For the first time in its 10-year history, the University of Delaware’s annual Nobel Prize Symposium included some bluesy rock ’n’ roll playing loudly through the speakers, as the event recognized Bob Dylan — the only songwriter ever awarded a Nobel.

The symposium on Wednesday, Oct. 26, consisted of short talks by six UD faculty members who conduct research and scholarship in areas closely connected to this year’s Nobel Prize-winning work.

The speakers discussed the laureates’ careers and the significance of their work at the public event held in Harker Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory. Each talk was followed by the opportunity for audience members to ask questions.

Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the annual symposium gives interested members of the UD community and the public more in-depth information about the laureates’ work than is typically found in general news stories about the prizes. 

Following are the 2016 prizes highlighted at the symposium.

Literature

Ben Yagoda, professor of English and author of The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, discussed the work of Dylan, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Trying to explain Dylan is a sucker’s game,” Yagoda acknowledged, citing examples from the singer’s five-decade career in which he has seemed to constantly reinvent himself and his musical style, blurring categories and defying analysis. “He’s written more than 500 songs over 50 years, and they’re all wildly different.”

Almost from his start as a folksinger in the protest movement, Dylan was a controversial figure in American music, and his selection for a Nobel Prize stirred controversy as well, Yagoda said.

In its formal announcement of the selection, the Nobel committee said Dylan was being honored "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Yagoda asked the audience: “Is Bob Dylan a poet? Is he deserving of a Nobel Prize in Literature?” His own opinion, he said, is in line with what Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in an interview about the selection.

“Bob Dylan writes poetry for the ear,” Danius said. “He is a great poet in the grand English tradition.”

Yagoda played two of Dylan’s songs — “Highway 61 Revisited” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” — and examined their lyrics as poetry.

The two very different songs have one thing in common, he noted: The meaning of each seems clear at first, whether as a tribute to the blues or as a traditional kind of love song, “but as always with Dylan, it’s more complicated than that,” Yagoda said.

Physiology

Donna Woulfe, associate professor of biological sciences, explained the work of Yoshinori Ohsumi, who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries related to autophagy.

Autophagy translates literally as “self-eating,” Woulfe said, and is the process in which the components of cells are degraded and recycled. She described Ohsumi as a humble scientist who once called himself “just a basic researcher in yeast” but whose discoveries have led to a new understanding of how cells recycle their contents.

Using light microscopes and electron microscopes, he studied mutations in autophagy genes, which can cause disease. His findings have potential applications in the study of cancer metastasis and, particularly, in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Woulfe said.

She also noted that Ohsumi didn’t have an independent research program, or a particularly successful career, until age 43. That fact, she said, should encourage students and other researchers to persevere in their work even when they encounter early setbacks.

Economics

Jeffrey Miller, professor emeritus of economics, spoke about the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which was awarded jointly to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström this year for their work in contract theory.

Holmström’s breakthroughs came first, in the late 1970s, when he examined incentives and how to structure a contract to motivate people in a market economy. The problem, Miller said, is that “When a contract is signed, the future is often quite uncertain.”

He said Holmström developed the principal-agent concept, focusing on the relationship between an agent (the person performing a task, such as an employee or a doctor) and the principal (the person benefiting from that work, such as an employer or a patient). The principle he developed described how a contract should link incentives to performance information.

In the mid-1980s, Hart worked on a new branch of contract theory dealing with how to determine which person involved in a contract is authorized to make decisions in various situations, known as “control rights.”

Miller cited the recent example of Wells Fargo, in which employees signed up customers for products and services without their knowledge in order to make their sales quotas.

“To me, that’s a good illustration that we still have a long way to go” in designing contracts that offer appropriate rewards, he said.

Physics

Stephanie Law, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, discussed the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded this year to David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz.

The three men did work in phase transition — the process, for example, in which liquid water is cooled and becomes solid ice — and topology, a branch of mathematics that describes properties that only change step-by-step, not abruptly.

Topology, Law said, had been considered an “impractical” mathematical field, but it turned out to have important applications in physics.

The three Nobel laureates, she said, “really created an entirely new way to think about and classify matter, beyond the three states of solid, liquid and gas.” They worked with very thin electrically conducting layers and with chains of atomic magnets that are found in some materials.

Their work laid the foundation for studying unusual phases of matter and for predicting a variety of exotic states of matter, Law said. Applications include spintronics and computer chips — research that is taking place at UD.

Peace

In 1964, a Marxist guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army (FARC) began an armed conflict that continued until this year, leaving 220,000 Colombians dead and displacing as many as 6 million people.

“This is the longest civil conflict in the Americas and one of the longest anywhere in the world,” said Julio Carrión, associate professor of political science and international relations and of Latin American and Iberian Studies.

Carrión spoke at the symposium about the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his efforts to bring the civil war to an end.

Under Santos, peace talks between the government and the FARC began in Cuba in 2012 and resulted in the signing of an agreement ending the conflict in September 2016. In October, however, Colombian voters narrowly rejected the agreement, which had promised amnesty and reduced penalties for FARC leaders.

In answer to an audience question, Carrión said the future is uncertain, although the cease-fire has held so far and negotiations will presumably continue to reach an accord that citizens will approve.

When the Peace Prize was announced, the Nobel committee said the award “should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace.”

Chemistry

Joel Rosenthal, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, explained the prize-winning work of Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa, who jointly received this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing molecular machines.

Rosenthal began his presentation by describing a then-obscure 1959 talk by physicist Richard Feynman, who at the time urged his listeners to explore the promise of creating tiny machines by manipulating individual atoms. Decades later, the talk attracted scientific attention in developing the field of nanotechnology.

“What the field really lacked was the molecular nuts and bolts to hold these machines together,” Rosenthal said.

The three Nobel laureates began developing those components by discovering new ways to link molecules together to form chains, axles and rotors, he said. These discoveries have led to the creation of the world’s smallest machines, including a molecular elevator and a nano-car.

Rosenthal said the 2016 chemistry prize is different from that in many previous years because it honors, not mature chemistry, but the promise of how the prize-winning research can be used in the future as other scientists develop applications for it. Possible applications, he said, include drug delivery, information storage and energy conversion.

The laureates “have miniaturized machines and taken chemistry to a new dimension,” the Nobel organization said in its announcement.

This article includes information from the Nobel Prize organization. For more, visit the website.