Meet the 2020 Nobel Prize winners

1. Meet the 2020 Nobel Prize winners

2. The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) won the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to combat hunger around the world and improve conditions for peace in areas affected by conflict.

3. The United Nations, which turns 75 this month, has itself won the Nobel Peace Prize in the past, as have several of its agencies, including the High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNICEF children's fund and its peacekeeping forces.

4. American poet Louise Gluck has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal".  Pictured: Gluck reacts outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

5. A professor at Yale University, Gluck, 77, made her debut in 1968 with "Firstborn", and is seen as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature.

6. Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin holds a Swedish-themed puppet after winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the development of a method for genome editing.

7. Charpentier, who is French, and American Jennifer Doudna share the $1.1 million prize for developing the CRISPR/Cas9 tool to edit the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with precision.

8. Three scientists who unravelled some of the deep mysteries of black holes, the awe-inspiring pockets of the universe where space and time cease to exist, have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

9. German Reinhard Genzel (pictured), of the Max Planck Institute and University of California, Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez, at the University of California, Los Angeles, shared the other half for discovering that an invisible and extremely heavy object

10. Ghez - only the fourth woman to be awarded the Physics prize after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018 - said she hoped it would inspire others to enter the field.

11. Two Americans and a Briton won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Medicine for identifying the hepatitis C virus, in work spanning decades that has helped to limit the spread of the fatal disease and develop drugs to cure it.

12. "(To) go from basically the beginning-part of this discovery to when it can be successfully treated - this is kind of a rare treat for a basic scientist," Rice, 68, told reporters on a Zoom call.

13. The shared prize recognizes research dating back to the 1960s when Alter (pictured), at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that a liver disease that was not hepatitis A or B could be spread through blood transfusions.