Recorded videos of all the awardees delivering their speeches
Visions of knowledge: acceptance speeches of laureates in the 12th and 13th Frontiers Awards
The double ceremony of the 12th and 13th editions of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, held on 21 September in the Euskalduna Conference Centre in Bilbao, recognized 35 global leaders in scientific research and artistic creation. Due to this exceptional circumstance, it was unfortunately not possible for all awardees to deliver their speeches during the event. On this site we now present the pre-recorded acceptance speeches of all Frontiers laureates. Furthermore, in the web profile of each laureate in the 12th and 13th editions, acceptance speeches are available in both video and PDF text formats.
23 September, 2021
BASIC SCIENCES
12th Edition
Charles Bennett: “Like a dream, quantum information cannot be copied or shared”
Gilles Brassard: “Most of contemporary technology relies on quantum theory”
Peter Shor: “Asking the right questions can be just as important as coming up with answers”
13th Edition
Paul Alivisatos: “Nanoscientists are emulating nature with human made nanocrystals and molecules”
Michael Grätzel: “The quality of human life depends to a large extent on the availability of clean energy sources”
BIOLOGY AND BIOMEDICINE
12th Edition
Michael Hall: “Our challenge now is to apply our new knowledge to alleviate the suffering caused by disease”
David Sabatini: “The mTOR pathway is implicated in many diseases, such as cancer, and also plays a major role in the aging process”
13th Edition
David Julius: “Chronic pain remains a major unmet medical need and widespread public health issue affecting millions of people”
Ardem Patapoutian: “We began our work for the love of pure science, but interestingly we are also uncovering unexpected medical implications”
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
12th Edition
Isabelle Guyon: “There are both unprecedented opportunities and legitimate worries about the potential misuses of Artificial Intelligence”
Bernhard Schölkopf: “Machine learning is technology, and technology is built to serve purposes. Those purposes are bound to ethics”
Vladimir Vapnik: “The problem of developing intelligent computers has now become the problem of formulating the essence of intelligence”
13th Edition
John Hennessy: “This award celebrates the importance of research that rethinks problems when the parameters change”
David Patterson: “For the past decade and foreseeable future, 99% of the microprocessors use RISC”.
ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
12th Edition
Carlos Duarte: “Imagine the core activity of the fourth industrial revolution being to repair our planet!”
Terence Hughes: “The window of opportunity to save reefs remains open, but it is closing rapidly”
Daniel Pauly: “Fishes have borders that they don’t cross, of temperature, of depth… It is our industrial fishing which knows no limits”
13th Edition
Sandra Díaz: “We inquired if behind the exquisite, almost infinite variety of forms and functions of the world’s plants there might be a few very general biological rules”
Sandra Lavorel: “The TRY database has served over 10 billion data supporting ever more advanced models of vegetation – climate interlinkages”
Mark Westoby: “We are trying to build a periodical table for ecological strategies”
CLIMATE CHANGE
12th Edition
Kerry Emanuel: “It has become apparent that anthropogenic climate change poses a serious risk to civilization”
13th Edition
Neil Adger: “Let us take up the challenge of making the world fairer and safer in the face of climate change”
Ian Burton: “There is no longer any such thing as pure nature unmodified by humans. We must face up to adapting to the environment we have created”
Karen O’Brien: “It has become clear that health crises, economic crises, and climate crises must be looked at together”
ECONOMICS, FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT
12th Edition
Philippe Aghion: “Our research allows us to avert Schumpeter’s pessimism and replace it by an ‘optimism of the will’”
Peter Howitt: “We still have a long way to go to achieve sustainable growth, with not much time left”
13th Edition
Ben Bernanke: “We have contributed to understanding how stress in financial markets, especially banking and credit markets, affects the course of the economy, including jobs”
Mark Gertler: “It was no surprise to me that the Bernanke Federal Reserve contained the crisis, saving the global economy from a catastrophic collapse”
Nobuhiro Kiyotaki: “I would like to continue my inquiry into the mystery of the decentralized economy”
John Moore: “To the extent that I’ve had any good ideas about economics, they’ve been fostered on Spanish soil”
HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
12th Edition
Susan Fiske: “Cognitive misers simplify the human world into ingroups that are on their side, with warm intent, and outgroups who are not trustworthy”
13th Edition
Gerald Holton: “I have sought to understand the cultural contributions of science as a central civilizing force, fostering rationality and objectivity”
MUSIC AND OPERA
12th Edition
Arvo Pärt: “Tomás Luis de Victoria with his music and El Greco with his painting gave me the impulses that were decisive for my musical future”
13th Edition
Peter Eötvös: “I hope that my music can carry the message of the present and deliver it to the future, with all the things of the past it considers of value packed inside its luggage”
