SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
2008 Nobels Announced in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, Economics
Most of the 2008 Nobel Prizes were announced last week. American Yoichiro Nambu at the University of Chicago won half of the physics prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
German virologist Harald zur Hausen received half the award in physiology or medicine for his discovery of the human papilloma virus, which led to development of a vaccine against cervical cancer. The other half went to French virologists Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The exclusion of American Robert Gallo from the award prompted Scientific American to consider "The Top 10 Nobel Snubs."
The chemistry prize went to Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien, along with Osamu Shimomura of Japan, for their work in isolating and refining the use of green fluorescent protein, or GFP, in jellyfish. GFP is now widely used to illuminate diverse biological systems, from neuronal circuits to cancer.
And today, the prize for economic science went to Princeton University professor Paul Krugman. He received the award for his decades of work on international trade and economic geography, most notably for "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity," according to the citation.