|
Once again,
Americans dominated the Nobel Prizes, winning the prestigious awards
in economics, physics, chemistry, and medicine.
In medicine, an American and two Britons shared the prize for their
pioneering discoveries in the mechanics of cell division, which could
have important implications for cancer treatment.
Leland Hartwell of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute
shared the prize with Paul Nurse and Timothy Hunt of London’s Imperial
Cancer Research Fund.
Three American economists shared the Nobel Prize for their work in how
markets as diverse as those used for cars, insurance, and labor, function
when buyers and sellers have differing amounts of information about
each other.
The trio, George Akerlof of Berkeley, A. Michael Spence of Stanford,
and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia, worked separately on different aspects
of what is known as asymmetric information. They created a general theory
about how markets work when participants have asymmetric information.
In physics, two Americans and a German, working with small numbers of
ultra-cold atoms, won the Nobel Prize for creating a new state of matter
with far-reaching potential in computing, nanotechnology, and precision
instructions.
Eric Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in
Boulder, Colorado and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado shared
the prize with German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle, working at MIT. They
are credited with creating a new form of matter, known as the Bose-Einstein
Condensate (BEC), which could eventually lead to devices that use streams
of wave-like but slow-moving atoms to replace lasers in precision measuring
devices ranging from clocks to gyroscopes.
Two Americans and a Japanese won the prize in chemistry for devising
innovative ways to build molecules without creating their mirror-image
opposites, a principle used in making hundreds of drugs to treat conditions
ranging from high cholesterol to Parkinson’s disease.
William Knowles, a former chemist at Monsanto of St. Louis, will share
half of the prize with Ryoji Noyori of Japan’s Nagoya University.
The other half will go to K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research Institute
in La Jolla.
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.
|
