This is what it's like to get "the call" - the Swedish Academy of Sciences ringing you up to say you won the Nobel Prize.

It's usually a dream-of-a-lifetime call that only the special few get in private. But for American physicist John Clauser, who was awarded the Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics, it rang a little different.

Thanks to a three-hour delay from a phone busy with congratulations and reporters' queries, the call finally got through to him while he was on a live Zoom interview with The Associated Press. And he shared his side of the notification and celebration.

"Oh hang on. They're on the phone right now," he said. "OK. Hang on just a second. Can I talk to the guys from the Swedish Nobel Committee?"

Over the next nine minutes, Clauser recounted to the Swedish Academy the difficult road that eventually led to a Nobel-awarding phone call - albeit a few hours late.

While studying at Columbia in the 1960s, Clauser became interested in designing practical experiments to put quantum mechanics to the test. But his ideas weren't always well-received in the field, he said.

Leading physicist Richard Feynman, who won his own physics Nobel in 1965, "kind of threw me out of his office," Clauser said. "He was very offended that I should even be considering the possibility that quantum mechanics might not give the correct predictions."

But Clauser said he was having fun working on these experiments and thought they were important - "even though everybody told me I was crazy and was going to ruin my career by doing it."

While continuing his work at University of California Berkeley, he and the late physicist Stuart Freedman "had to build everything from scratch. There was very little money so I was basically cobbling together junk or scrap from the UC physics department," he told the Academy.

"There's a lot of stuff unused in storerooms," Clauser said. "I would rummage around and say, 'Oh, hey, I can use this.'"

Some of the great physicists of the past scavenged the same way, he pointed out.

And those experiments, with all their backlash and scraped-together budgets, were the very reason he was on the phone with the Swedish Academy decades later.

As the call wrapped up, there was the matter of logistics. Clauser asked the Academy about when he would "get some dates and times on what I'm expected to do."

Of course, there's something you definitely have to say to the Academy when it calls: "Thanks a lot."

Nobel Prize for 3 chemists who made molecules 'click'

Three scientists were jointly awarded this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing a way of "snapping molecules together" that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.

Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal were cited for their work on click chemistry that works "sort of like molecular Lego."

"It's all about snapping molecules together," said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that announced the winners at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Sharpless, 81, who previously won a Nobel in 2001 and is now the fifth person to receive the prize twice, first proposed the idea of connecting molecules using chemical "buckles" around the turn of the millennium, Aqvist said.

"The problem was to find good chemical buckles," he said. "They have to react with each other easily and specifically."

Meldal, 68, based at the University of Copenhagen, and Sharpless, who is affiliated with Scripps Research in California, independently found the first such candidates that would easily snap together with each other but not with other molecules, leading to applications in the manufacture of medicines and polymers.

Bertozzi, 55, who is based at Stanford University "took click chemistry to a new level," the Nobel panel said, by finding a way to make the process work inside living organisms without disrupting them.

The goal is "doing chemistry inside human patients to make sure that drugs go to the right place and stay away from the wrong place," she said at a news conference following the announcement.

The award was a shock, she said. "I'm still not entirely positive that it's real, but it's getting realer by the minute."

Later, speaking to The Associated Press by Zoom, Bertozzi said one of the first people she called after being awakened by the call around 2 a.m. was her father, William Bertozzi, a retired physicist and night owl, who was still awake watching TV.

"Dad, turn down the TV, I have something to tell you," she said she told him. After she assured him nothing was wrong, he guessed the news. "You won it, didn't you?"

One of three daughters, Bertozzi said she was "fortunate because I grew up with parents that were very supportive, evangelical almost, about having their girls participate in the sciences."

Bertozzi, who is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press' Health and Science Department, said she was grateful for the energy and enthusiasm that a Nobel Prize win will inject into the field.

Meldal said he received the call from the Nobel panel about half an hour before the public announcement. "They ... told me not to tell anyone," he told the AP, adding that he just sat in his office, shaking a bit.

Meldal started out as an engineer, "but I wanted to understand the world so I thought chemistry would give me the solutions."

Jon Lorsch, director of the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which supports the work of Bertozzi and Sharpless, described click chemistry as "sort of like molecular Lego - you have a group on one molecule that specifically attaches to a group on another molecule," like Lego clicking together.

"That makes it possible to attach molecules in very specific pre-defined ways," he said, and gives scientists a very precise tool to build complex new molecules for use in drugs, synthetic materials and other uses.

However, the first iteration of click chemistry could not be used with living cells. "The original click chemistry used copper as a catalyst to join molecules," Lorsch said. "But the trouble is that copper is toxic to most living systems at higher concentrations."

Bertozzi then devised a way to jumpstart the reactions without copper or other toxic solvents - broadening the applications to human and animal tissues.

"Being able to work without dangerous solvents, opened many new doors - it enabled scientists to work on new types of reactions that actually take place within the human body," said Angela Wilson, president of the American Chemical Society.

That has allowed scientists to attach dyes to cancer cells to track their movements and analyze how they differ from healthy tissue.

Wilson believes the advances of this year's Nobel laureates "will allow more individualized medicine in the future because we can really track things much better within the human body."

Sharpless credited his passion for looking for the impossible and not accepting limits for helping him stumble upon his discoveries.

"I'm just really lucky to have a photographic memory and love the periodic table," he told a virtual news conference from his home in the San Diego suburb of La Jolla. "Prizes aren't what I'm doing science for. ... I have to do it. It's kind of a compulsion,"

M.G. Finn, a chemist now at Georgia Tech who collaborated with Sharpless on his Nobel-winning work, said click chemistry's use in biology and drug development was still "at its infancy," with more exciting discoveries to come.

Meldal agreed.

It's "very much an opportunity ... when you get this kind of award to argue for our young people to take chemistry as a discipline," he said at a news conference in Copenhagen. "Chemistry is the solution to many of our challenges."

Last year's prize was awarded to scientists Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan for finding an environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that the Nobel panel said is "already benefiting humankind greatly."

A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.

Three scientists won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger showed that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.

The awards continue with literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Monday.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.

Physics prize recognises scientists' work on quantum entanglement

This year's Nobel Prize in physics went to three scientists for proving that tiny particles could retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon once doubted but now being explored for potential real-world applications such as encrypting information.

Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for experiments proving the "totally crazy" field of quantum entanglements to be all too real. They demonstrated that unseen particles, such as photons, can be linked, or "entangled," with each other even when they are separated by large distances.

It all goes back to a feature of the universe that even baffled Albert Einstein and connects matter and light in a tangled, chaotic way.

Bits of information or matter that used to be next to each other even though they are now separated have a connection or relationship - something that can conceivably help encrypt information or even teleport. A Chinese satellite now demonstrates this and potentially lightning fast quantum computers, still at the small and not quite useful stage, also rely on this entanglement. Others are even hoping to use it in superconducting material.

"It's so weird," Aspect said of entanglement in a telephone call with the Nobel committee. "I am accepting in my mental images something which is totally crazy."

Yet the trio's experiments showed it happens in real life.

"Why this happens I haven't the foggiest," Clauser told The Associated Press during a Zoom interview in which he got the official call from the Swedish Academy several hours after friends and media informed him of his award. "I have no understanding of how it works but entanglement appears to be very real."

His fellow winners also said they can't explain the how and why behind this effect. But each did ever more intricate experiments that prove it just is.

Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment, cobbled together with scavenged equipment, that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described "a spooky action at a distance" that he thought would eventually be disproved.

"I was betting on Einstein," Clauser said. "But unfortunately I was wrong and Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right."

Aspect said Einstein may have been technically wrong, but deserves huge credit for raising the right question that led to experiments proving quantum entanglement.

"Most people would assume that nature is made out of stuff distributed throughout space and time," said Clauser, who while a high school student in the 1950s built a video game on a vacuum tube computer. "And that appears not to be the case."

What the work shows is "parts of the universe - even those at great distances from each other - are connected," said Johns Hopkins physicist N. Peter Armitage. "This is something so unintuitive and something so at odds with how we feel the world 'should' be."

This hard-to-understand field started with thought experiments. But what in one sense is philosophical musings about the universe also holds hope for more secure and faster computers all based on entangled photons and matter that still interact no matter how distant.

"With my first experiments I was sometimes asked by the press what they were good for," Zeilinger, 77, told reporters in Vienna. "And I said with pride: 'It's good for nothing. I'm doing this purely out of curiosity.'"

In quantum entanglement, establishing common information between two photons not near each other "allows us to do things like secret communication, in ways which weren't possible to do before," said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Quantum information "has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology," said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee. "Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements."

The kind of secure communication used by China's Micius satellite - as well as by some banks - is a "success story of quantum entanglement," said Harun Siljak of Trinity College Dublin. By using one entangled particle to create an encryption key, it ensures that only the person with the other entangled particle can decode the message and "the secret shared between these two sides is a proper secret," Siljak said.

While quantum entanglement is "incredibly cool" security technologist Bruce Schneier, who teaches at Harvard, said it is fortifying an already secure part of information technology where other areas, including human factors and software are more of a problem. He likened it to installing a side door with 25 locks on an otherwise insecure house.

At a news conference, Aspect said real-world applications like the satellite were "fantastic."

"I think we have progress toward quantum computing. I would not say that we are close," the 75-year-old physicist said. "I don't know if I will see it in my life. But I am an old man."

Speaking by phone to a news conference after the announcement, the University of Vienna-based Zeilinger said he was "still kind of shocked" at hearing he had received the award.

Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger have figured in Nobel speculation for more than a decade. In 2010 they won the Wolf Prize in Israel, seen as a possible precursor to the Nobel.

The Nobel committee said Clauser developed quantum theories first put forward in the 1960s into a practical experiment. Aspect was able to close a loophole in those theories, while Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that effectively allows information to be transmitted over distances.

"Using entanglement you can transfer all the information which is carried by an object over to some other place where the object is, so to speak, reconstituted," Zeilinger said. He added that this only works for tiny particles.

"It is not like in the Star Trek films (where one is) transporting something, certainly not the person, over some distance," he said.

Medicine Nobel for Swede who unlocked secrets of Neanderthal DNA

Swedish scientist Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discoveries in human evolution that unlocked secrets of Neanderthal DNA that helped us understand what makes humans unique and provided key insights into our immune system, including our vulnerability to severe COVID-19.

Techniques that Paabo spearheaded allowed researchers to compare the genome of modern humans and that of other hominins - the Denisovans as well as Neanderthals.

"Just as you do an archeological excavation to find out about the past, we sort of make excavations in the human genome," he said at a news conference held by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

While Neanderthal bones were first discovered in the mid-19th century, only by understanding their DNA - often referred to as the code of life - have scientists been able to fully understand the links between species.

This included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species, around 800,000 years ago.

"Paabo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence," said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee.

This transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. People outside Africa have 1-2% of Neanderthal genes. Neanderthals were never in Africa, so there's no known direct contribution to people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Paabo and his team managed to extract DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, leading to the recognition of a new species of ancient humans they called Denisovans.

Wedell called it "a sensational discovery" that showed Neanderthals and Denisovans were sister groups that split from each other around 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6% of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating interbreeding occurred there too.

"By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, Homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments," Wedell said. For example, Tibetans share a gene with Denisovans that helps them adapt to high altitude.

Paabo said he was surprised to learn of his win, and at first thought it was an elaborate prank by colleagues or a call about his summer home in Sweden.

"So I was just gulping down the last cup of tea to go and pick up my daughter at her nanny where she has had an overnight stay, and then I got this call from Sweden," he said in an interview on the Nobel Prizes homepage. "I thought, 'Oh the lawn mower's broken down or something'" at the summer home.

He also mused about what would have happened if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years.

"Would we see even worse racism against Neanderthals, because they were really in some sense different from us? Or would we actually see our place in the living world quite in a different way when we would have other forms of humans there that are very like us but still different," he said.

Paabo, 67, performed his prizewinning studies at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute. During the celebrations after the news conference in Leipzig, colleagues threw him into a pool of water. Paabo took it with humor, splashing his feet and laughing.

Paabo's father, Sune Bergstrom, won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982, the eighth time the son or daughter of a laureate also won a Nobel Prize. In his book "Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes," Paabo described himself as Bergstrom's "secret extramarital son" - something he also mentioned briefly on Monday.

He father took a "big interest" in his work, he said, but it was his mother who most encouraged him.

"The biggest influence in my life was for sure my mother, with whom I grew up," he said in the Nobel interview. "And in some sense it makes me a bit sad that she can't experience this day. She sort of was very much into science, and very much stimulated and encouraged me through the years."

Scientists in the field lauded the Nobel Committee's choice.

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he was thrilled, fearing the field of ancient DNA might "fall between the cracks."

By recognizing that DNA can be preserved for tens of thousands of years - and developing ways to extract it - Paabo and his team created a completely new way to answer questions about our past, said Reich, who is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press' Health and Science Department.

Dr. Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, called it "a great day for genomics," a relatively young field first named in 1987.

The Human Genome project, which ran from 1990-2003, "got us the first sequence of the human genome, and we've improved that sequence ever since," Green said.

When you sequence DNA from an ancient fossil, you only have "vanishingly small amounts," Green said. Among Paabo's innovations was figuring out methods for extracting and preserving these tiny amounts. He was then able to lay pieces of the Neanderthal genome sequence against the sequencing of the Human Genome Project.

Paabo's team published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome in 2009, and sequenced more than 60% of the full genome from a small sample of bone, after contending with decay and contamination from bacteria.

"We should always be proud of the fact that we sequenced our genome. But the idea that we can go back in time and sequence the genome that doesn't live anymore and something that's a direct relative of humans is truly remarkable," Green said.

Paabo said they discovered during the pandemic that "the greatest risk factor to become severely ill and even die when you're infected with the virus has come over to modern people from Neanderthals. So we and others are now intensely studying the Neanderthal version versus the protective modern version to try to understand what the functional difference would be."

Last year's medicine recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.