The coronavirus pandemic has brought the role of science into sharper focus than it has ever been before, and scientific progress has been lightning fast.

From Oct. 4 to 11, the Alfred Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace, as well as the more recent Nobel Prize in economics, will be awarded in Stockholm and Oslo.

While predicting who will win the Nobel Prize is notoriously difficult - the shortlist, as well as the nominators, are all kept under wraps, and documents revealing the juicy details are kept secret for 50 years - here are some Nobel-worthy candidates and the life-changing discoveries they have made.

Vaccine Breakthrough

Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the U.S. are two possible laureates whose pioneering work led directly to the first mRNA vaccines.

More than a billion people have been injected with them in a rush to stop a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 4.7 million people.

Kariko and Weissman have previously won multiple awards, including the Lasker Prize in the U.S., which is widely seen as a predecessor to the Nobel Prize.

DNA Sequencing

David Pendlebury, a senior citation analyst at Clarivate's Institute for Scientific Information, draws Nobel predictions based on the number of times a scientist's key papers are cited by peers. Pendlebury believes it is too soon for the science behind the COVID-19 vaccinations to be recognized with a Nobel Prize.

According to him, the Nobel committee is innately conservative, waiting at least a decade, if not several, before inducting new members into its exclusive club.

He believes the committee could commemorate Jacques Miller, a French-Australian researcher whose discoveries in the 1960s concerning the organization and function of the human immune system, specifically B cells and T cells, lies at the heart of vaccination research.

Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman, and Pascal Mayer were also awarded the Breakthrough Prize for their work on next-generation DNA sequencing technologies.

On Diversity

The Nobel Committee encouraged nominators to consider gender, geography, and field diversity in 2019, but the laureates were all men. Last year, two women, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the CRISPR genome-editing method, while Andrea Ghez was part of a trio that received the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on a supermassive black hole.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology will be announced on Monday, Oct. 4, followed by the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, Chemistry on Wednesday, Literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences next Monday.