Announcements week of October 7-11, 2002

Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston for their discoveries concerning

"genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death"

"This year's Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine have made seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. By establishing and using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as an experimental model system, possibilities were opened to follow cell division and differentiation from the fertilized egg to the adult. The Laureates have identified key genes regulating organ development and programmed cell death and have shown that corresponding genes exist in higher species, including man. The discoveries are important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases."

Source: Press release on the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology 2002, Karolinska Institutet

Raymond Davis Jr
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, and

Masatoshi Koshiba
International Center for Elementary Particle Physics, University of Tokyo, Japan

“for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos”

and the other half to

Riccardo Giacconi
Associated Universities Inc., Washington DC, USA

“for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources”.



"The mysterious particle called a neutrino was predicted as early as 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize in 1945), but it would take 25 years to prove its existence (by Frederick Reines, Nobel Prize in 1995). This is because neutrinos, which are formed in the fusion processes in the Sun and other stars when hydrogen is converted into helium, hardly interact at all with matter and are therefore very difficult to detect. For example, thousands of billions of neutrinos pass through us every second without our noticing them. Raymond Davis Jr constructed a completely new detector, a gigantic tank filled with 600 tonnes of fluid, which was placed in a mine. Over a period of 30 years he succeeded in capturing a total of 2,000 neutrinos from the Sun and was thus able to prove that fusion provided the energy from the Sun. With another gigantic detector, called Kamiokande, a group of researchers led by Masatoshi Koshiba was able to confirm Davis's results. They were also able, on 23 February 1987, to detect neutrinos from a distant supernova explosion. They captured twelve of the total of 1016 neutrinos (10,000,000,000,000,000) that passed through the detector. The work of Davis and Koshiba has led to unexpected discoveries and a new, intensive field of research, neutrino-astronomy.

The Sun and all other stars emit electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths, both visible and invisible light, e.g. X-rays. In order to investigate cosmic X-ray radiation, which is absorbed in Earth's atmosphere, it is necessary to place instruments in space. Riccardo Giacconi has constructed such instruments. He detected for the first time a source of X-rays outside our solar system and he was the first to prove that the universe contains background radiation of X-ray light. He also detected sources of X-rays that most astronomers now consider to contain black holes. Giacconi constructed the first X-ray telescopes, which have provided us with completely new - and sharp - images of the universe. His contributions laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy."

Source: Press release on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2000, Swedish Academy of Sciences

”for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules”
with one half jointly to John B. Fenn
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA, and

Koichi Tanaka
Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, Japan

”for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules”

and the other half to

Kurt Wüthrich
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA

”for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution”.

Source: Press release on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Daniel Kahneman
Princeton University, USA

“for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty”

and

Vernon L. Smith
George Mason University, USA

“for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”.

Source: Press release on the 2002 Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2002 is awarded to the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész

"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history".

"In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete..."

Source: Press release on the Nobel Prize in Literature 2000, Svenska Akademien

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter,

"for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

Source: Press release on the Nobel Prize in Peace 2000, Norwegian Nobel Committee

Princeton Ten Previous Nobel Laureates

Physics ('45,'57,'63,'80,'93,'98,'04), Chemistry ('46), Medicine/Physiology('95), Economic Sciences ('79,'94,'02)

Physics 1945

"for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle"

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Physics 1957

LEE, TSUNG-DAO, China, Columbia University, New York, NY, U.S.A., b. 1926:

"for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles"

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Physics 1963

WIGNER, EUGENE P., U.S.A., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, b. 1902 (in Budapest, Hungary), d. 1995:

"for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles";

and the other half jointly to:

GOEPPERT-MAYER, MARIA, U.S.A., University of California, La Jolla, CA, b. 1906 (in Kattowitz, then Germany), d. 1972; and

JENSEN, J. HANS D., Germany, University of Heidelberg, b. 1907, d. 1973:

"for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure"

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Physics 1980

CRONIN, JAMES, W., U.S.A., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, b. 1931; and

FITCH, VAL L., U.S.A., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, b. 1923:

"for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons"

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Physics 1993

HULSE, RUSSELL A., U.S.A., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, b. 1950, and

TAYLOR Jr., JOSEPH H., U.S.A., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, b. 1941:

"for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation"

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Physics 1998

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded
The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to

Professor Robert B. Laughlin, Stanford University, California, USA,
Professor Horst L. Störmer, Columbia University, New York and Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA, and
Professor Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

The three researchers are being awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of "particles", with charges that are fractions of electron charges.

Citation:
"for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations."

Chemistry 1946

SUMNER, JAMES BATCHELLER, U.S.A., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, b. 1887, d. 1955:

"for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized"

the other half jointly to:

NORTHROP, JOHN HOWARD, U.S.A., Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton, NJ, b. 1891, d. 1987; and

STANLEY, WENDELL MEREDITH, U.S.A., Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton, NJ, b. 1904, d. 1971:

"for their preparation of enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form"

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Physiology or Medicine 1995

LEWIS, EDWARD B., U.S.A., California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, U.S.A., b. 1918;

NsSSLEIN-VOLHARD, CHRISTIANE, Germany, Max-Planck-Institut f_r Entwicklungsbiologie, T_bingen, Germany, b. 1942; and

WIESCHAUS, ERIC F., U.S.A., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., b. 1947:

"for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development"

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Economic Sciences 1979

SCHULTZ, THEODORE W., U.S.A., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, b. 1902 d. 1998: and

LEWIS, Sir ARTHUR, United Kingdom,, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., b. 1915 (in the West Indies), d. 1991:

"for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries"

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Economic Sciences 1994

HARSANYI, JOHN C., U.S.A., University of California, Berkeley, CA, b. 1920 (in Budapest, Hungary);

NASH, JOHN F., U.S.A., Princeton University, NJ, b. 1928; and

SELTEN, REINHARD, Germany, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universit,t, Bonn, Germany, b. 1930:

"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games"

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Economic Sciences 2002

Sources: Nobel Foundation -- www.nobel.se         Nomination and Selection of the Nobel Laureates