Tag: Nobel Prize

Alice Munro, Nobel literature winner revered as short story master, dead at 92

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honoured short story writers, has died at age 92.

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died on Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included “The Beggar Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 feature film “Away from Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor’s General Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”

Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.

“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in British Columbia, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

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Peter Higgs, Nobel Laureate physicist who proposed Higgs boson particle, dies at 94

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Peter Higgs, the British physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 2013 for his discovery decades earlier of a theoretical mechanism to explain the origin of mass in the universe, has died. He was 94.   

He died on April 8 at his home, according to the University of Edinburgh, where he was professor emeritus. Higgs “was a remarkable individual — a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us,” said Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal and vice chancellor.

Higgs shared his Nobel prize with Belgian physicist Francois Englert for proposing the existence of what became known as the Higgs boson particle and the invisible field in space that gives mass to matter. The discovery of the elemental particle was announced in 2012 by European nuclear research body CERN after the boson was detected in the Large Hadron Collider, an underground laboratory near Geneva that smashes protons together at almost the speed of light and records data on their interaction. 

The breakthrough corroborated the ideas of Higgs published almost half a century earlier, when they were dismissed in the journal Physics Letters as having “no obvious relevance to physics.” 

His work, along with similar predictions made independently by Englert and his colleague Robert Brout, led to one of the most significant scientific findings of the past century. The “God particle,” a term used in US physicist Leon Lederman’s book of the same name to describe the boson field’s creative qualities, may offer insights into dark matter and dark energy, which make up about 96% of the universe and remain a mystery to cosmologists.

The Higgs boson, which decays almost instantly, completed the Standard Model of particle physics that explains how matter holds together. Without mass, particles would fly off into space, and nothing could take shape. 

“This brilliant achievement is richly deserved recognition of Peter Higgs’ lifetime of dedicated research and his passion for science,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron said after the announcement of Higgs’s Nobel Prize. 

Confirmation of the boson’s existence was the work of thousands of scientists on the competing Atlas and CMS experiment teams at CERN. It involved making particles collide in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular supermagnetized tunnel to recreate the conditions after the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. The project cost at least $10 billion.

It is “probably the largest and the most complex machine ever constructed by humans,” according to the Nobel Foundation.

Modest Man

Higgs shed a tear when CERN’s scientists erupted in applause at a press conference revealing their discovery on July 4, 2012. The father of the Higgs boson was as modest in the limelight as his simple lifestyle suggested: He lived in a small flat in Edinburgh, had no television and used public transport, according to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper.

“I regarded it as cheers for the home team, and the home team were the two experiments, Atlas and CMS,” he said in an interview with the BBC. “Maybe they were cheering me, too, but that was a minor issue.”

Higgs said the credit for predicting the mass-forming mechanism belonged to six physicists who contributed three papers on the subject in 1964: Englert and Brout, who wrote the first article, Higgs, and then Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble. 

The Nobel Foundation, which allows three recipients of a prize and none posthumously, chose Higgs and Englert as winners.

Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeast England on May 29, 1929, to an English father and a Scottish mother. His father was a sound engineer for the BBC who lived apart from the family for much of Higgs’s childhood.

Higgs, who suffered from asthma and was partly schooled at home by his mother, lived in Birmingham and Bristol, where he attended Cotham Grammar School until 1946 and developed an interest in the work of physicist Paul Dirac. He graduated with first-class honors in physics from King’s College, University of London, in 1950, and completed a master’s and a doctorate on molecular vibrations.

Higgs held research fellowships in Edinburgh and London before becoming a lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1960. He wrote his ground-breaking paper after developing the theory while walking in the hills around Edinburgh. Higgs was joined by the five other physicists who held similar views about the application of quantum field theory, considered outdated in physics at the time, in their quest to solve the problem of particle mass. 

In 1980, Higgs became a professor of theoretical physics at the university, a post he held for 16 years.

Higgs, Brout and Englert in 2004 won the Wolf Prize, administered by the Wolf Foundation in Israel, and the American Physical Society’s JJ Sakurai Prize for Theoretic Particle Physics in 2010, along with the five other scientists who contributed to work on the Higgs mechanism.

“It’s very nice to be right sometimes,” Higgs said after winning the Nobel Prize. 

The Higgs boson was the subject of “Particle Fever,” a documentary that followed CERN scientists on the path to their groundbreaking discovery. 

Higgs married an American linguist, Jody Williamson, whom he met at a university staff meeting in Edinburgh. The couple had two sons, Christopher and Jonathan, before their divorce in the early 1970s.

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View: Nobel prize for Claudia Goldin will hopefully force more focus on gender gaps

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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This year’s Nobel Laureate in economics is an economic historian with a gender bias. Currently, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Claudia Goldin has been awarded the ultimate honour for, “providing the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its press release.

Indeed every inch of Goldin’s work is devoted to when where and why women have been paid less than men and under what circumstances can the gender gap be reduced.

In her early years, she trawled through the archives and collected 200 years of data from the US and demonstrated how and why there are gender differences in compensation and in types of jobs.

Goldin’s path-breaking research showed that female participation in the labour market decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century.

Goldin explained that this change came about because of a change in social norms and medical advances. For instance, access to the contraceptive pill played a revolutionary role in helping women plan their careers.

Social acceptance of family planning helped, but the gender gap continued due to the influence of parents and family. According to Goldin, part of the explanation for the gender gap is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age. Often expectations of young women are formed by the experiences of previous generations — for instance, their mothers, who did not go back to work after the birth of children.

Harvard University, where she teaches lists over 80 research papers from Goldin covering a wide swathe of issues related to the nature of women’s employment and compensation.

Her recent books include:

1)Women Working Longer—Increased Employment at Older Ages Edited by Goldin along with Lawrence F. Katz and published by University of Chicago Press, 2018.

2)The Race Between Education and Technology written by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, published by Harvard University Press, 2008

During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men, Goldin proves in some of her papers. Her latest book published in 2021 by Princeton University Press titled “Career & Family: Women’s Century Old Journey Toward Equity” tackles what is holding women back from equal pay even after better education than men. The book shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men.

The book includes her work during the Covid years when she says women suffered because daycares and schools closed. Goldin says COVID-19 impacted women’s employment and labor force participation more relative to men. But the big divide was less between men and women than it was between the more- and the less-educated. The more educated could work from home. The less educated in service jobs lost.

Contrary to many accounts, she proves that women did not exit the labor force in large numbers, and they did not greatly decrease their hours of work. The aggregate female labor force participation rate did not plummet. The real story of women during the pandemic concerns the fact that employed women who were educating their children, and working adult daughters who were caring for their parents, were stressed because they were in the labor force, not because they left

Goldin concludes that book with the hope that the acceptance of remote working may be the pandemic’s silver lining, But that’s not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

One hopes that the award of the ultimate prize to Goldin will force employers, governments and societies to discuss and consider Goldin’s advice and ensure a better blend of work ethic and caregiving.

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US labour economist Claudia Goldin wins 2023 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to US labour economist Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes, Hans Ellegren, Secretary-General, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the award on Monday (October 9) in Stockholm.  Goldin is only the third woman to win the prize.

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and was the director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. She is a co-director of the NBER’s Gender in the Economy group. An economic historian and a labor economist, Goldin’s research covers a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Her most recent book is Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

The Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022 was given to US economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig together with former Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke for research on banks in times of turmoil.

Full list of Nobel Prize in Economics winners (1990 onwards)

While Americans have mostly dominated the award category, Women have won the prestigious prize twice only. Here’s a table of the list of winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics since 1990.

List of Noble Prize 2023 winners

The prestigious Peace Prize on Friday went to imprisoned Iranian women’s rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi. Earlier in the week, Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse was rewarded in literature. The chemistry prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for their work on nanoparticles called quantum dots.

In physics, Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz were honoured for using ultra-quick light flashes that enable the study of electrons inside atoms and molecules.

The medicine prize, the first to be announced, went to a duo — Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman — for their groundbreaking technology that paved the way for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

History of Nobel Prize in Economics

The Nobel Prize in Economics, officially known as the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, was established in 1968 by the Nobel Foundation and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the field. The prize is awarded to individuals or organizations who have made significant contributions to economic science, including groundbreaking research, innovative applications, and influential policy work.

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The winner is given a gold medal, a diploma and a prize sum of 11 million Swedish kronor or about $1 million. The laureates receive their prizes from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a lavish prize ceremony in the Swedish capital Stockholm.

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Explained | Quantum Dots for which three scientists won Nobel Prize

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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In 2023, Sweden’s Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three US-based scientists — Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov. for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

The Academy on X (formerly Twitter) said the prize rewards the discovery and development of quantum dots and nanoparticles.

What is Quantum Dots?

Quantum dots are tiny crystals so small that “their size determines their properties” and can be tuned to different colours. These are semiconducting particles just one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots have found many applicability in the industrial and medical sectors. These particles spread their light from television screens and LED lamps. The most common everyday use of quantum dots is probably in “QLED” televisions.

The particles catalyse chemical reactions and their clear light can be used for many applications, including illuminating tumour tissue for conducting surgeries.

Cyril Aymonier, head of France’s Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry, told AFP that these “improve the resolution of the screen and preserve the quality of the colour for longer”.

Among its future applicability also lies the possibility that quantum dots could have the potential to double the efficiency of solar cells.

This year’s chemistry laureates – Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov – succeeded in creating quantum dots independently of each other in the 1980s. In 1993, Russian-born laureate Moungi Bawendi revolutionised the methods for manufacturing quantum dots, making their quality extremely high.

Also Read:Royal Swedish Academy announces Nobel Prize winners in chemistry

“Researchers have primarily utilised quantum dots to create coloured light. They believe that in the future quantum dots can contribute to flexible electronics, minuscule sensors, slimmer solar cells and perhaps encrypted quantum communication,” the academy added.

However, one big problem yet to be solved is most quantum dots are made using cadmium, a toxic heavy metal.

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Royal Swedish Academy announces Nobel Prize winners in chemistry

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Sweden’s Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday (October 4).

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2023 #NobelPrize in Chemistry to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.” pic.twitter.com/qJCXc72Dj8

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 4, 2023

The academy said that the prize was awarded to three US-based scientists — Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov. for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

Researchers Moungi G. Bawendi & Louis E. Brus are associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University respectively. Alexei I. Ekimov is currently working for Nanocrystals Technology Inc., New York.

Quantum Dots

The Academy on X (formerly Twitter) said the 2023 prize rewards the discovery and development of quantum dots and nanoparticles, which are so tiny that “their size determines their properties.”

These particles spread their light from television screens and LED lamps. The particles catalyse chemical reactions and their clear light can be used for many applications, including illuminating tumour tissue for conducting surgeries.

This year’s chemistry laureates – Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov – succeeded in creating quantum dots independently of each other in the 1980s. In 1993, this year’s laureate Moungi Bawendi revolutionised the methods for manufacturing quantum dots, making their quality extremely high.

“Researchers have primarily utilised quantum dots to create coloured light. They believe that in the future quantum dots can contribute to flexible electronics, miniscule sensors, slimmer solar cells and perhaps encrypted quantum communication,” it added.

Today quantum dots are an important part of nanotechnology’s toolbox. The 2023 #NobelPrize laureates in chemistry have all been pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld. pic.twitter.com/Yjj3FqpM2X

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 4, 2023

Names Leaked

The names of Nobel prize winners were all over the Swedish media after the academy prematurely sent a press release.

“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023 rewards the discovery and development of quantum dots, nanoparticles that are so small that their size determines their properties,” Dagens Nyheter (DN), a Swedish daily said quoting the email.

However, chair of the academy’s Nobel committee for chemistry, Johan Aqvist, said to Reuters, “It is a mistake by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Our meeting starts at 09:30 CET (07:30 GMT) so no decision has been made yet. The winners have not been selected.”

In 2022, American researchers Carolyn R. Bertozzi & K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs.

This Year’s Winners

Earlier, the prestigious award in medicine in 2023 was given to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

On the other hand, Scientists Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

The Nobel Foundation raised the prize money by 10% this year to 11 million kronor (about $1 million). Additionally, winners will receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma in December, when they arrive to receive the Nobel Prize.

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Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman win Nobel in medicine for enabling development of mRNA vaccines

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly, announced the award Monday in Stockholm.

BREAKING NEWS
The 2023 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/Y62uJDlNMj

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2023

The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (USD 1 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. (AP)

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Nobel Prize winners to now get $90,000 more!

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Nobel Foundation said Friday that it will raise the award amount for this year’s Nobel Prizes by 1 million kronor (USD 90,000) to 11 million kronor (USD 986,270) as the Swedish currency has plummeted recently. “The Foundation has chosen to increase the prize amount because it is financially viable to do so,” it said in a brief statement.

The rapid depreciation of the Swedish currency has pushed it to its lowest level ever against the euro and the US dollar. Sweden has been struggling with high inflation it was 7.5 percent in August, down from 9.3 percent in July, far from the 2 percent target set by the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank.

When the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, the prize amount was 150,782 kronor per category, the foundation said. Over the past 15 years, the amount has been adjusted several times, it said. In 2012, it was reduced from 10 million kronor to 8 million kronor as a broad-based program to strengthen the Nobel Foundation’s finances was initiated.

In 2017, the prize amount was increased from 8 million kronor to 9 million kronor. In 2020, it was raised to 10 million kronor. This year’s Nobel Prize winners will be announced in early October. The laureates are then invited to receive their awards at prize ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

The prestigious peace prize is handed out in Oslo, according to Nobel’s wishes, while the other award ceremonies are held in Stockholm. Sweden is not part of the eurozone. Twenty years ago, Swedes held a referendum on whether to join the European currency and voted against it.

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Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow