Nobel Prize

(The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences corrects laureate's name to Dan Shechtman from Daniel Shechtman)

2011-10-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Lannin and Veronica Ek

Dan Shechtman

An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

Three decades after Dan Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.

Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons.

"People just laughed at me,"

Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for "bringing disgrace" on the team. "I felt rejected," Shechtman remembered.

"His discovery was extremely controversial," said the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which granted him the 10-million crown ($1.5-million) award.

"Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science ... His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.

"In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves."

A PRIZE FOR THOUSANDS

On Wednesday, Shechtman said he was "excited" but at pains to praise fellow scientists, many of whom once doubted him.

Nancy Jackson, the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), called it "a great work of discovery".

Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.

Sometimes referred to as Shechtmanite in the discoverer's honour, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesised in laboratories. Two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring find of quasicrystals in eastern Russia.

David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, called them "quite beautiful". Interlocking arrays of stars, circles and floral shapes are typical.

"You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits - they are very symmetrical," Phillips said. "With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating."

An intriguing feature of such patterns, also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letter tau, or the "golden ratio", occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two.

Living things, including flowers, fruit and shellfish, also demonstrate similar arrangements, which scientists associate with the efficient packing of materials into growing organisms.

Quasicrystals are very hard and are poor conductors of heat and electricity, offering uses as thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces, handy for frying pans, and appear in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and heat insulation in engines.

Astrid Graslund, secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface. It doesn't want to react with anything -- they cannot ... become rusty.

"But it is more a conceptual insight - that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals - it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important."

BATTLE OF BELIEF

Since Galileo was mocked by established scientists and persecuted by the church in the 16th century for observing that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the reverse, overturning accepted wisdom has never been easy, as several of this year's Nobel prizewinners in science have shown.

Research that was largely ignored for years secured the medicine prize for the late Ralph Steinman and the astounding finding that the universe's expansion was speeding up not slowing down meant the physics prize for its joint discoverers.

But in a year when science is in a froth over whether particles may have been fired from Geneva to Italy faster than the speed of light -- apparently defying Einstein -- few in the modern age have had to battle disbelief as hard as Shechtman.

"He dealt with the scepticism in a very scientific and gentlemanly manner and answered his critics as every scientist should -- through science," Ron Lifshitz, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Reuters. "There were also personal slurs but those did not warrant a response ... He believed in his own work and carried on with determination."

Interviewed about his Nobel by television in Israel, where the award was big national news for a small country with a long roster of laureates, Shechtman spoke of a photograph in his office that showed a small cat sipping water, surrounded by angry dogs; a biblical inscription read: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil".

"That's the way I felt for many years," Shechtman chuckled. "It accurately describes the situation, during that period."

Dan Shechtman "trusted in his science", however, and came to see the criticism by the late Pauling, which Shechtman has described as "almost theological", as a positive source of strength:

"When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling." (Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Williams, Ori Lewis and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)

source :

http://www.reuters.com

"Tomas Tranströmer" The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011

2011-10-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

"because, through his condensed, transluscent images, he gives us fresh access to reality". The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas transtromer

Tomas Tranströmer

" in the middle of life it happens that death comes and measures man. The visit is forgotten and life continues. But the suit is made, quietly ".Tomas Transtrِmer

Tomas Tranströmer was Born in a working-class Stockholm neighborhood in 1931

Tranströmer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Södra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjöberg’s Frenzy, which was filmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-fiction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents’ divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis. He published his first collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.

Tomas transtromer

After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Västerås, where he spent the rest of his working life. In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Tranströmer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play.

Since his stroke 1990, he has published a short book of 'autobiographical chapters', Memories Look at Me(1993) and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton’s translation of his Bloodaxe New Collected Poems(1997). In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing five short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to theNew Collected Poems to form Tranströmer’s first collected edition to appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2010.

Tranströmer has also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary’s János Pilinszky

Tomas Tranströmer and his wife Monica currently live in Stockholm..

Tomas Tranströmer Prizes

Tomas transtromer and his wife Monica

2011 The Nobel Prize in Literature

2007, he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.

1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize

1990 the Neustadt International Prize for Literature

1983 the Bonner Award for Poetry

1981 West Germany’s Petrarch Prize

the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and the August Prize.

Poems by Tomas Tranströmer

THE COUPLE

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows

an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.

The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,

but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

like two colors that meet and run together

on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer

tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

They stand packed and waiting very near,

a mob of people with blank faces.

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Tomas Tranströmer Collected Poems

• 17 dikter (1954) - Seventeen Poems

• Hemligheter på vägen (1958)

• Den halvfärdiga himlen (1962) - The Half-Finished Heaven

• Klanger och spår (1966) - Windows and Stones

• Mörkerseende (1970) - Night Vision

• Stigar (1973) - Paths

• Östersjöar (1974) - Baltics

• Sanningsbarriären (1978)

• Det vilda torget (1983)

• För levande och d öda (1989) - For the Living and the Dead

• Sorgegondolen (1996)

• Den stora gåtan (2004)

• The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (2006) - Translated by Robin Fulton

• Galleriet: Reflected in Vecka nr.II (2007) - an artist book by Modhir Ahmed

Sources :

http://www.nobelprize.org

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com

http://www.companionstar.org

http://tomastranstromer.net/about/

Cancer kills Ralph Steinman before he hears of Nobel Prize

2011-10-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Ralph Steinman

Ralph Steinman who won the Nobel prize for medicine 2011 used his own discoveries to treat himself for cancer, but died of the disease just days before he could be told of the award.

Ralph Steinman The 68-year-old physician, who joked last week with his family about hanging on until the annual prize declaration, died Friday after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer

-- a fact the Nobel committee was not told until hours after it announced the 2011 award was shared by Steinman and two others.

Ralph Steinman never knew his life's work had been crowned with the highest accolade science can bestow, becoming the first person in half a century to win a posthumous Nobel prize -- after a day of consternation in Stockholm, where the Nobel rules have long insisted, in principle, on recognizing only the living.

"We wanted him to be here for this," said his daughter Alexis Steinman, 34. "We were like 'OK Dad, I know things aren't going well but the Nobel, they are going to announce it next Monday'. And he's like: 'I know I have got to hold out for that. They don't give it to you if you have passed away.

"'I got to hold out for that.'"

The Nobel Committee spent the morning calling Steinman to offer the traditional congratulations only to discover they faced a "unique" situation. After anguished consultations on the fate of the prize, and money worth three quarters of a million dollars, they decided it would go to Steinman's heirs.

Two other pioneers whose work on the immune system has also driven ground-breaking possibilities for curbing infections and cancers, American Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman from France, shared the other half of the 10 million-crown prize.

Steinman, whose research contributed to the launch last year of the first approved vaccine to kill tumors, was working until his final days, colleagues said.

"BITTERSWEET NEWS"

last Sunday, Ralph Steinman lost consciousness on Thursday and died surrounded by family the following day. But Rockefeller University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne said his staff only heard of his death from the family about half an hour after news of the Nobel prize came out from Sweden.

Nobel Committee secretary general Goran Hansson told Reuters: "I am, of course, saddened that Dr Steinman could not receive this news and feel that happiness.

"He was a great scientist."

After examining a rule which bars giving the prize to the dead, and a second which says a laureate nonetheless keeps the prize if they die between the announcement and the award ceremony held some weeks later, the committee said it found the latter rule to be more fitting to Steinman's case.

"The Nobel Prize shall not deliberately be awarded posthumously. However, the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel laureate was alive," the committee said.

His university said: "Steinman ... was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design."

Those cells, which the Montreal-born Steinman discovered in the 1970s, are vital to the attack the body launches on tumors and infections if they breach its first line of immune defense.

The other prizewinners, Beutler and Hoffmann, studied the first stages of the body's immune responses in the 1990s.

Lars Klareskog, who chairs the prize panel, said: "I am very excited about what these discoveries mean." In particular they may offer ways to tackle antibiotic-resistant microbes.

Beutler, 53, is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Luxembourg-born Hoffmann, 70, conducted much of his work in Strasbourg.

SELF-DEFENSE

The work of all three prizewinners has been pivotal to the development of improved types of vaccines against infectious diseases and novel approaches to fighting cancer. The research has helped lay the foundations for a new wave of "therapeutic vaccines" that stimulate the immune system to attack tumors.

Better understanding of the complexities of the immune system has also given clues to treating inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, in which the body's defense system goes haywire and ends up attacking its own tissues.

Beutler told Reuters his work "might lead to new treatments for inflammatory and auto-immune disease, and possibly new treatments for other kinds of diseases as well."

In the United States, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society said the trio's work "formed the foundation of immunotherapy which holds great promise for the cancer community."

Beutler and Hoffmann discovered in the 1990s that receptor proteins act as a first line of defense, innate immunity, by recognizing bacteria and other microorganisms. Steinman's work, explained how, if required, dendritic cells in the next phase, adaptive immunity, kill off infections that break through.

The research ultimately led to the launch of the first therapeutic cancer vaccine last year, Dendreon's Provenge, which treats men with advanced prostate cancer.

It was unclear how Steinman had treated his own pancreatic cancer -- a notoriously deadly form of the disease. The development of treatments from research can take many years. Former student Michel Nussenzweig said Steinman's discovery was only now reaching that stage after a particular wait.

"No one believed it for a really long time," Nussenzweig said of the work on cells. "His dream was to use his discovery to develop vaccines and it's a dream that's pretty close."

Medicine is usually the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. They were first awarded in 1901 using a bequest from dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

The only previous posthumous awards were to Swedes: poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, for literature, in 1931; and U.N. chief Dag Hammarskjold, given the 1961 peace prize weeks after dying in a plane crash while on a peacemaking mission in Africa.

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London, Michelle Nichols in New York and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Source :Reuters