Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2008

Prize for Peace

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Martti Ahtisaari, former president (1994–2000) of Finland, for his work over more than 30 years in settling international disputes, many involving ethnic, religious, and racial differences. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that his efforts had “contributed to a more peaceful world and to ‘fraternity between nations’ in Alfred Nobel’s spirit.” The committee added that “he has shown what role mediation of various kinds can play in the resolution of international conflicts.”

Ahtisaari was born on June 23, 1937, in Viipuri, Fin. (now Vyborg, Russia). When the city of his birth was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 after the Russo-Finnish War, the boy and his family remained in Finland, moving first to Kuopio and then to Oulu. He studied at the University of Oulu, receiving a diploma in 1959, and then worked as a primary-school teacher. Beginning in the early 1960s he trained teachers in Pakistan and then in Finland. After joining (1965) the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ahtisaari held a number of positions. He served (1973–76) as ambassador to Tanzania and was (1975–76) an envoy to Zambia, Somalia, and Mozambique. He functioned (1977–81) as the United Nations commissioner for Namibia and twice (1978 and 1989–90) served as a UN special representative to that country. In his earliest major success in diplomacy, he helped guide Namibia’s path to independence in 1990 after it had endured years of conflict with South Africa.

As the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Ahtisaari was elected president of Finland in 1994. Upon leaving the presidency in 2000, he formed the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), serving as its chairman. Under the auspices of the CMI, the UN, and other organizations, he undertook a number of peace missions around the world, including, in 2000, an appointment as a weapons inspector in Northern Ireland in support of the decommissioning of the Irish Republican Army. In 2005 Ahtisaari helped settle the conflict in Aceh province in Indonesia, with Indonesian government forces agreeing to withdraw after 30 years of fighting in return for the province’s dropping its demands for independence. For the next two years he served as a UN special envoy in Kosovo, attempting to mediate between Kosovo’s push for independence and the Serbian government, and in 2008 he undertook mediation between Sunni and Shiʿite Muslims in Iraq. Over the years he also worked in other parts of the world, including Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.

Ahtisaari was known for his charm and sense of humour but was also recognized as a man who could be blunt and tough in negotiations between adversaries. He received many honorary degrees and a number of international awards, including the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding in 2000 and the UNESCO Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in 2008.

Prize for Economics

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 was awarded to American Paul Robin Krugman for his development of a new theory of international trade and of economic geography. Through the integration of economies of scale into general equilibrium models, Krugman furthered understanding of both the determinants of trade and the location of production in an increasingly globalized post-World War II economy. His research findings explained how the consumer’s desire for variety and choice enabled countries to achieve the economies of scale required to trade profitably in similar products. This led to later research on the “new economic geography,” which explained the location of jobs and businesses and why there was acceleration in the pace of urbanization and a population decline in rural areas.

  • Paul Krugman
    Paul Krugman
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Through his new theory of trade, Krugman demonstrated why rich countries trade with each other in similar goods (such as the trading of cars between Japan and Germany) when there is no apparent comparative advantage. His analysis was based on the assumption of economies of scale, where mass production leads to a fall in unit cost, but more crucially on the principle that consumers want diversity in the products available to them. Traditional trade theories, from the early 1800s (notably British economist David Ricardo’s laissez-faire Iron Law of Wages) to the 1920s and ’30s (in particular the Heckscher-Ohlin theory established by Swedish economists Eli Filip Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin), suggested that trading partnerships were based on national differences, as countries specialized in producing what they did best and imported the rest. In general, these theories provided an adequate explanation of most international trade until the 1950s, when like-for-like trade began to increase and new international trade patterns emerged. Krugman’s trade model, which he detailed in an article in the Journal of International Economics in 1979, showed that when trade barriers are removed, larger markets are created. While the increased global competition may reduce the number of foreign firms, the ensuing trade benefits not from specialization but rather from economies of scale, competition, and the wider choice and variety of goods available to consumers (as in the global automobile industry).

In his 1991 paper “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” Krugman developed a comprehensive theory of location of labour and firms in which he examined the proximity factor that drives urbanization. Large firms might cluster near a large market in order to exploit economies of scale and to minimize transport costs to their customers. Previous theories had assumed that firms clustered geographically in order to benefit from any spin-off in terms of expertise that they might glean from each other.

Krugman was born in New York City on Feb. 28, 1953, and was educated at Yale University (B.A., 1974) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1977), where he then was a member of the economics faculty from 1979 to 2000. He left MIT for a year (1982–83) to work as the chief staffer for international economics on Pres. Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and again for a hiatus (1994–96) to teach at Stanford University. From 1979 he also worked as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2000 he became a professor of economics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Krugman was a prolific and sometimes controversial writer, with more than 20 books and 200 papers in professional journals to his credit. His notable books include scholarly works such as The Risks Facing the World Economy (1991), Currencies and Crises (1992), and World Savings Shortage (1994); economics textbooks such as Microeconomics (2004) and Macroeconomics (2005); and nonacademic best sellers such as The Return of Depression Economics (1999), The Great Unravelling (2003), and The Conscience of a Liberal (2007). He gained a broader readership through his regular magazine columns in Slate (1996–99) and Fortune (1997–99) and especially through his politically partisan and frequently humorous Op-Ed column in the New York Times (from 2000). Prior to the Nobel, Krugman received (1991) the John Bates Clark medal, given every two years to an economist under age 40 who was judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic knowledge.

Prize for Literature

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to French writer J.-M.G. Le Clézio, one of the preeminent literary figures of his generation. He was known for his intricate, seductive fiction and distinctive works of nonfiction that mediated between the past and the present, juxtaposing the modern world with a primordial landscape of ambiguity and mystery. Le Clézio—the 14th French-language writer to be honoured as the laureate in literature and the first since Claude Simon received the prize in 1985—was cited by the Swedish Academy as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” Le Clézio acknowledged an expansive range of literary influences, including Homer, Milton, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Juan Rulfo, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Joyce, and was prolific in a variety of genres, often merging narrative forms and techniques. Accomplished as a novelist, children’s author, and essayist, Le Clézio forged a literature of universal themes, from life and death, rebirth, and redemption to immigration and displacement, alienation, and the loss of innocence.

  • Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
    Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
    Olivier Laban-Mattei—AFP/Getty Images

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born on April 13, 1940, in Nice, France; he was descended from a Breton family that had immigrated to the formerly French and subsequently British colony of Mauritius. Bilingual in French and English, he spent part of his childhood in Nigeria before completing his secondary education in France. After studying for a time in England, he returned to France, where he earned an undergraduate degree (1963) from the Institut d’Études Littéraires (now the University of Nice) and a master’s degree (1964) from the University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1983 he completed a doctorate of letters at the University of Perpignan, France. Le Clézio traveled extensively and immersed himself in the study of other cultures, particularly the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, which he wrote about in Trois villes saintes (1980), Le Rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue (1988; The Mexican Dream; or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, 1993), and La Fête chantée (1997).

Although he emerged within the French literary milieu dominated by writers of the nouveau roman (new novel) such as Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, Le Clézio developed independently from his contemporaries and established himself early in his career as an author of singular achievement and temperament. He made his debut as a novelist with the publication in 1963 of Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation, 1964) and gained widespread acclaim as a young author when the book—which had been sent as an unsolicited manuscript to the prestigious Gallimard publishing house—was awarded the Prix Renaudot. Other publications that further enhanced Le Clézio’s reputation in France and abroad included the short-story collection La Fièvre (1965; Fever, 1966) and the novels Le Déluge (1966; The Flood, 1967), Terra amata (1967; Terra Amata, 1969), La Guerre (1970; War, 1973), and Les Géants (1973; The Giants, 1975). Le Clézio was drawn to the marginalized of society and offered a compassionate and evocative portrayal of the disenfranchised and displaced in search of meaning, identity, and reintegration. For example, Lalla, the protagonist of his acclaimed novel Désert (1980), is a North African Berber separated from her past and her cultural inheritance when she was forced to flee her desert homeland; she returns pregnant and resolved both to perpetuate her tribal inheritance and to embrace her legacy of memory and transcendence.

Beginning with the publication in 1991 of Onitsha (Onitsha, 1997), Le Clézio turned increasingly to semiautobiographical works such as the novels La Quarantaine (1995) and Révolutions (2003). In L’Africain (2004), Le Clézio recounted the childhood experience of being reunited with his father in the aftermath of World War II. Later works include Ballaciner (2007), a personal tribute to the art of filmmaking and its relationship to literature, and the novel Ritournelle de la faim (2008). As a writer Le Clézio was primarily a storyteller and craftsman for whom the act of writing was one of the “greatest pleasures in life.” He said, “I feel that the writer is just a kind of witness of what is happening. A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher, he’s just someone who is witness to what is around him.”

Prize for Chemistry

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a Japanese and two American chemists for the discovery and development of a protein called the green fluorescent protein (GFP). Sharing the prize equally were Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass., Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, New York City, and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego. Their work with GFP opened a vast set of pathways and opportunities for studying biological processes at the molecular level. The protein provided a visual signal that scientists learned to use in many ingenious ways to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell.

  • Roger Tsien
    Roger Tsien
    Joe Toreno—Reuters/Landov
  • Osamu Shimomura
    Osamu Shimomura
    Josh Reynolds/AP
  • Martin Chalfie
    Martin Chalfie
    Diane Bondareff/AP

GFP, a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, consists of 238 amino acids. Three were of particular interest: serine at position 65, tyrosine at the next position, 66, and glycine at position 67. Together with oxygen, these amino acids undergo a chemical reaction in which they lose their initial identities and form a light-sensitive unit called a chromophore. The chromophore is fluorescent—that is, it absorbs light of one wavelength (blue or ultraviolet) and emits light of a different wavelength (green). One of the most important characteristics of GFP is its ability to be joined to other proteins without affecting their function. In this way GFP could be used as a “signal flag” on virtually any protein almost anywhere it might be found. Moreover, investigators determined how to modify GFP and make similar substances fluoresce in colours that ranged through the spectrum from blue to deep red.

A simple, powerful way of using GFP and GFP-like markers was to use them in pairs in which the specific wavelengths of light emitted by one of the markers would excite the other to fluoresce, a process called fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). The two markers had to be relatively near each other for the energy transfer to occur, which could then be verified by detecting the coloured light emitted by the second marker. This method and other, more complex variants could be used, for example, to study how specific proteins moved within a cell. A sophisticated variant for studying protein-protein interaction had one part of the GFP attached to one of the proteins of interest and the rest of the GFP attached to the other. When the two proteins came together, they formed a fully functioning GFP that then showed itself by fluorescing.

The green fluorescence of Aequorea victoria was discovered in 1955. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that the fluorescence is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. American biochemist Douglas Prasher analyzed the chromophore in GFP in the 1980s and subsequently found and cloned the gene responsible for making GFP. In 1993 Chalfie showed that the gene that instructs the cell to make GFP could be embedded in the nucleic acids of other organisms, first in the bacterium Escherichia coli and then in the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, so that they would make their own GFP. This discovery opened the possibility of using GFP in virtually any organism. Tsien then showed, beginning in 1994, that oxygen is required for GFP fluorescence and that point mutations in the gene could shift the wavelength and intensity of the fluorescence. Tsien also helped to determine the structure of GFP and described how to use GFP and its variants to study the role and behaviour of calcium ions in living systems.

Osamu Shimomura was born on Aug. 27, 1928, in Fukuchiyama, Japan. In 1960, after receiving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Nagoya (Japan) University, he became a researcher at Princeton University. He moved to the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1982. Shimomura also worked at Boston University Medical School. Martin Chalfie was born on Jan. 15, 1947, in Chicago. In 1977 he received a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University. He joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he became a professor in 1982. Chalfie was a member (from 2004) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Roger Tsien was born on Feb. 1, 1952, in New York City. In 1977 he received a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge. He moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, and in 1989 he became a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Tsien also was a member (from 1998) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Prize For Physics

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to a Japanese-born American physicist, Yoichiro Nambu, and two Japanese physicists, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, for their theoretical work in particle physics that described broken symmetry in particle interactions. Nambu, of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, was awarded one-half of the $1.4 million prize for his discovery and description of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan, and Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, each received one-fourth of the prize for their work on symmetry violation that predicted the existence of a previously unknown family of quarks (a group of fundamental subatomic particles).

The apparent symmetry of the basic building blocks of the universe was a subject of intense interest to fundamental particle physicists. As the construction of large particle accelerators in the mid-20th century made possible the study of a greater variety of fundamental particles, it appeared that each particle was paired with an antiparticle. The negatively charged electron, for example, had an antiparticle (the positron) of the same mass but opposite charge. In terms of its properties, each antiparticle looked like the mirror image of its corresponding particle, and when particles and their antiparticles met, mutual annihilation occurred. If particles and antiparticles were symmetrical, however, physicists were presented with the problem of accounting for the universe’s huge preponderance of particles over antiparticles, which was an indication of a lack of symmetry in the universe as a whole. Also, as fundamental particles and their interactions were observed in physics experiments, it appeared for a time that all such interactions were symmetrical. For example, interactions of particles and the mirror image of the interactions appeared to be the same, and this property, named mirror symmetry, gave rise to a conservation law called parity conservation. Interactions of electrically charged particles also appeared to be symmetrical, and the combination of symmetry in the charge and parity between particle and antiparticle was called CP symmetry. Investigations into the decay of certain particles revealed, however, that there were exceptions to mirror symmetry (1956) and to CP symmetry (1964).

From theoretical research on superconductivity that he conducted in the late 1950s, Nambu produced a theory—the theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking—that demonstrated how asymmetries could appear in elementary particle physics. The theory was therefore important in the development of the so-called standard model used to describe the fundamental particles that make up matter.

By 1970 it had been suggested that massive particles such as protons and neutrons could be built up from fractionally charged constituents named quarks and that quarks came in three flavours, or types, which were referred to as up, down, and strange. Strong evidence for a fourth flavour—charm—was put forward in 1970, which implied the existence of two families of quarks. In 1972 Kobayashi and Maskawa expanded upon the work of the Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo and investigated the theory of how quarks interact (the so-called strong interaction) in terms of the CP violation. This led them to postulate that there must be three families of quarks. This extension of the standard model was eventually verified experimentally with the discoveries of the bottom quark (1977) and the top quark (1995).

Yoichiro Nambu was born on Jan. 18, 1921, in Tokyo. He received a B.S. (1942) and a doctorate in science (1952) from the University of Tokyo. After serving as an associate professor at Osaka City University (1949–52), he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., before moving to the University of Chicago in 1954. He served on the faculty at the university until retiring as professor emeritus in 1991. Nambu became an American citizen in 1970. He received many awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science (1982), the Dirac Medal (1986), and the Wolf Prize in physics (1994/1995). He was a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary member of the Japan Academy.

Makoto Kobayashi was born on April 7, 1944, in Nagoya, Japan. He received a Ph.D. in 1972 from Nagoya University, and in 1979 he became an assistant professor at KEK in Tsukuba Science City. In 1989 he was appointed professor and designated as the head of Physics Division II. He became the director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies at KEK in 2003, and he was named professor emeritus in 2006. Among the awards he received were the J.J. Sakurai Prize (1985) for theoretical particle physics (shared with Maskawa), the Japan Academy Prize (1985), and the Japanese Person of Cultural Merit Award (2001).

Toshihide Maskawa (also spelled Masukawa) was born Feb. 7, 1940, in Nagoya, Japan. In 1967 he received a Ph.D. from Nagoya University. He taught at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Nuclear Study and at Kyoto Sangyo University. Maskawa was director of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University from 1997 to 2003, when he became professor emeritus. In 1985 Maskawa and Kobayashi were the first recipients awarded the J.J. Sakurai Prize.

Prize for Physiology or Medicine

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists—one German and two French—for their discoveries of viruses that seriously harm human health. Harald zur Hausen, professor emeritus and former chairman and science director at the German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, was awarded one-half of the prize for the discovery of human papillomaviruses (HPVs) that cause cervical cancer. Luc Montagnier, director at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, Paris, and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, professor and director of the retroviral infections unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, shared the other half of the award for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of the immune-system disorder AIDS.

  • Harald zur Hausen; Luc Montagnier; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
    Harald zur Hausen; Luc Montagnier; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

In the early 1970s zur Hausen argued that HPV caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in women, but few scientists agreed with him. What was widely known at the time was that there were many strains of HPV, and although some strains targeted the genitals, they did not appear to induce anything beyond benign warts. Assuming that tumour cells would contain viral DNA, zur Hausen spent more than 10 years in efforts to isolate and identify an HPV agent for cervical cancer. His findings demonstrated that HPV comprised a diverse family of many harmless strains and at least two oncogenic, or cancer-causing, strains—HPV 16 and HPV 18. Zur Hausen discovered HPV 16 in 1983; the following year he cloned both strains from cervical cancer patients. Subsequent studies documented the two strains in more than 70% of all cervical cancer cases worldwide. His discoveries enabled researchers to develop successful vaccines that afforded more than 95% protection from infection by HPV 16 and HPV 18.

In the early 1980s Montagnier, heading a team that included Barré-Sinoussi, began looking for a viral cause for AIDS. The investigation of viral particles from infected lymph nodes of AIDS patients revealed that the infectious agent was a retrovirus that replicated in immune-system cells called helper T lymphocytes. Further study helped characterize it as a lentivirus, or “slow” virus—the first known to infect humans. The gradual but massive replication of the virus after infection extensively destroyed lymphocytes and thereby severely impaired an individual’s immune system. The findings of Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi were a crucial factor that sped development of new antiviral drugs and diagnostics.

During the same period, American scientist Robert Gallo also studied the virus that became known as HIV, and he published his findings a short time after Montagnier’s team. Over the ensuing years there was considerable controversy over who first isolated the virus. Montagnier’s team, however, was eventually acknowledged as having discovered the virus.

Zur Hausen was born on March 11, 1936, in Gelsenkirchen, Ger. After earning an M.D. from the University of Düsseldorf in 1960, he conducted postdoctoral research at the university’s Institute of Microbiology (1962–65) and at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (1966–69). Returning to Germany from the U.S., zur Hausen continued his research on viruses at several German universities. He joined the German Cancer Research Center in 1983 as scientific director and chairman, and he remained there until retiring as professor emeritus in 2003.

Montagnier was born on Aug. 18, 1932, in Chabris, France. He received a degree in science (1953) from the University of Poitiers, France, and an M.D. (1960) from the University of Paris. He worked on RNA viruses at laboratories in France and England before he joined (1972) the Pasteur Institute in Paris. After establishing (1993) the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, Montagnier accepted an endowed chair at Queens College, New York City, where he headed (1998–2001) the Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology. He returned to the Pasteur Institute in 2001 as professor emeritus.

Barré-Sinoussi was born on July 30, 1947, in Paris. She received a Ph.D. (1975) from the Pasteur Institute in Garches, France, and then undertook postdoctoral research on retroviruses at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md. Barré-Sinoussi returned to Europe in 1975 to join the Pasteur Institute. In 1996 she became head of the institute’s Retrovirus Biology Unit, which was later renamed the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit.

Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2008
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