October 16, 2019

Last week, World Book looked at the Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine, physics, and chemistry. Today, we present the Nobel Prize winners in literature, peace, and economics. Every year in the first week of October, the Nobel Foundation in Sweden awards Nobel Prizes to artists, economists, scientists, and peace workers who—in keeping with the vision of the Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel—have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

On October 10, the 2019 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. Handke, an accomplished playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, was rewarded for his “influential work” and “linguistic ingenuity” in exploring human experience. On the same day, the 2018 literature prize (which was delayed over a scandal involving a foundation member) was given to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk for her “narrative imagination” and “encyclopedic passion” representing all walks of life.

On Oct. 11, 2019, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his successful efforts to create peace between his nation and neighboring Eritrea. In July 2018, Ahmed negotiated “a joint declaration of peace and friendship” with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, resolving a dispute that had festered since Eritrea broke away from Ethiopia and became an independent nation in 1993. Since coming to office in April 2018, Ahmed has also restored democratic freedoms within Ethiopia.

On Oct. 14, 2019, the Nobel Prize for economics was given to the United States-based economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for creating an “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Banerjee and Duflo (who are married and serve as professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) worked with the Harvard University academic Kremer to find scientific solutions to improve education and children’s health around the world. They broke large issues into simple questions and then searched for practical answers to those questions that could be instituted on a grand scale.

October 11, 2019

Every year in the first week of October, the Nobel Foundation in Sweden awards Nobel Prizes to artists, economists, scientists, and peace workers who—in keeping with the vision of the Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel—have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. Today, World Book looks at the first three prizes, in the scientific categories of physiology or medicine, physics, and chemistry.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

On Monday, October 7, 2019, the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was given jointly to the scientists William G. Kaelin, Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, and Gregg L. Semenza for their work showing how cells adapt to the changing availability of oxygen. Kaelin, Ratcliffe, and Semenza identified the molecular machinery that allows cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. Their discoveries offer promising new strategies in the treatment of such diseases and maladies as anemia, cancer, heart attacks, and strokes.

William G. Kaelin, Jr., was born in New York and is a professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. Peter J. Ratcliffe of the United Kingdom is the director of clinical research at the Francis Crick Institute in London and director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford. Gregg L. Semenza, also from New York, is a professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

On Tuesday, October 8, the Nobel Foundation announced the prize for physics had been awarded to the Canadian-American cosmologist James Peebles and to the Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their work on explaining the evolution of the universe and for discovering distant exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system). Among other things, Peebles theorized how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies. In 1995, Mayor and Queloz discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star elsewhere in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, enhancing the study of planetary systems beyond our own that could support life.

James Peebles is the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University in New Jersey. Michel Mayor is an astrophysicist and professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Geneva. Didier Queloz is a professor of physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and at the University of Geneva.

On Wednesday, October 9, the Nobel Foundation announced that John B. Goodenough of the United States, M. Stanley Whittingham of the United Kingdom, and Akira Yoshino of Japan would share the prize for chemistry for developing and refining rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The lightweight, rechargeable, and powerful batteries are used in everything from mobile phones to laptop computers and electric vehicles. They can also store great amounts of energy from solar and wind power, further enabling the possibility of a fossil fuel-free future.

At 97 years old, John B. Goodenough is the oldest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize. He is currently the Virginia H. Cockrell Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. M. Stanley Whittingham is a distinguished professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Akira Yoshino is an honorary fellow at Tokyo’s Asahi Kasei Corporation and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.

October 10, 2018

On Friday, October 5, gynecologist Denis Mukwege and human rights activist Nadia Murad were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts “to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” On Monday, October 8, the Nobel Prize for economic sciences went to United States economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer for integrating technological innovation and climate change with economic growth.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

Denis Mukwege has spent much of his life helping the victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working from the Panzi Hospital in the far-eastern city of Bukavu, Mukwege and his staff have treated thousands of sexual assault victims. Most of the abuses were committed during a civil war that killed millions of people in the late 1990′s and 2000′s. Nadia Murad is a member of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. In 2014, Islamic State terrorists attacked Murad’s village, killed hundreds of people, and abducted Murad and other young Yazidi women and held them as sex slaves. Murad was repeatedly raped and abused before she managed to escape. Murad then began raising awareness of the horrors and traumas that she had experienced. Sexual violence in war and armed conflict is a grave violation of international law.

William Nordhaus is an economics professor at Yale University. He created an “integrated assessment model” that shows how economy and climate change together over time. Paul Romer teaches at the New York University Stern School of Business. He has demonstrated how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations.

October 5, 2018

Every year in the first week of October, the Nobel Foundation in Sweden awards Nobel Prizes to artists, economists, scientists, and peace workers who–in keeping with the vision of chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel–have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. On Monday, the foundation awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to scientists James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their research on immunotherapy that stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. Allison and Honjo helped develop powerful new therapies to treat, and in some instances cure, certain types of cancer.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

James P. Allison is with the department of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Tasuku Honjo is a professor in the department of immunology and genomic medicine at Kyoto University.

On Tuesday, the Nobel Foundation announced the prize for physics had been awarded to three scientists: Arthur Ashkin (from the United States), Gérard Mourou (France), and Donna Strickland (Canada) for their groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics. Ashkin invented “optical tweezers,” an instrument that uses lasers to manipulate such tiny objects as atoms, viruses, and living cells. Mourou and Strickland worked together to generate the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created. This technology has many useful applications and is the basis for LASIK eye surgery. The pair published an article on the laser research in 1985, when Mourou was teaching at the University of Rochester in New York and Strickland was a graduate student there.

Arthur Ashkin’s prize-winning work was conducted while he worked at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. At age 96, he is the oldest Nobel Prize recipient ever. Gérard Mourou is currently with the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. Donna Strickland is associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Strickland is just the third woman in 117 years to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Polish-born scientist Marie Curie shared the prize in 1903 for her research on radiation. In 1963, German-born scientist Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the prize for her research on atomic nuclei.

On Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018, the Nobel Foundation announced that Americans Frances H. Arnold and George P. Smith would share the prize for chemistry with Sir Gregory Winter of the United Kingdom for using directed evolution to synthesize proteins. This process mimics natural selection, the driving force of biological evolution, in a laboratory to create novel proteins with useful properties.

Arnold is currently a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. She is the fifth woman to win the chemistry prize. Smith is a former professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Winter is affiliated with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

October 10, 2017

Yesterday, on October 9, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics to American Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago. Thaler received the prize for his pioneering work in behavioral economics. This field demonstrates how human behavioral characteristics affect economic decision making.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

Economists had long assumed that people act rationally and in their own best interests when making economic decisions. However, in his research, Thaler demonstrated how social preferences, limited knowledge, and a lack of self-control often lead people to make poor economic decisions. Such irrational decisions occur often enough that they can affect people’s lives and influence the economic market overall. He also demonstrated that people often simplify financial decisions by focusing on the narrow impact of each decision rather than on its overall effect. For example, people might choose not to withhold a small part of their paycheck to contribute to retirement savings. They may view it as an unnecessary pay cut rather than seeing it as an investment in their future.

Thaler also showed that people often make irrational economic decisions in consistent ways. Companies may exploit these predictable irrational behaviors to trick people into buying their products. But Thaler also demonstrated that people can be encouraged to make better decisions by means of a small incentive. Economists refer to this idea as nudge theory because it shows people can be nudged into making better economic choices. For example, employers may match a portion of a worker’s contribution to a retirement fund. This modest payment encourages responsible financial planning by employees and benefits society as a whole.

Thaler was born on Sept. 12, 1945, in East Orange, New Jersey. He studied at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated in 1967. He earned a master’s degree in 1970 at the University of Rochester in New York, where he also received his doctorate in economics in 1974. He taught at the University of Rochester and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1995.

October 5, 2017

Yesterday, October 4, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry to three molecular biologists: Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson. The three made key contributions to the development of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for producing high-resolution images of biomolecules (molecules from living things).

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

An electron microscope uses a beam of electrons to magnify a specimen. It can produce detailed images of smaller areas than can an optical microscope, which uses beams of light. The wavelength (distance between wave crests) of an electron beam is much shorter than that of a light beam. This allows an electron microscope to make very small structures visible.

After the first electron microscopes were built in the 1930’s, they became important tools in chemistry, medicine, physics, and other scientific areas. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Joachim Frank developed an image-processing method that turned the electron microscope’s fuzzy, two-dimensional images into sharp, three-dimensional ones. This greatly improved researchers’ abilities to study the fine details of microscopic structures.

Scientists thought, however, that electron microscopes were useful only for imaging dead matter. The intensity of an electron beam destroyed biological material. Electron microscopes also require a vacuum (space with little matter) to work. Biomolecules collapse in a vacuum. In the 1980’s, Jacques Dubochet used cryotechnology (technology involving very low temperatures) to solve these problems. He surrounded a biomolecule in water and cooled the water so rapidly that it solidified as a glasslike structure around the specimen. This protected the specimen from the effects of the vacuum, with its natural shape and structure remaining intact. This also protected the specimen from the electron beam’s harmful radiation.

In 1990, Richard Henderson produced an image of a protein at atomic resolution (visible at the scale of an atom). This breakthrough came after decades of work carefully preparing specimens and adding details to the image. Henderson traveled around the world to find electron microscopes with the sharpest resolutions to enhance his protein model. Henderson’s image proved that cryo-EM could be used to produce images in fine detail.

The work of Dubochet, Frank, and Henderson paved the way for cryo-electron microscopy. Researchers can now freeze biomolecules in a natural stage or pose and portray them at a very high resolution. Frank was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1940. He earned his Ph.D. degree in 1970 from the University of Munich. Dubochet was born in Aigle, Switzerland, in 1943. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1973 from the Universities of Basel and Geneva. Henderson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1945. He earned his Ph.D. degree in 1969 from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

October 4, 2017

Yesterday, October 3, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics to three American scientists. Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shared the prize with Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for their work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment that led to the discovery of gravitational waves.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

The existence of gravitational waves was predicted in 1915 by the German-born American physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. A gravitational wave is a type of radiation that carries gravitational force. Scientists think that violent cosmic events create powerful gravitational waves. The waves, however, are difficult to detect because they grow weaker as they travel outward from their source. Researchers expect the waves that reach Earth to be very weak. The strongest waves might change the separation between two balls 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) apart by less than a thousandth of the diameter of the nucleus of an atom. Detecting such waves presented a significant challenge in physics.

Over years of research and collaboration, Thorne made important predictions of what the detection of gravitational waves would actually look like and how to identify them. He and Weiss helped develop plans to build large interferometers, devices that use light waves or other waves to make precise measurements, that could detect gravitational waves from cosmic sources. These sources include such violent cosmic events as collisions between black holes and neutron stars, the smallest and densest type of star known. Barish is widely credited for overseeing LIGO from its construction in 1999 to its first measurements in 2002. In 2016, LIGO scientists announced that they had detected gravitational waves coming from two colliding black holes. The gravitational waves had been detected by LIGO on Sept. 14, 2015. Since then, gravitational waves have been detected three more times.

Rainer Weiss was born on Sept. 29, 1932, in Berlin, Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1938, and he earned a Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1962. Kip S. Thorne was born on Jun. 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah. He studied physics at Caltech and received his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University in New Jersey in 1965. Barry C. Barish was born on Jan. 27, 1936, in Omaha, Nebraska. He studied physics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1962.

October 3, 2017

Yesterday, October 2, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to American chronobiologists Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young. The three scientists were awarded the prize for their discoveries on how circadian rhythms, also known as “biological clocks,” function in organisms, including humans. The science that deals with the study of biological clocks and rhythms is called chronobiology.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

Biological clocks control the rhythms of functions and processes in organisms. They keep accurate time during each 24 hours and over days, weeks, months, and even years. Birds migrate, fish spawn, and flowers blossom on schedules that are set by their built-in clocks. In human beings, biological clocks regulate body activities and periods of sleep and wakefulness.

In their Nobel Prize-winning research, the scientists investigated the mechanisms that control the circadian rhythm in the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The researchers isolated a particular gene responsible for producing a protein that builds up in the body at night and degrades at a set rate during the day, thus functioning as a biological clock. Hall, Robash, and Young discovered that this same mechanism functions in many other organisms, including people.

The scientists have also worked to raise awareness of the importance of proper sleep in maintaining good health. Their research suggests that a mismatch between the external environment and the internal biological clock may have a negative impact on human health. Such mismatches can occur when people travel across several time zones and experience “jet lag.”

Jeffery C. hall was born on May 3, 1945, in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1971. He is a professor emeritus at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and also affiliated with the University of Maine. Michael Rosbash was born on Mar. 7, 1944, in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned a Ph.D. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He is currently a professor at Brandeis University. Michael W. Young was born on March 28, 1949, in Miami, Florida. He earned a Ph.D. degree at the University of Texas in Austin in 1975. He is currently a professor at Rockefeller University in New York City.

October 14, 2016

On October 13, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature to the American composer, singer, and musician Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” He became the first songwriter to win the award.

Nobel Prize medal (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

Dylan has been one of the most influential songwriters of the past 50 years. He called his early work “finger-pointing songs” aimed at what many people considered the wrongs of society. These early songs, often performed with acoustic guitar and harmonica, included “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War” (both 1963) and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964). These songs became anthems that helped galvanize the civil rights movement of the United States and captured the spirit of young American protesters who opposed the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War (1957-1975).

American singer, composer, and musician Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Credit: © Valerie Wilmer, Camera Press/Redux Pictures

Dylan turned to electronic instruments in 1965, producing one of the greatest of all rock songs, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan recorded many other popular songs, including “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965), “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965), “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″ (1966), “Just Like a Woman” (1966), “Lay Lady Lay” (1969), “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (from the soundtrack of the 1973 motion picture Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), and “Tangled Up in Blue” (1975). Many other artists have recorded Dylan’s songs.

Dylan’s switch from acoustic to electronic music in 1965 angered some of his fans but won him many new ones. Dylan has shifted musical directions several times, such as turning to country music in the late 1960′s and Christian music in the early 1980′s. Today, Dylan continues to explore a variety of musical genres, drawing from folk, blues, country music, jazz, and early rock traditions.

Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. His real name was Robert Allen Zimmerman. After dropping out of the University of Minnesota in 1961, he moved to New York City to meet his idol, folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Dylan has won almost a dozen Grammy Awards. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. He won an Academy Award for his song “Things Have Changed” from the motion picture Wonder Boys (2000). Dylan received a Pulitzer Prize citation in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, in 2012.

Other World Book and Back in Time articles

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• Back in Time: Popular music (1965)