Nobel Laureates

The Nobel Prize, undoubtedly the most prestigious award in the world, is awarded to those individuals who render valuable services to mankind in different fields of life namely physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace and economics. The will of the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895. Consequently the prizes were first awarded in 1901.

Before discussing the winners of 2011, it is important to share with the readers that each prize is awarded by a separate committee. The peace prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences award prizes in physics, chemistry and Nobel Memorial prize in economic sciences. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awards Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and the Swedish academy grants the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank instituted an award in economics that is often associated with Nobel Prizes. The first such prize was awarded in 1969. Although it is not an official Nobel Prize, its announcements and presentations are made along with other prizes.

After winning each recipient or laureate receives a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money which depends upon the Nobel Foundation’s income that year. The prize is not awarded posthumously. However if a person is awarded with prize and dies before receiving it, the prize may still be presented. A prize may not be shared among more than three people. Now let us have a look at the prize-winners of 2011.

Nobel Prize in Economics 2011:
Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims have shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics for providing ways to understand the impacts of policy changes or shocks like surging oil prices on output, inflation or employment. Here we take a look at the economists’ profile.

Thomas Sargent
Sargent was born in July 1943 and gained a BA in 1964 from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in 1968 from Harvard University.  He has specialized in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics. He is known as “one of the leaders of the rational expectations revolution” and the author of numerous path-breaking papers.

In a series of articles written during the 1970s, Sargent showed how structural macroeconomic models could be constructed, solved and estimated. His approach turned out to be particularly useful in the analysis of economic policy, but is also used in other areas of macro econometric and economic research.  Sargent has shown how structural macro econometrics can be used to analyse permanent changes in economic policy. This method can be applied to study macroeconomic relationships when households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments He is presently Berkley Professor of Economics and Business, New York University.

Christopher Sims
Sims was born in October 1942 and earned his PhD in Economics in 1968 at Harvard University. He has held teaching positions at Harvard, University of Minnesota, Yale University and, since 1999, Princeton.  Sims is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1989) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1988).  In his article “Macroeconomics and Reality” (1980), Sims introduced a new way of analysing macroeconomic data. He also concurred with Sargent in emphasizing the importance of expectations.

Sims proposed a new method of identifying and interpreting economic shocks in historical data and of analysing how such shocks are gradually transmitted to different macroeconomic variables.  Sims has developed a method based on so-called vector auto regression to analyse as to how the economy is affected by temporary changes in economic policy and other factors.  Sims is currently the Harold Helms Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University.

Nobel Peace Prize 2011:
The Norwegian Nobel Committeehas decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 is to be divided in three equal parts between Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.  We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.

In October 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325.  The resolution for the first time made violence against women in armed conflict an international security issue.  It underlined the need for women to become participants on an equal footing with men in peace processes and in peace work in general.

Ellen Johnson
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Africa’s first democratically elected female president.  Since her inauguration in 2006, she has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women.

Leymah Gbowee
Leymah Gbowee mobilized and organized women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections.  She has since worked to enhance the influence of women in West Africa during and after war.

Tawakkul Karman
In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the ‘Arab spring’ Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen.

It is the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s hope that the prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realise the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2011:
Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, a stunning revelation that suggests the cosmos will eventually freeze to ice.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said American Saul Perlmutter would share the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award with U.S.-Australian Brian Schmidt and U.S. scientist Adam Riess. Working in two separate research teams during the 1990s — Perlmutter in one and Schmidt and Riess in the other — the scientists raced to map the universe’s expansion by analyzing a particular type of supernovas, or exploding stars.

They found that the light emitted by more than 50 distant supernovas was weaker than expected, a sign that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, the academy said.

“For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago,” the citation said. “However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice.”

Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley.

Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia.

Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nobel Prize in chemistry 2011
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 was awarded to an Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman “for the discovery of quasicrystals”.

His discovery of quasicrystals revealed a new principle for packing of atoms and molecules’ said Lars Thelander, who leads the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at academy. This led to a paradigm shift within chemistry.

Dan Shechtman
Dr. Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Shechtman joined the Iowa State faculty in 2004. He currently spends about five months a year in Ames on a part-time appointment.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 was divided, one half jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity” and the other half to Ralph M. Steinman “for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”.

Ralph M. Steinman
Ralph Steinman, a pioneer in understanding how cells fight disease, tried to help his own immune system thwart his pancreatic cancer. He died three days before he was awarded Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee, unaware of his death, announced the award in Stockholm. Steinman’s employer, Rockefeller University in New York, learned of his death after the Nobel announcement.

Nobel officials said they believed it was the first time that a laureate had died before the announcement without the committee’s knowledge. Since 1974, the Nobel statutes don’t allow posthumous awards unless a laureate dies after the announcement but before the Dec. 10 award ceremony. That happened in 1996 when economics winner William Vickrey died a few days after the announcement. However, the committee said that Steinman’s award would stand and that his survivors would receive his share of the $1.5 million prize.

Hoffmann, 70, headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences in 2007-08.

Beutler, 53, holds dual appointments at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and as professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. He will become a full-time faculty member at UT Southwestern on Dec. 1.

Beutler and Hoffmann were cited for their discoveries in the 1990s of receptor proteins that can recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body, and activate the first line of defense in the immune system, known as innate immunity.

The work of the three men has enabled the development of improved vaccines against infectious diseases, and in the long term could yield better treatments of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and chronic inflammatory diseases.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2011
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 was awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality. (see a separate story about Tomas Transtromer)