Nobel Minds 2025

Hello from the Royal Palace in Stockholm. I'm Lucy Hawings from the BBC and we've been invited to record the program in this beautiful room by their royal highnesses Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel. Thank you. Well, thank you and uh warm welcome to the Royal Palace and to the Bernardot Library. This library gathers thousands of books originally owned by past kings and queens from the Banadot dynasty, providing insights into their time. Just as knowledge shaped their world, it continues to shape ours. Science is an important part of meeting the complex challenges of today. challenges that our esteemed Nobel laureates address through their groundbreaking discoveries guiding us toward a more enlightened future. There is a great strength in bringing together experts from different disciplines as we do here this evening and I am very much looking forward to the upcoming discussions. So once again a warm welcome to all of you. Laurates, thank you so much for joining us. This is the first time that you've gathered all together. It is my first time here too. It is an honor and a privilege for me to be here with you in beautiful Stockholm. So, thank you for having me. And with us here in the audience are some of your friends and family I know as well and some students from here in Sweden who have some wonderful questions they're going to be asking us later. So, we're looking forward to hearing from them. We're But I wanted to start by getting a sense of what it takes to become a Nobel laureate. And Omar, I thought I'd start with you. Uh, you've been awarded Omay Yagi the Nobel Prize in chemistry. But when I heard your story, all I thought was what a determined young man you must have been to come from a family of refugees in Jordan and then today to be sitting here with us. Would you describe yourself as determined? Yeah, I guess so. Um, I mean, and it t it takes passion, I think. I mean, I fell in love with molecules when I was very young. I didn't even know they were molecules. I was just attracted to their beauty. Oh, we're in this very beautiful library. And it was a library that you in a library you first discovered. True. Chemistry. Yes. Yes. Well, in my in my school when I was 10 years old,