A brand-new Nobel Laureate
10/13/2026On Monday, Georg Nagel was awarded the Nobel Prize; on Tuesday, he was honoured at the Biozentrum. Confetti cannons went off, even though Nagel himself was unable to attend.
Monday morning, 9.40 am: The telephone rings in Shiqiang Gao’s office at the Institute of Physiology on Röntgenring. The display shows 0046, the country code for Sweden. And because the Nobel Prizes are being awarded this week, Gao realises he’d better answer this call.
Sure enough: the call is from Stockholm, and the caller asks for Georg Nagel’s mobile number. The committee would like to inform Nagel personally that he is to receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Gao is Nagel’s closest colleague in Würzburg; he started working for him as a PhD student 16 years ago. He knows that Nagel has been in his second home, Italy, for the past few days. And he knows his mobile number too.
A day later, some 150 members of the Biozentrum, the university management and other JMU departments gather in the courtyard of the building on the Hubland campus. There, they not only popped the champagne corks but also set off four confetti cannons to celebrate “a brand-new Nobel Prize”, as Markus Engstler, spokesperson for the Biozentrum, put it.
From 2004 to 2021, Georg Nagel served as Professor of Molecular Plant Physiology at the Chair of Botany I at the Julius-von-Sachs Institute at the Biozentrum, and subsequently as a senior professor at the Institute of Physiology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) until the end of June 2026.
The news from Stockholm was a “really wonderful surprise”, said University President Paul Pauli at the ceremony at the Biozentrum. He described Georg Nagel as a principled, straightforward scientist who is passionate about his field. “He deserves it,” said Pauli. The only fly in the ointment: “It’s a shame he can’t be here in person.” But the university will make up for that.
Then other colleagues of Georg Nagel at the Biozentrum took the floor: Dirk Becker, Ulrich Terpitz and Martin Müller. They all mentioned Nagel’s reserved nature and his modesty; they all expressed their joy and pride at his “unique achievement”.
After the short speeches, Markus Engstler gathers all the party guests in the centre of the courtyard and counts down to the shower of confetti – in the hope “that we’ll need lots more confetti cannons in future”.
