Hello and welcome to Babbage on Economist Radio. I'm Kenneth Cuckier, a senior

editor at the Economist, and coming up on today's show, we'll be responding to

this year's Nobel Prize winners. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today

decided to award 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Physics.

How could we make our technology more ethical? What if we didn't design

technology to maximize the story of social realities we put in front of people?

And why Dragonfish is the new black? It is essentially just as good at absorbing

light as the darkest material that we've ever managed to create.

But first, it's Nobel season. On Monday morning, to Suh Guhanzhou and James

Allison learn that they were this year's winners in the category of Physiology

or Medicine. They were recognized for their pioneering cancer therapies. The

Natasha Loders, our healthcare correspondent, she explains. Cancer

and Unotherapy is really an idea that scientists have been trying to pursue for

decades, which is to harness the power of the body's own immune system to fight

off and defeat cancers. So James Allison and Tzucco Hanzhou were initially

working on separate sides of the planet and not together. But both of them were

working on these protein molecules that stick out on the outside surface of

white blood cells called T-cells. And both of them independently speculated that

if you were to somehow block these molecules, which are now known as

checkpoint inhibitors, if you were to block them, you would release the T-cell

and allow it to attack cancer. The scale of the contribution made by both

these scientists is enormous. They've laid the foundations for immunotherapy,

...