Outlook in 2014

Scientists are hoping to make the world's most successful crop even better.

From a wild Asian grass to a refined crop that is the staple diet of half the world's population, the domestication of Oryza sativa spans centuries, but the grain's ancestry is hotly contested.

Around the world, researchers are looking for ways to rid rice of a troublesome companion.

Golden rice could help to end a nutritional crisis — but only if researchers can overcome some daunting technical and political hurdles.

Rice is a staple food, but production is not keeping pace with the rise in global population. So scientists are dreaming big and aiming high to change the future for this crucial grain.

Jules Hoffmann shared the 2011 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries in the activation of innate immunity against bacteria and fungi in fruit flies. Now based at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Strasbourg University in France, Hoffmann talks to ádám and Dávid Tárnoki about how to use the immune system to kill cancer cells.

Torsten Wiesel is president emeritus of Rockefeller University in New York City. He shared half of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Hubel for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system. He tells Stefano Sandrone about his greatest scientific achievement and his vision of the future.

Laureate Barry Marshall, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, tells Meghan Azad why he risked his health to prove his theory about the link between stomach ulcers and bacteria. He shared the 2005 Nobel prize with Robin Warren for discovering the stomach-dwelling bacterium Helicobacter pylori and for proving that it is this microorganism, not stress, that causes most peptic ulcers.

Brian Kobilka shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for their studies of G protein-coupled receptors. He is professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Haya Jamal Azouz asks Kobilka what it takes to spend 30 years answering a single research question.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were jointly awarded the 2008 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of HIV in 1983. Three decades on, Barré-Sinoussi is director of the Retroviral Infections unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Here, she tells Iria Gomez-Touriño about the latest strategies to combat the virus.

As the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings turn 64, laureates and young researchers discuss growing old — and whether exercise and stress reduction can slow the ageing process.

Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus proved that genetic changes could drive the formation of tumours. They were awarded the 1989 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the origin of retroviral oncogenes. Bishop — now director of the GW Hooper Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco — tells Kipp Weiskopf about 40 years in cancer research.

Waste removal is not usually described as sexy, but the once-neglected field of autophagy — which plays a part in cancer and other diseases — is a hot topic in biomedical research.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality. In some countries, incidence rates are dropping but survival rates for those with the disease remain low. By Eric Bender.

Lung cancer uses cunning mechanisms to evade the immune system. Can new antibody therapies outwit the disease?

Lung cancer kills more people than any other malignancy. Let's not delay in implementing a screening programme, says John K. Field.

Therapies targeted at the specific genetics of a patient's lung cancer have proved harder to realize than expected.

Studies in never-smokers have revealed key lung-cancer mutations — but the cause of the disease is still a mystery.