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Every fall the
Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm, Sweden announces the year’s
newest Nobel laureates. Once again, Americans swept the Nobel Prizes,
winning the prestigious awards in economics, physics,
chemistry, and medicine.
These brilliant and accomplished individuals should be held up as models
for our young people. We should all be singing their praises and making
them our newest heroes, household names that outshine our athletes
and actors in fame if not fortune. It never happens that way. But at
least we should all do our part to help spread the facts of their accomplishments
and our pride as a nation in having them represent us.
In medicine, an American shared the prize with an Englishman for their
work in imaging human internal organs with exact and non-invasive methods.
The discoveries of Paul C. Lauterbur of the University of Illinois
at Urbana, and Peter Mansfield of Nottingham, England, led to the development
of modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which represents a breakthrough
in medical diagnostics and research.
In economics, an American also shared the prize with an Englishman.
Robert F. Engle, a professor at New York University, and Briton Clive
W. J. Granger, won the economics prize for their use of statistical
methods for studying the timing behind economic developments. Engle
is the fourth consecutive American to receive the award.
In physics, two Americans and a Russian scientist won the Nobel Prize
for theories about how matter can show bizarre behavior at extremely
low temperatures.
Alexei A. Abrikosov, a Russian and American citizen based at the Argonne
National Laboratory in Illinois; Anthony J Leggett, a British and American
citizen based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and
Vitaly L. Ginzburg, of Moscow; shared the prize for their contributions
to knowledge about two phenomena of quantum physics: superconductivity
and superfluidity.
Two Americans won the prize in chemistry for studies of tiny transportation
tunnels in cell walls, work that illuminates diseases of the heart,
kidneys, and nervous system. Peter Agre, of the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, discovered the “channels” that let
water pass in and out of cells, and Roderick MacKinnon, of the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute at the Rockefeller University in New York,
did key studies of the structure and workings of channels that transport
charged particles called ions through cell walls.
Since the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, 277 of the 661 winners
have been Americans. Year after year, Americans are able to reap the
high honor of winning these internally acclaimed, nonpolitical, merit-based
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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