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Once again,
Americans swept the Nobel Prizes, winning the prestigious awards in
economics, physics, chemistry, medicine, and peace.
In medicine, an American and two Britons shared the prize for discoveries
about how genes regulate organ growth. Their findings shed light on
the development of many illnesses, including strokes and AIDS.
H. Robert Horvitz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
shared the prize with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. Brenner is a
professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla and
Sulston works at the Sanger Center at England’s Cambridge University.
Two American economists won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the use of
psychological and experimental economics in decision-making. Daniel
Kahneman, based at Princeton University, and Vernon Smith of George
Mason University, conducted research that paved the way for scientists
to rely less on observation of actual economies and more on controlled
laboratory experimentation.
In physics, two Americans and a Japanese scientist won the Nobel Prize
for using some of the most obscure particles and waves in nature to
increase understanding of the universe.
Riccardo Giacconi, of the Associated Universities Inc. in Washington,
D.C., will receive half the prize for his role in pioneering contributions
to astrophysics, which have led to the discover of cosmic x-ray sources.
Raymond Davis of the University of Pennsylvania shares the other half
of the physics prize with Japanese scientist Masatoshi Koshiba of the
University of Tokyo. The two pioneered the construction of giant, underground
chambers to detect neutrinos, elusive particles that stream from the
sun by the billion.
American, Japanese, and Swiss scientists won the prize in chemistry
for inventing techniques used to identify and analyze proteins, advances
that revolutionized the hunt for new medicines. The techniques are also
proving useful for diagnosing some cancers.
John Fenn, of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Kiochi Tanaka, of
Shimadzu Corp. in Kyoto Japan, will share half the prize. The other
half goes to Kurt Wuethrich, a scientist with the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Zurich and the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.
And finally, President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Peace.
Year after year, Americans are able to reap the high honor of winning
these internationally acclaimed awards. These are true, modern-day heroes.
We salute them all for their contributions to modern knowledge. We also
applaud all the teachers they’ve had at every level throughout
the years, who helped form the building blocks of knowledge that propelled
them to this exalted honor.
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