Generalknowledge at a glance. Nobel Prize Winners 2013
For Medicine: US duo James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born Thomas Suedhof, for their groundbreaking work on how the cell organises its transport system. The trio, who all work at US universities, were honoured for “their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”. The winners will share equally the prize sum of eight million Swedish kronor (USD 1.25 million).
For Physics: Britain’s Peter Higgs and Belgium’s Francois Englert, for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson—the particle key to explaining why elementary matter has mass—and it is the key to explaining the building blocks of matter and the origins of the universe. They had theorized about the existence of the particle in the 1960s.
For Chemistry: Jointly to Martin Karplus ( Harvard University), Michael Levitt (Stanford School of Medicine) and Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California) “for the development of multi-scale models for complex chemical systems”. Chemists earlier used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks. Today, the modelling is carried out in computers. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes.
For Literature: Canadian Alice Munro, for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story”. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the award. Her collections include, “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Runaway” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006) and “Too Much Happiness” (2009).
For Peace: The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global chemical weapons watchdog working to eliminate chemical arms stockpiles around the battlefields of Syria’s civil war. OPCW, a relatively small organisation with a modest budget, dispatched experts to Syria after a sarin gas attack killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus in August 2013. Their deployment under a UN mandate helped avert a US strike against President Bashar al-Assad and marked an unusual step into the limelight for a group more used to working behind the scenes overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons worldwide.
For Economics: The award is shared by three Americans—Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller, “for their work toward deepening an understanding of how asset prices move ”. The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel’s 1895 will.