THE NOBEL PRIZE 2006
SR International – Radio Sweden, Sweden
Oct 12 2006
The 2006 Nobel Prizes were announced in Stockholm starting with the
Medicine prize, on the 2nd of October.
The Nobel Prizes are announced out over two week period in Sweden
and Norway.
The prize-awarding institutions are scientific and literary bodies
in Sweden, and a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament to
choose the peace laureate.
The Swedish institutions invite nominations from past laureates
and selected university professors. For the peace prize, members of
governments and parliaments worldwide can also make nominations.
The Awards
All awards are always presented on the 10th of December, the
anniversary of the death in 1896 of Alfred Nobel, theSwedish
industrialist who set up and financed the prizes.
Occasionally no winner is announced.
The identities of the winners are announced simultaneously, with
citations explaining the choice, at a news conference in the Swedish
capital and by couriers sent to the Stockholm offices of international
news agencies.
The peace prize is announced and awarded in Oslo, the Norwegian
capital. Alfred Nobel designated that the Peace Prize be awarded in
Norway which at the time was joined to Sweden in a political union.
Nobel Committee members almost never discuss their choices in public,
and runners-up aren’t revealed for 50 years.
Each Award is 10 million Swedish kronor, or some $1.4 million US
dollars, plus a diploma, and gold medal. Laureates and their families
are invited to gala ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo which are followed
by lavish banquets with Scandinavian royalty.
2006 Nobel Medicine Prize
Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello won the Nobel medicine
prize for discovering a method of turning off selected genes,
an important research tool that scientists hope will lead to new
treatments for HIV, cancer and other illnesses.
The Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm honoured the pair for their
relatively recent discovery of RNA interference, which it called “a
fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information.”
Fire’s and Mello’s findings, published in 1998, opened a new field
of research that has helped researchers break down, or silence,
specific genes to help neutralize harmful viruses and mutations. RNA
interference occurs in plants, animals, and humans. It is already
being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function
of genes and it may lead to novel therapies in the future. AIDS
researchers hope RNA interference can help them develop new drugs to
fight viruses such as HIV.
“It looks very encouraging today, but it’s too early to say whether it
will find an important place in the therapeutic arsenal” against HIV,
said Goran Hansson, chairman of the prize committee.
Erna Moller, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska, said RNA
interference has already had a dramatic effect on the pharmaceutical
and biotech industries.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a biomolecule that can store and
transmit genetic information, similar to the role of DNA. In 1989,
Americans Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech were awarded the Nobel Prize
in chemistry for discovering RNA’s catalytic properties.
Fire, 47, of Stanford University, and Mello, 45, of the University
of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, published their seminal
work in the journal Nature in 1998. The two men will share the prize,
including 10 million kronor ($1.4 US dollar million).
The Nobel committees typically honour discoveries that have been
tested over decades, but Hansson said the findings by Fire and Mello
had a big impact even though they were published just eight years ago.
Last year’s medicine prize went to Australians Barry J. Marshall and
Robin Warren for discovering that bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers.
2006 Nobel Physics Prize
Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize
in physics for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of how
the universe was created and deepen understanding of the origin of
galaxies and stars.
The scientists shared the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.4 million
US dollar) award for discovering the nature of “blackbody radiation”
– cosmic background radiation believed to stem from the big bang –
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said.
Mather, 60, and Smoot, 61, based their work on measurements done with
the help of the NASA-launched Cosmic Background Explorer satellite
in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages
about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they
detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time.
“It is one of the greatest discoveries of the century. I would call
it the greatest. It increases our knowledge of our place in the
universe.” Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee for physics.
Mather, works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland, and Smoot works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
in Berkeley, California. Mather said he and Smoot did not realize
how important their work was at the time of their discovery.
However, their work was soon hailed as a major breakthrough.
Mather received standing ovations when he presented the COBE results
to the American Astronomical Society in 1990. After the results were
published in 1992, famed astronomer and author Stephen Hawking called
it “the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all times.” By
confirming the predictions of the big-bang theory, which states that
the universe was born of a dense and incredibly hot state billions
of years ago, with direct quantitative evidence, the scientists
transformed the study of the early universe from a largely theoretical
pursuit into a new era of direct observation and measurement.
The COBE project gave strong support for the big-bang theory because
it is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave
radiation measured by the satellite. The academy called Mather the
driving force behind the COBE project while Smoot was responsible
for measuring small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
“The very detailed observations that the laureates have carried out
from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development
of modern cosmology into a precise science,” Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences
Since 1986, Americans have either won or shared the physics prize
with people from other countries 15 times. Last year, Americans John
L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber and German Theodor W. Haensch won the
prize for work that could lead to better long-distance communication
and more precise navigation worldwide and in space.
2006 Nobel Chemistry Prize
American Roger Kornberg, the son of a Nobel laureate, won the 2006
Nobel chemistry prize for showing how genes are copied, a process
essential to how cells develop and life itself.
Kornberg’s prize came 47 years after he watched his father Arthur
accept the medicine Nobel in Stockholm for his own gene work. It also
crowned the success for U.S. scientists, who have swept all the 2006
Nobel science awards.
The Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes the10-million-crown
($1.36 US dollar million) award, said Roger Kornberg’s research into
how ribonucleic acid, RNA, moves geneticinformation around the body
was of “fundamental medical importance.”
Kornberg’s discovery showed how DNA, which he has describedas a silent
map, is “read” by RNA and converted into a protein within a cell.
Kornberg was 12 when he traveled to Stockholm to see his father receive
the 1959 Nobel for medicine for studies of how genetic information
is ferried from one DNA molecule to another.
As an undergraduate, the younger Kornberg said he briefly considered
majoring in English literature, but his passion for science won out,
he told a news conference at Stanford University in California,
where he and his father both still work.
The Kornbergs are the eighth set of parent and child laureates.
The Swedish Academy of Sciences said the process of gene copying,
or genetic transcription, was central to life.
“(It) is a key mechanism to the biological machinery. If it does not
work, we die,”Per Ahlberg, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry
And because the transfer of information helps explain how a cell
becomes a nerve or liver or muscle cell, understanding transcription
is crucial for the development of various therapeutic applications
of stem cells.
Kornberg used a process called X-ray crystallography – in which
molecules in a chemical reaction are “frozen” into crystals and
photographed using X-rays – to capture transcription in action and
in incredible detail. These images showed the complex structure RNA
uses to make this translation.
2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has been won by
an American economist who developed theories about unemployment that
better capture how workers and companies actually make decisions
about jobs.
Edmund S. Phelps, 73, a professor at Columbia University in New York,
was cited Monday for research into the relationship between inflation
and unemployment, giving
“Phelps’ work has fundamentally altered our views on how the
macroeconomy operates.” Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Phelps told reporters in his New York apartment that he learned of
the prize in a phone call from Sweden that woke him early in the
morning. He said he had waited for the award for a long time, but
wasn’t expecting it this year.
Phelps was born in Chicago and earned his bachelor’s degree at Amherst
College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1955 and his Ph.D. at Yale
University in 1959. He has been the McVickar professor of political
economy at Columbia since 1982.
The Swedish academy said the theoretical framework Phelps developed
in the late 1960s helped economists understand the root of soaring
prices and unemployment in the 1970s and the limitations of policies
to deal with these problems. His framework helped central banks shift
their focus toward using inflation expectations to set monetary policy
rather than concentrating on money supply and demand.
Phelps argued that this view did not take workers’ or companies’
decision-making into account, and his research showed that their
expectations about both unemployment andinflation affected their
actions.
Phelps told reporters that his goal was to make economic theory better
reflect the real world. “I’ve been interested in trying to put people
in a more realistic way into our economic models,” Phelps said. “In
particular I’ve emphasized that people have to form expectations
about the current state of the world and also expectations about the
future, including the consequences for the future of their actions
in the present.”
He said this is not easy because people make decisions with
incomplete information about the state of the world and how the
economy works. “It’s a great big mess, but I think the messiness was
not sufficiently appreciated earlier,” he said.
Phelps did his work at a time economists believed that a government
could not lower unemployment without triggering inflation.
The economics prize is the only one of the awards not established in
the will left by Swedish industrialistAlfred Nobel 111 years ago. The
medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace prizes were first
awarded in 1901, while the economics prize was set up separately by
the Swedish central bank in 1968. It carries an award of $1.4 million
US dollars.
Last year’s laureates were Robert J. Aumann, a citizen of Israel and
the United States, and American Thomas C. Schelling, for their work
in game-theory analysis. Both men were interviewed by Radio Sweden
in Sweden just before they received their award
Nobel Literature Prize
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of “My Name is Red”, “Snow”
and half-a-dozen other novels, won the Nobel Literature Prize on
Thursday for a body of work that probes the crossroads of Muslim and
Western cultures.
The Swedish Academy said Pamuk “in the quest for the melancholic
soul of his native city (Istanbul) has discovered new symbols for
the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
The 54-year-old writer is Turkey’s best-known author at home and
abroad, but also a political rebel whose pronouncements on his
country’s history have put its respect for freedom of expression
under the international spotlight.
“In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator
even though he sees himself principally a fiction writer with no
political agenda,” the Swedish Academy
Turkey’s decades-old striving to become European – characterized
by clashes between Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity –
along with the painful impact of an aggressive westernization after
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, permeate Pamuk’s writing.
Pamuk was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn
the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and he took a stand for his
Turkish colleague Yasar Kemal when the latter was put on trial in 1995.
Pamuk himself faced prosecution after telling a Swiss newspaper last
year that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed
during World War I under the Ottoman Turks.
The charges against him sparked widespread international protest,
and were dropped earlier this year.
Just hours before the Swedish Academy made its announcement, the
French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a punishable
offence to deny that the massacre of Armenians constituted genocide.
Pamuk is the first Turk to win the prestigious prize, and had been
rumoured as one of the frontrunners this year. A chain-smoker, he
mostly shuns the public eye, writing for long hours in an Istanbul
flat overlooking the bridge over the Bosphorus linking Europe and Asia.
Born in 1952 into a prosperous, secular family, Pamuk was intent on
becoming a painter in his youth. He studied architecture at Istanbul
Technical University but later turned to writing and studied journalism
in Istanbul.
He published his prize-winning first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons”,
in 1982, a family chronicle in which he describes the shift from a
traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western lifestyle.
His second novel, “The House of Silence”, came out in 1983, but it
was his third book, “The White Castle”, published two years later,
that gave him an international reputation.
“Structured as a historical novel set in 17th century Istanbul, it is
“on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with
an alien culture,” the Swedish Academy.
With the 2000 book “My Name is Red” – a love story, murder mystery and
discussion on the role of individuality in art – Pamuk explores the
relationship between East and West, describing an artist’s different
relationship to his work in each culture.
His latest novel is the critically-acclaimed “Snow”, set in Turkey’s
border town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and
Russian empires.
“The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just as it
knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts that
characterise Turkish society of our day,” The Swedish Academy
Pamuk will take home the prize sum of 10 million kronor, or some 1.37
million US dollars.