CHICAGO (Reuters) - A cold spot in the oldest radiation in the universe could be the first sign of a cosmic glitch that might have originated shortly after the Big Bang, British and Spanish scientists said on Thursday.
They think this spot -- detected on satellite maps of microwave radiation -- might be a cosmic defect or texture, a holdover from the universe's infancy. But they said their theory would need confirmation.
Such defects or textures, they theorize, reflect a flaw in the pattern of the universe as it formed -- think of a snag in pantyhose or a flaw in a diamond.
"If the cold spot is indeed proven to be a texture, it will completely change our view of how the universe evolved following the Big Bang," said Mike Hobson, of the Astrophysics Group at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, whose study appears in the journal Science.
Hobson, Neil Turok and colleagues at the Institute of Physics at Cantabria based this theory on an analysis of a large cold spot in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is basically the heat glow left over from the formation of the universe.
The cold spot was discovered in 2003 by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, and its presence has been the subject of many theories, said Al Kogut of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Kogut, who did not work on the paper, said if this texture theory is proven, it would offer a window into the universe shortly after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, showing places where the universe was expanding and cooling.
"If you imagine water cooling down in an ice cube tray, it will make a transition from a liquid state to solid crystal," Kogut said in a telephone interview.
If that occurs very slowly, he said, that transition goes very smoothly, producing crystal clear ice. But if it goes very fast, the crystal aligns in different directions. Where they don't agree, a crack appears, he said.
This paper "is basically saying this cold spot is a relic of high-energy physics that occurred immediately after the Big Bang," Kogut said.
"They're claiming they've found one of these things and it could be the tip of the iceberg," he said.
But Kogut, like the study's authors, said he would like more proof. "The evidence is encouraging, but far from compelling," he said.
By Julie Steenhuysen
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
25 Secrets of Mona Lisa Revealed
New images uncover 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including proof that Leonardo da Vinci gave her eyebrows, solving a long-held mystery.
The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which will feature new research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debut in the United States at the Metreon in San Francisco. The Mona Lisa showcase is part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius."
Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multi-spectral Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his contemporaries.
"The face of Mona Lisa appears slightly wider and the smile is different and the eyes are different," Cotte said. "The smile is more accentuated I would say."
Mona Lisa mysteries
A zoomed-in image of Mona Lisa's left eye revealed a single brush stroke in the eyebrow region, Cotte said.
"I am an engineer and scientist, so for me all has to be logical. It was not logical that Mona Lisa does not have any eyebrows or eyelashes," Cotte told LiveScience. "I discovered one hair of the eyebrow."
Another conundrum had been the position of the subject's right arm, which lies across her stomach. This was the first time, Cotte said, that a painter had rendered a subject's arm and wrist in such a position. While other artists had never understood da Vinci's reasoning, they copied it nonetheless.
Cotte discovered the pigment just behind the right wrist matched up perfectly with that of the painted cover that drapes across Mona Lisa's knee. So it did make sense: The forearm and wrist held up one side of a blanket.
"The wrist of the right hand is up high on the stomach. But if you look deeply in the infrared you understand that she holds a cover with her wrist," Cotte said.
Behind a painting
The infrared images also revealed da Vinci's preparatory drawings that lie behind layers of varnish and paint, showing that the Renaissance man was also human.
"If you look at the left hand you see the first position of the finger, and he changed his mind for another position," Cotte said. "Even Leonardo da Vinci had hesitation."
Other revelations include:
-Lace on Mona Lisa's dress
-The transparency of the veil shows da Vinci first painted a landscape and then used transparency techniques to paint the veil atop it.
-A change in the position of the left index and middle finger.
-The elbow was repaired from damage due to a rock thrown at the painting in 1956.
-The blanket covering Mona Lisa's knees also covers her stomach.
-The left finger was not completely finished.
-A blotch mark on the corner of the eye and chin are varnish accidents, countering claims that Mona Lisa was sick.
-And the Mona Lisa was painted on uncut poplar board, contrary to speculations.
In the larger picture, Cotte said when he stands back and looks up at the enlarged infrared image of Mona Lisa, her beauty and mystique are apparent.
"If you are in front of this huge enlargement of Mona Lisa, you understand instantly why Mona Lisa is so famous," Cotte said. He added, it's something you have to see with your own eyes
Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which will feature new research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debut in the United States at the Metreon in San Francisco. The Mona Lisa showcase is part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius."
Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multi-spectral Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his contemporaries.
"The face of Mona Lisa appears slightly wider and the smile is different and the eyes are different," Cotte said. "The smile is more accentuated I would say."
Mona Lisa mysteries
A zoomed-in image of Mona Lisa's left eye revealed a single brush stroke in the eyebrow region, Cotte said.
"I am an engineer and scientist, so for me all has to be logical. It was not logical that Mona Lisa does not have any eyebrows or eyelashes," Cotte told LiveScience. "I discovered one hair of the eyebrow."
Another conundrum had been the position of the subject's right arm, which lies across her stomach. This was the first time, Cotte said, that a painter had rendered a subject's arm and wrist in such a position. While other artists had never understood da Vinci's reasoning, they copied it nonetheless.
Cotte discovered the pigment just behind the right wrist matched up perfectly with that of the painted cover that drapes across Mona Lisa's knee. So it did make sense: The forearm and wrist held up one side of a blanket.
"The wrist of the right hand is up high on the stomach. But if you look deeply in the infrared you understand that she holds a cover with her wrist," Cotte said.
Behind a painting
The infrared images also revealed da Vinci's preparatory drawings that lie behind layers of varnish and paint, showing that the Renaissance man was also human.
"If you look at the left hand you see the first position of the finger, and he changed his mind for another position," Cotte said. "Even Leonardo da Vinci had hesitation."
Other revelations include:
-Lace on Mona Lisa's dress
-The transparency of the veil shows da Vinci first painted a landscape and then used transparency techniques to paint the veil atop it.
-A change in the position of the left index and middle finger.
-The elbow was repaired from damage due to a rock thrown at the painting in 1956.
-The blanket covering Mona Lisa's knees also covers her stomach.
-The left finger was not completely finished.
-A blotch mark on the corner of the eye and chin are varnish accidents, countering claims that Mona Lisa was sick.
-And the Mona Lisa was painted on uncut poplar board, contrary to speculations.
In the larger picture, Cotte said when he stands back and looks up at the enlarged infrared image of Mona Lisa, her beauty and mystique are apparent.
"If you are in front of this huge enlargement of Mona Lisa, you understand instantly why Mona Lisa is so famous," Cotte said. He added, it's something you have to see with your own eyes
Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Monday, October 15, 2007
3 Americans Win Nobel in Economics
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was awarded to three American economists today for creating and developing a sophisticated explanation of the interaction among individuals, markets and institutions.
Their work, called mechanism design theory, has influenced thinking on a wide range of problems in economics and political science, from the design of government bond auctions to patent systems to voting procedures.
Leonid Hurwicz, 90, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, initiated the field of mechanism design theory, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the award citation. His work was further developed by two 56-year-old economists who are sharing the prize — Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Mr. Hurwicz, who was born in Moscow, started his work in the postwar years at a time when economists and others were heatedly debating whether socialist reforms were possible without a loss of economic efficiency. Those debates tended to be deeply ideological.
Mr. Hurwicz was a pioneer in trying a more rigorous, mathematical analysis to those kinds of issues. Last year, in a lecture last year to honor Mr. Hurwicz, Mr. Myerson explained, “Over many years and decades, Leo Hurwicz has worked to show how mathematical economic models can provide a general framework for analyzing different economics institutions, like those of capitalism and socialism, as mechanisms for coordinating the individuals of society.”
The field of mechanism design theory strives to take into account the realities of economic life systematically. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is a powerful metaphor that describes how the market, in theory, will always efficiently allocate scarce resources. Yet real-world conditions tend to complicate things. Competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed, optimizing private production and consumption may have social costs, and institutions can strongly shape economic bargaining.
The work begun by Mr. Hurwicz, and advanced by Mr. Maskin and Mr. Myerson, gave economists and policy makers new intellectual tools to address questions like those listed in the academy’s citation: “How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best designed?”
The institutional focus of this year’s laureates, economists say, is an important contribution. “Economists’ most lasting influence comes from the design of institutions,” said Robert J. Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University. “It is these mechanisms we use day to day that really matter to our lives.”
The three economists will share the prize money, 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.56 million. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was not one of the five original prizes — physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace — that Alfred Nobel specified in his will, and were first awarded in 1901. The first economics prize was awarded in 1969.
By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 15, 2007
Their work, called mechanism design theory, has influenced thinking on a wide range of problems in economics and political science, from the design of government bond auctions to patent systems to voting procedures.
Leonid Hurwicz, 90, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, initiated the field of mechanism design theory, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the award citation. His work was further developed by two 56-year-old economists who are sharing the prize — Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Mr. Hurwicz, who was born in Moscow, started his work in the postwar years at a time when economists and others were heatedly debating whether socialist reforms were possible without a loss of economic efficiency. Those debates tended to be deeply ideological.
Mr. Hurwicz was a pioneer in trying a more rigorous, mathematical analysis to those kinds of issues. Last year, in a lecture last year to honor Mr. Hurwicz, Mr. Myerson explained, “Over many years and decades, Leo Hurwicz has worked to show how mathematical economic models can provide a general framework for analyzing different economics institutions, like those of capitalism and socialism, as mechanisms for coordinating the individuals of society.”
The field of mechanism design theory strives to take into account the realities of economic life systematically. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is a powerful metaphor that describes how the market, in theory, will always efficiently allocate scarce resources. Yet real-world conditions tend to complicate things. Competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed, optimizing private production and consumption may have social costs, and institutions can strongly shape economic bargaining.
The work begun by Mr. Hurwicz, and advanced by Mr. Maskin and Mr. Myerson, gave economists and policy makers new intellectual tools to address questions like those listed in the academy’s citation: “How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best designed?”
The institutional focus of this year’s laureates, economists say, is an important contribution. “Economists’ most lasting influence comes from the design of institutions,” said Robert J. Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University. “It is these mechanisms we use day to day that really matter to our lives.”
The three economists will share the prize money, 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.56 million. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was not one of the five original prizes — physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace — that Alfred Nobel specified in his will, and were first awarded in 1901. The first economics prize was awarded in 1969.
By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 15, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Al Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work
OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.
The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.
Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said, referring to the issue of man-made climate change. The United Nations panel, a network of 2,000 scientists organized in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.
In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the panel, said he was overwhelmed by the decision, adding it was “not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams.”
Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored and planned to donate his half of the $1.56 million award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group he serves as board chairman.
“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”
He said the “award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis — a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years.”
Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday night at a fund-raising event for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow Democrat.
Ms. Kreider said Mr. Gore would hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate Protection in San Francisco today and return to his home in Nashville over the weekend.
Dr. Pachauri, in an interview in New Delhi today in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, where he is director-general, cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on the effects of human activities on climate change.
“The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the I.P.C.C. has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change,” he said
Dr. Pachauri said he thought the award would now settle the scientific debate on climate change and that governments would now take action.
He said it was “entirely possible to stabilize the levels of emissions but that climate change and its impact will continue to stalk us.”
“We will have to live with climate change up to a certain point of time but if we want to avoid or delay much more serious damage then its essential that we start mitigation quickly and to a serious extent,” he said.
The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the Nobel committee tried to minimize after its announcement today.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of the Bush administration.
He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.
"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge all of them to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming,” he said. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”
He said the peace prize was only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”
In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.
In Washington, a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “Of course we’re happy for Vice President Gore and the I.P.C.C. for receiving this recognition.”
Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more public attention.
The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of the human effect on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting Arctic.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources.”
“Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."
The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A Web site, www.draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.
The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida.
“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”
The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.
Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.
Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist who has participated in the periodic climate assessments since the early days of the I.P.C.C. panel, described the work of the committee, which includes both scientists and government officials, as “a beautiful example of a largely successful experiment in people coming together to improve government.”
“The reward reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason, and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized,” added Dr. Oppenheimer, who is now at Princeton University and previously worked for Environmental Defense, a private advocacy group.
Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.
“We can recommend ways for policy makers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C. data being there, this would be next to impossible,” Mr. de Boer said. He said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.
"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. "We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders were in conflict with farmers because the changing climate had brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
From the 1980s onward, many scientists and international affairs experts considered the prospect that long-lived gases from human activities could warm the earth to be a threat to global security as well as the environment.
The first large scientific meeting on the issue, the Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, was held in Toronto in 1988. It was also the first meeting to bring together scientists and government officials on a large scale to discuss research pointing to dangerous warming from a buildup of greenhouse gases.
The conference concluded with a statement saying: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”
Its “call to action” included a recommendation that the main heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, be cut by 2005 to 20 percent below 1988 levels — a target far more ambitious than anything later discussed in United Nations climate-treaty talks and missed long ago.
The intergovernmental climate panel was formally convened after the conference.
Its four reports, the first published in 1990, have provided the underpinning for international negotiations leading to the first climate treaty, with only voluntary terms, in 1992 and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first accord with binding terms but with limited support and a 2012 expiration date.
Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Andrew C. Revkin from New York, and James Kanter from Paris.
By WALTER GIBBS
Published: October 13, 2007
The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.
Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said, referring to the issue of man-made climate change. The United Nations panel, a network of 2,000 scientists organized in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.
In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the panel, said he was overwhelmed by the decision, adding it was “not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams.”
Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored and planned to donate his half of the $1.56 million award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group he serves as board chairman.
“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”
He said the “award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis — a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years.”
Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday night at a fund-raising event for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow Democrat.
Ms. Kreider said Mr. Gore would hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate Protection in San Francisco today and return to his home in Nashville over the weekend.
Dr. Pachauri, in an interview in New Delhi today in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, where he is director-general, cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on the effects of human activities on climate change.
“The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the I.P.C.C. has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change,” he said
Dr. Pachauri said he thought the award would now settle the scientific debate on climate change and that governments would now take action.
He said it was “entirely possible to stabilize the levels of emissions but that climate change and its impact will continue to stalk us.”
“We will have to live with climate change up to a certain point of time but if we want to avoid or delay much more serious damage then its essential that we start mitigation quickly and to a serious extent,” he said.
The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the Nobel committee tried to minimize after its announcement today.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of the Bush administration.
He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.
"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge all of them to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming,” he said. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”
He said the peace prize was only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”
In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.
In Washington, a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “Of course we’re happy for Vice President Gore and the I.P.C.C. for receiving this recognition.”
Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more public attention.
The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of the human effect on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting Arctic.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources.”
“Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."
The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A Web site, www.draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.
The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida.
“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”
The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.
Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.
Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist who has participated in the periodic climate assessments since the early days of the I.P.C.C. panel, described the work of the committee, which includes both scientists and government officials, as “a beautiful example of a largely successful experiment in people coming together to improve government.”
“The reward reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason, and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized,” added Dr. Oppenheimer, who is now at Princeton University and previously worked for Environmental Defense, a private advocacy group.
Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.
“We can recommend ways for policy makers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C. data being there, this would be next to impossible,” Mr. de Boer said. He said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.
"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. "We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders were in conflict with farmers because the changing climate had brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
From the 1980s onward, many scientists and international affairs experts considered the prospect that long-lived gases from human activities could warm the earth to be a threat to global security as well as the environment.
The first large scientific meeting on the issue, the Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, was held in Toronto in 1988. It was also the first meeting to bring together scientists and government officials on a large scale to discuss research pointing to dangerous warming from a buildup of greenhouse gases.
The conference concluded with a statement saying: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”
Its “call to action” included a recommendation that the main heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, be cut by 2005 to 20 percent below 1988 levels — a target far more ambitious than anything later discussed in United Nations climate-treaty talks and missed long ago.
The intergovernmental climate panel was formally convened after the conference.
Its four reports, the first published in 1990, have provided the underpinning for international negotiations leading to the first climate treaty, with only voluntary terms, in 1992 and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first accord with binding terms but with limited support and a 2012 expiration date.
Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Andrew C. Revkin from New York, and James Kanter from Paris.
By WALTER GIBBS
Published: October 13, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
German Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry
A German scientist whose studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces have implications for the environment won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today.
Gerhard Ertl’s work in surface chemistry has applications across a broad array of fields, and helps explain the processes in manufacturing computer chips, in the function of automobiles’ catalytic converters and on the surface of stratospheric ice crystals that have implications for global warming.
The $1.5 million prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Dr. Ertl’s 71st birthday, and he said in remarks broadcast from Stockholm that winning the prize “is the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.”
In an interview with the Associated Press from his office in Berlin, he said, “I am speechless.” He is an emeritus professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. “I was not counting on this,” he said.
In a statement released early today, Catherine T. Hunt, the president of the American Chemical Society, congratulated Dr. Ertl, calling him a “spectacular scientist” working in a field “that often receives little public attention, and yet has transformed lives in so many ways.” She said, “In the future, this research will help us tap new sources of renewable fuels, for instance, and produce smaller, more powerful electronics products.”
The Nobel prizes are being announced this week. On Monday, the prize that recognizes achievement in “physiology or medicine” went to Mario R. Capecchi, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University in Wales, for their work that led to the technique of manipulating the genes of mice.
Tuesday’s award, in the field of physics, went to Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, whose work in magnetics led to the development of the kinds of hard drives that have allowed computers and music players to shrink to tiny dimensions.
The awards are to be handed out by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Gerhard Ertl’s work in surface chemistry has applications across a broad array of fields, and helps explain the processes in manufacturing computer chips, in the function of automobiles’ catalytic converters and on the surface of stratospheric ice crystals that have implications for global warming.
The $1.5 million prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Dr. Ertl’s 71st birthday, and he said in remarks broadcast from Stockholm that winning the prize “is the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.”
In an interview with the Associated Press from his office in Berlin, he said, “I am speechless.” He is an emeritus professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. “I was not counting on this,” he said.
In a statement released early today, Catherine T. Hunt, the president of the American Chemical Society, congratulated Dr. Ertl, calling him a “spectacular scientist” working in a field “that often receives little public attention, and yet has transformed lives in so many ways.” She said, “In the future, this research will help us tap new sources of renewable fuels, for instance, and produce smaller, more powerful electronics products.”
The Nobel prizes are being announced this week. On Monday, the prize that recognizes achievement in “physiology or medicine” went to Mario R. Capecchi, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University in Wales, for their work that led to the technique of manipulating the genes of mice.
Tuesday’s award, in the field of physics, went to Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, whose work in magnetics led to the development of the kinds of hard drives that have allowed computers and music players to shrink to tiny dimensions.
The awards are to be handed out by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel
Two physicists who discovered how to manipulate the magnetic and electrical properties of thin layers of atoms to store vast amounts of data on tiny disks, making iPods and other wonders of modern life possible, were chosen as winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday.
Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, will share the $1.5 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
They will receive the money in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Dr. Fert, 69, and Dr. Grünberg, 68, each working independently in 1988, discovered an effect known as giant magnetoresistance, in which tiny changes in a magnetic field can produce huge changes in electrical resistance.
The effect is at the heart of modern gadgets that record data, music or snippets of video as a dense magnetic patchwork of zeros and ones, which is then scanned by a small head and converted to electrical signals.
“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Börje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy, said, according to The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”
In remarks broadcast over a speakerphone at the academy in Stockholm, Dr. Fert said: “I am so happy for my family, for my co-workers. And I am also very happy to share this with a friend.”
Experts said the discovery was one of the first triumphs of the new field of nanotechnology, the science of building and manipulating assemblies of atoms only a nanometer (a billionth of a meter) in size.
The scanning heads in today’s gizmos consist of alternating layers only a few atoms thick of a magnetic metal, like iron, and a nonmagnetic metal, like chromium. At that small size, the strange rules of quantum mechanics come into play and novel properties emerge.
The Nobel citation said Dr. Fert and Dr. Grünberg’s work also heralded the advent of a new, even smaller and denser type of memory storage called spintronics, in which information is stored and processed by manipulating the spins of electrons.
Engineers have been recording information magnetically and reading it out electrically since the dawn of the computer age, but as they have endeavored to pack more and more data onto their machines, they have been forced to use smaller and fainter magnetic inscriptions and thus more and more sensitive readout devices.
It has long been known that magnetic fields can affect the electrical resistance of magnetic materials like iron. Current flows more easily along field lines than across them. The effect was useful for sensing magnetic fields, and in heads that read magnetic disks. But it amounted to only a small change in resistance, and physicists did not think there were many prospects for improvement.
So it was a surprise in 1988 when groups led by Dr. Fert at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides and by Dr. Grünberg found that super-slim sandwiches of iron and chromium showed enhanced sensitivity to magnetic fields — “giant magnetoresistance,” as Dr. Fert called it. The name stuck.
The reason for the effect has to do with what physicists call the spin of electrons. When the magnetic layers of the sandwich have their fields pointing in the same direction, electrons whose spin points along that direction can migrate freely through the sandwich, but electrons that point in another direction get scattered.
If, however, one of the magnetic layers is perturbed, by, say, reading a small signal, it can flip its direction so that its field runs opposite to the other one. In that case, no matter which way an electron points, it will be scattered and hindered from moving through the layers, greatly increasing the electrical resistance of the sandwich.
As Phillip Schewe, of the American Institute of Physics, explained, “You’ve leveraged a weak bit of magnetism into a robust bit of electricity.”
Subsequently, Stuart Parkin, now of I.B.M., came up with an easier way to produce the sandwiches on an industrial scale. The first commercial devices using giant magnetoresistance effect were produced in 1997.
Dr. Grünberg was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic and obtained his Ph.D. from the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany in 1969. He has been asked many times over the years when he was going to win the big prize, and so was not surprised to win the Nobel, according to The A.P.
He said he was looking forward to being able to pursue his research without applying for grants for “every tiny bit.”
Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, and received his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud in 1970. He told The A.P. that it was impossible to predict where modern physics is going to go.
“These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say, ‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind,’” Dr. Fert said.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, will share the $1.5 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
They will receive the money in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Dr. Fert, 69, and Dr. Grünberg, 68, each working independently in 1988, discovered an effect known as giant magnetoresistance, in which tiny changes in a magnetic field can produce huge changes in electrical resistance.
The effect is at the heart of modern gadgets that record data, music or snippets of video as a dense magnetic patchwork of zeros and ones, which is then scanned by a small head and converted to electrical signals.
“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Börje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy, said, according to The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”
In remarks broadcast over a speakerphone at the academy in Stockholm, Dr. Fert said: “I am so happy for my family, for my co-workers. And I am also very happy to share this with a friend.”
Experts said the discovery was one of the first triumphs of the new field of nanotechnology, the science of building and manipulating assemblies of atoms only a nanometer (a billionth of a meter) in size.
The scanning heads in today’s gizmos consist of alternating layers only a few atoms thick of a magnetic metal, like iron, and a nonmagnetic metal, like chromium. At that small size, the strange rules of quantum mechanics come into play and novel properties emerge.
The Nobel citation said Dr. Fert and Dr. Grünberg’s work also heralded the advent of a new, even smaller and denser type of memory storage called spintronics, in which information is stored and processed by manipulating the spins of electrons.
Engineers have been recording information magnetically and reading it out electrically since the dawn of the computer age, but as they have endeavored to pack more and more data onto their machines, they have been forced to use smaller and fainter magnetic inscriptions and thus more and more sensitive readout devices.
It has long been known that magnetic fields can affect the electrical resistance of magnetic materials like iron. Current flows more easily along field lines than across them. The effect was useful for sensing magnetic fields, and in heads that read magnetic disks. But it amounted to only a small change in resistance, and physicists did not think there were many prospects for improvement.
So it was a surprise in 1988 when groups led by Dr. Fert at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides and by Dr. Grünberg found that super-slim sandwiches of iron and chromium showed enhanced sensitivity to magnetic fields — “giant magnetoresistance,” as Dr. Fert called it. The name stuck.
The reason for the effect has to do with what physicists call the spin of electrons. When the magnetic layers of the sandwich have their fields pointing in the same direction, electrons whose spin points along that direction can migrate freely through the sandwich, but electrons that point in another direction get scattered.
If, however, one of the magnetic layers is perturbed, by, say, reading a small signal, it can flip its direction so that its field runs opposite to the other one. In that case, no matter which way an electron points, it will be scattered and hindered from moving through the layers, greatly increasing the electrical resistance of the sandwich.
As Phillip Schewe, of the American Institute of Physics, explained, “You’ve leveraged a weak bit of magnetism into a robust bit of electricity.”
Subsequently, Stuart Parkin, now of I.B.M., came up with an easier way to produce the sandwiches on an industrial scale. The first commercial devices using giant magnetoresistance effect were produced in 1997.
Dr. Grünberg was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic and obtained his Ph.D. from the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany in 1969. He has been asked many times over the years when he was going to win the big prize, and so was not surprised to win the Nobel, according to The A.P.
He said he was looking forward to being able to pursue his research without applying for grants for “every tiny bit.”
Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, and received his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud in 1970. He told The A.P. that it was impossible to predict where modern physics is going to go.
“These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say, ‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind,’” Dr. Fert said.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
3 Win Nobel in Medicine for Gene Technology
Two Americans and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for developing the immensely powerful “knockout” technology, which allows scientists to create animal models of human disease in mice.
The winners, who will share the $1.54 million prize, are Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.
Other scientists are applying their technology, also known as gene targeting, in a variety of ways, from basic research to the development of new therapies, said the Nobel Committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that selected the winners.
The knockout technique provided researchers with a superb new tool for finding out what any given gene does. It allows them to genetically engineer a strain of mice with the gene missing, or knocked out, then watch to see what the mice can no longer do.
After the first decoding of the mouse and human genomes in 2001 yielded thousands of new genes of unknown function, knockout mice became a prime source of information for making sense of these novel genes.
Most human genes can also be studied in this way through their counterpart genes in the mouse. Mice have been likened to pocket-size humans, because they have the same organs and their genes are about 95 percent identical in sequence. Scientists have developed more than 500 mouse models of human ailments, including those affecting the heart and central nervous system, as well as diabetes, cancer and cystic fibrosis.
Scientists can now use the technology to create genetic mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or organs, both during development and in the adult animal, the Nobel citation said.
Gene-targeting technology can knock out single genes to study development of the embryo, aging and normal physiology. So far, more than 10,000 mouse genes, or about half of those in the mammalian genome, have been knocked out, the committee said.
Researchers can also make conditional knockouts, mice in which a gene of interest can be inactivated in a specific tissue or part of the brain, at any stage in life. Another important variation is to tag a normal gene with a so-called reporter gene that causes a visible color change in all cells where the normal gene is switched on.
Knockout mice are so important in medical research that thousands of strains are kept available in institutions like the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me.
“The technique is revolutionary and has completely changed the way we use the mouse to study the function of genes,” said Dr. Richard P. Woychik, the lab’s director. “When people come across a novel human gene, one of the first things they think about is knocking it out in a mouse.”
The three laureates, who are friends but work independently, also shared a Lasker Award in 2001. They began their work in the 1980s, and the first reports that the technology could generate gene-targeted mice were published in 1989. The reports involved a rare inherited human disease, the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, in which lack of an enzyme causes fits of self-mutilation.
The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who said he lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.
Dr. Capecchi’s mother, the daughter of an American, had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had had a love affair.
When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.
Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.
At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in the home of a Quaker family in Pennsylvania.
The family put Mario in the third grade, where as a means of communication his teachers told him to draw murals. As he did, he slowly learned English. Because of the street smarts he developed in Italy, he became a class leader and the boy who beat up the bullies.
He went on to study political science at Antioch College, alternating periods of work and studies. Then he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
When he decided to leave the Harvard faculty in 1973 because members of the department did not get along, he said, and did not recruit sufficient younger scientists, Dr. Capecchi went to Utah. Colleagues told him, he said, that he was “nuts” to leave Harvard’s Ivy League splendor. But Dr. Capecchi said Dr. Watson told him he could do good science anywhere.
Dr. Capecchi said the main advantage was that he could work on long-term projects more easily in Utah than at Harvard, where there was a push to get results quickly.
Dr. Capecchi said that when he reapplied to the N.I.H. in 1984 for the grant it had rejected in 1980, he was told, “We are glad you didn’t follow our advice.”
After learning he had become a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Smithies told Agence France-Presse that “it’s actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science.”
Dr. Smithies has credited his interest in science to his boyhood love for radios and telescopes, and for a comic-strip inventor whom he wanted to emulate. He earned a scholarship to Oxford, then dropped out of medical school to study chemistry before moving to the University of Wisconsin. Because of a visa problem, Dr. Smithies worked in Toronto for about seven years before returning to Wisconsin. He became a geneticist and moved to the University of North Carolina 19 years ago.
Dr. Smithies is a licensed airplane pilot and is fond of gliding.
Dr. Evans had planned to have an “ordinary day” off work cleaning his daughter’s home in Cambridge, England, where he was visiting when he learned he won the prize. It was “a boyhood dream come true,” Dr. Evans told Agence France-Presse.
Like Dr. Capecchi, Dr. Evans said his scientific career was an upward struggle. In an interview with the Lasker Foundation, Dr. Evans said recognition was important to him because he often was a lone scientist who cried out against the consensus. In applying for grants, he said he was told many of his ideas were premature and could not be done.
“Then five years later,” he said, “I find everyone is doing the same thing.”
Nicholas Wade contributed reporting.
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
GENETIC PIONEERS Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine for work on creating “knockout mice.” The larger one lacks a gene that limits muscle growth. From left, the Nobelists are Martin Evans of Cardiff University, Wales; Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah; and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The winners, who will share the $1.54 million prize, are Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.
Other scientists are applying their technology, also known as gene targeting, in a variety of ways, from basic research to the development of new therapies, said the Nobel Committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that selected the winners.
The knockout technique provided researchers with a superb new tool for finding out what any given gene does. It allows them to genetically engineer a strain of mice with the gene missing, or knocked out, then watch to see what the mice can no longer do.
After the first decoding of the mouse and human genomes in 2001 yielded thousands of new genes of unknown function, knockout mice became a prime source of information for making sense of these novel genes.
Most human genes can also be studied in this way through their counterpart genes in the mouse. Mice have been likened to pocket-size humans, because they have the same organs and their genes are about 95 percent identical in sequence. Scientists have developed more than 500 mouse models of human ailments, including those affecting the heart and central nervous system, as well as diabetes, cancer and cystic fibrosis.
Scientists can now use the technology to create genetic mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or organs, both during development and in the adult animal, the Nobel citation said.
Gene-targeting technology can knock out single genes to study development of the embryo, aging and normal physiology. So far, more than 10,000 mouse genes, or about half of those in the mammalian genome, have been knocked out, the committee said.
Researchers can also make conditional knockouts, mice in which a gene of interest can be inactivated in a specific tissue or part of the brain, at any stage in life. Another important variation is to tag a normal gene with a so-called reporter gene that causes a visible color change in all cells where the normal gene is switched on.
Knockout mice are so important in medical research that thousands of strains are kept available in institutions like the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me.
“The technique is revolutionary and has completely changed the way we use the mouse to study the function of genes,” said Dr. Richard P. Woychik, the lab’s director. “When people come across a novel human gene, one of the first things they think about is knocking it out in a mouse.”
The three laureates, who are friends but work independently, also shared a Lasker Award in 2001. They began their work in the 1980s, and the first reports that the technology could generate gene-targeted mice were published in 1989. The reports involved a rare inherited human disease, the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, in which lack of an enzyme causes fits of self-mutilation.
The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who said he lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.
Dr. Capecchi’s mother, the daughter of an American, had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had had a love affair.
When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.
Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.
At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in the home of a Quaker family in Pennsylvania.
The family put Mario in the third grade, where as a means of communication his teachers told him to draw murals. As he did, he slowly learned English. Because of the street smarts he developed in Italy, he became a class leader and the boy who beat up the bullies.
He went on to study political science at Antioch College, alternating periods of work and studies. Then he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
When he decided to leave the Harvard faculty in 1973 because members of the department did not get along, he said, and did not recruit sufficient younger scientists, Dr. Capecchi went to Utah. Colleagues told him, he said, that he was “nuts” to leave Harvard’s Ivy League splendor. But Dr. Capecchi said Dr. Watson told him he could do good science anywhere.
Dr. Capecchi said the main advantage was that he could work on long-term projects more easily in Utah than at Harvard, where there was a push to get results quickly.
Dr. Capecchi said that when he reapplied to the N.I.H. in 1984 for the grant it had rejected in 1980, he was told, “We are glad you didn’t follow our advice.”
After learning he had become a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Smithies told Agence France-Presse that “it’s actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science.”
Dr. Smithies has credited his interest in science to his boyhood love for radios and telescopes, and for a comic-strip inventor whom he wanted to emulate. He earned a scholarship to Oxford, then dropped out of medical school to study chemistry before moving to the University of Wisconsin. Because of a visa problem, Dr. Smithies worked in Toronto for about seven years before returning to Wisconsin. He became a geneticist and moved to the University of North Carolina 19 years ago.
Dr. Smithies is a licensed airplane pilot and is fond of gliding.
Dr. Evans had planned to have an “ordinary day” off work cleaning his daughter’s home in Cambridge, England, where he was visiting when he learned he won the prize. It was “a boyhood dream come true,” Dr. Evans told Agence France-Presse.
Like Dr. Capecchi, Dr. Evans said his scientific career was an upward struggle. In an interview with the Lasker Foundation, Dr. Evans said recognition was important to him because he often was a lone scientist who cried out against the consensus. In applying for grants, he said he was told many of his ideas were premature and could not be done.
“Then five years later,” he said, “I find everyone is doing the same thing.”
Nicholas Wade contributed reporting.
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
GENETIC PIONEERS Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine for work on creating “knockout mice.” The larger one lacks a gene that limits muscle growth. From left, the Nobelists are Martin Evans of Cardiff University, Wales; Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah; and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)