowed the audience on the DLD stage in Munich. Like Pääbo and Zeilinger, Reesa was still one of the “hidden champions” of the speaker line-up when she performed. The later awards show how right the
Svante Pääbo is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. For years he has studied what makes modern humans so unique and what sets them apart from their extinct relatives. In 1997, for example, Pääbo was the first researcher to sequence the Neanderthal genome, with the result that its DNA differs significantly from that of today’s humans.
Anton Zeilinger is Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna. Together with the Frenchman Alain Aspect and the American John F. Clauser, he was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for research in the field of quantum mechanics. The Nobel Prize Committee honors the three for their work, which paved the way for new technologies based on quantum information. Her research is already being used in quantum networks, quantum computers and secure quantum-encrypted communication.
This year’s Nobel prizes are endowed with ten million Swedish crowns (approx. 920,000 euros). The award ceremony in all categories will take place on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the award donor Alfred Nobel.
Click here for the DLD Munich 14 panel: “On Information: An Edge Conversation”.
