YEAR IN REVIEW 1998: NOBEL-PRIZES

Prize for Chemistry A Dane, a Briton, and an American shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discoveries about ATP synthase, an enzyme responsible for making adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the universal energy carrier in living cells. By means of energy-rich chemical bonds, the molecule ATP captures the chemical energy released from food and makes it available to cells for muscle contraction, transmission of nerve impulses, construction of cell components, and other processes. It serves this critical function, often described as the energy currency of cells, in living things ranging from microbes to humans. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the $1 million prize to Paul Delos Boyer of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and John Ernest Walker of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, Eng. They were honoured for research conducted independently that explained the way ATP synthase works as a catalyst in cells to promote the synthesis of ATP. The other half of the prize went to Jens Christian Skou of Aarhus University, rhus, Den., for discovery of the first molecular pump in cells. Powered by ATP, molecular pumps are protein molecules that transport ions, or electrically charged atoms, through cell membranes. Skou discovered sodium, potassium-ATPase, a special enzyme that functions as such a pump by degrading ATP and using the released energy to power the transport process. When Boyer began his research on ATP formation in the early 1950s, scientists knew that it was the energy carrier in living cells. ATP consists of a molecule of adenosine linked to a chain of three phosphate groups by high-energy bonds. Removal of a phosphate group releases the stored energy for use by cells. In the process ATP becomes adenosine diphosphate (ADP). With help from chemical energy in food, a phosphate can be added to ADP, producing more ATP. In the late 1970s Boyer proposed the binding-change hypothesis, a detailed elucidation of the mechanism by which ATPase catalyzes synthesis of ATP from ADP and phosphate. Walker's work complements Boyer's in a remarkable manner, the Swedish Academy stated. Walker, who began studies on ATP synthase in the early 1980s, verified that the mechanism proposed by Boyer was valid. In the 1980s Walker deciphered the sequence, or linear arrangement, of the amino-acid building blocks of ATP synthase. He added further evidence in the 1990s by obtaining the first high-resolution crystal structure of the active part of ATP synthase. All of Walker's structural clarifications were consistent with Boyer's mechanism. Skou was honoured for research that he had done in the late 1950s. He established sodium, potassium ATPase as the first enzyme known to promote transport of ions through cell membranes. Such transport maintains normal concentrations of sodium, potassium, and other chemicals in cells. Sodium concentration inside cells is lower than outside, and potassium concentration is higher inside than out. When, for example, a nerve cell transmits an impulse, sodium ions pour into the cell, increasing their internal concentration. They must be transported out of the cell for it to fire again. That transport requires energy, which sodium, potassium-ATPase acquires by detaching phosphate groups from ATP molecules. Other researchers later discovered more ion pumps with similar structures and functions. A calcium pump, for instance, helps to control muscle contraction, and a hydrogen pump produces hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Popular drugs used to treat stomach ulcers and gastritis work by inhibiting action of the pump enzyme. Boyer was born on July 31, 1918, in Provo, Utah, and received a doctoral degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After joining UCLA in 1963, he directed the institution's Molecular Biology Institute (1965-83) and became professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry (1990). Walker was born on Jan. 7, 1941, in Halifax, Eng., and received a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. In 1982 he became senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Skou, born on Oct. 8, 1918, in Lemvig, Den., trained in medicine at the University of Copenhagen and earned a Ph.D. from Aarhus University, where he became professor of physiology (1963). In 1977 he was made professor of biophysics at Aarhus. MICHAEL WOODS Prize for Economics The stereotype that the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science is usually awarded for dry academic concepts with only theoretical rather than applied value was far from the truth in 1997. Not only had the prizewinners, American Robert C. Merton and Canadian-born Myron Samuel Scholes, seen their ideas put to use, but they also had profited from them. The pair shared the award for providing an answer to the fundamental question of how to measure the value of stock options and other derivatives, an answer that had helped fuel the growth of world financial markets for 20 years. They had also put their money where their mouths were by becoming principals in Long-Term Capital Management, a $6 billion firm that invested primarily in fixed-income securities and derivatives of those securities; Merton was even one of the firm's cofounders. Scholes's greatest contribution to the field of economics was the formula that bore his name: the Black-Scholes option-valuation formula, developed in tandem with Fischer Black, whose death in 1995 made him ineligible for the Nobel Prize (which is not awarded posthumously). Despite some early difficulty in finding a publisher, Scholes and Black were able to present their landmark formula in the Journal of Political Economy in 1973. Prior to this time, it had been difficult for people to determine the value of stock options (purchased agreements that give investors or traders the right to either buy or sell an asset at a fixed time in the future). Although investors could calculate a risk premium to hedge against major financial losses, they lacked the means to predict such a premium accurately. The Black-Scholes formula, though mathematically complex, was based on a series of rather straightforward variables: the current share price, the future strike price, the time to maturity, the time to expiry, and the interest rate on alternative, risk-free investments. The formula helped lessen the high risk inherent in the derivatives market by demonstrating that risk premiums are not necessary for investment in stock options because they already are factored into the price of the stock. The implication was that options should be priced as a type of insurance, or hedging device, so that they mirrored risk-free investment alternatives, such as treasury bills. This made the trading of options and other derivatives more attractive to investors, and soon the Black-Scholes formula was adopted by traders worldwide as the main method for valuing stock options. By the mid-1970s traders at the Chicago Board Options Exchange were able to compute instantly the value of options on hand-held electronic calculators. Merton used his background in mathematics to build on the Black-Scholes formula by demonstrating how certain restrictions, such as the assumption that a stock will pay no dividends, could be relaxed. By altering the formula, he showed how it could be applied to financial matters other than options, including home mortgages and student loans, and to risk management in general. Scholes was born on Jan. 7, 1941, in Timmins, Ont., and educated at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont. (B.A., 1961), and the University of Chicago (M.B.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1970), where he studied under Nobel laureate Merton H. Miller. Scholes taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; 1968-73) and the University of Chicago (1973-83) before joining (1983) Stanford University as a professor of both law and finance. Merton, whose father was a noted sociologist, was born in New York City on July 31, 1944. He studied engineering mathematics at Columbia University, New York City (B.S., 1966), applied mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (M.S., 1967), and economics at MIT (Ph.D., 1970). He taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 1970 until 1988, when he joined the Harvard Business School. Merton, who sat on the boards of several economic journals and mutual fund companies, wrote economic treatises on corporate finance, as well as the book Continuous-Time Finance (1990).TOM MICHAEL Prize for Literature Soon after being named winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature in October, Italian actor-playwright Dario Fo demonstrated to the world how he had secured his reputation as a social agitator. He announced that his $1 million Nobel award would be donated to the legal defense of three former radicals who were imprisoned for a murder associated with an incident that formed the centrepiece of one of his best-known satires, Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1974; Accidental Death of an Anarchist). The play tells of an anarchist who was unjustly blamed for terrorist bombings and during police interrogation was thrown from a fifth-story window to his death--a death that was ruled accidental. The police interrogators, led by the main character, Il Matto (The Maniac), beat the suspect and brought him to the window and made him lean out for a bit of cool night air to revive him . . . Apparently, there was a misunderstanding between the two officers supporting him as often happens in these cases, each of them thought the other one was holding him--You got him Gianni?' You got him Luigi?' and bump, down he went. In the real-life 1969 case, the government destroyed evidence relating to the bombing, and the three radicals for whom Fo lent his celebrity support were convicted of the 1972 assassination of the chief interrogator. They were demanding a new trial, however. The selection of the avant-garde dramatist and performer came as a surprise to many Nobel Prize watchers, including Fo himself, and the inter-national literary establishment reacted somewhat coolly to the news. Partially blinded by a stroke in 1996, Fo brought characteristic levity to the staid Nobel ceremony in December by handing out colourful drawings and delivering an improvised speech. His risky theatrical caricatures lampooned what he viewed as hypocrisy in government, society, and religion and were occasionally the subject of official condemnation. The Vatican, for example, censured his popular one-man show, Mistero Buffo (1973) as the most blasphemous show in the history of television for such irreverent scenes as the one in which Jesus Christ transforms the wedding at Cana into a drunken bacchanal. Based on medieval mystery plays, Mistero Buffo remained topical, changing with every audience. Fo's biting brand of comedy was perhaps best described in a monologue from the same work: I am the jongleur . . . I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the big shots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and pssss they deflate. Fo was born on March 24, 1926, in Leggiuno-Sangiamo, a fishing village north of Milan, the city where he later settled. By the early 1950s he was creating satirical revues for small theatres, often appearing with the actress Franca Rame, whom he married in 1954. Their agitprop theatre of leftist politics was rooted in the traditions of commedia dell'arte and court jesters, and when their clownish sketches on the television show Canzonissima lasted only seven weeks in 1962, their notoriety was fueled. In 1968 Fo and Rame founded the acting troupe Nuova Scena, which was financed by the Italian Communist Party. They left the party in 1970, however, to establish the touring company Collettivo Teatrale La Comune. Fo wrote about 70 plays, coauthoring some of them with Rame, notably Female Parts (1981). Fo's other works include Non si paga, non si paga! (1974; We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!), Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (1978; Adult Orgasm Escapes from the Zoo), Il papa e la strega (1989; The Pope and the Witch), and Il diavolo con le zinne (1997).TOM MICHAEL Prize for Peace The banning of antipersonnel land mines took only six years--from November 1991, when American activist Jody Williams helped found the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), to December 1997, when 131 nations met in Ottawa and 123 signed or indicated that they would sign the historic treaty. On December 10, six days after the closing of the Ottawa conference, Williams and ICBL were honoured in Oslo with the Nobel Prize for Peace; Williams and ICBL were awarded equal shares in the prize. Inexpensive to manufacture (about $5 apiece) but costly to detect and defuse (about $1,000 for each one), antipersonnel mines, which were more compact and more prevalent than antitank mines, were considered especially advantageous for their ease of placement and indiscriminate element of terror. According to Williams and ICBL, in some 68 countries there were an estimated 110 million antipersonnel land mines that maimed or killed at the rate of 26,000 persons--most of them civilians--each year. Because minefields were more likely to be found in less-developed countries recovering from recent wars--such as Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cambodia--resulting deaths and injuries took a tremendous toll on overburdened health services, and land mine removal drained national finances and rendered land unusable. The treaty signed in December mandated an absolute ban on land mine production, export, and use, as well as the destruction of existing stockpiles and the removal of active mines. Despite major signatory holdouts--such as the United States and China--the campaign to ban land mines received worldwide support, and the efforts of ICBL were supported by such figures as Diana, princess of Wales (see OBITUARIES), U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, and Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy. Accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of ICBL was Cambodian Tun Channareth, who had lost his legs to a land mine in 1982. Williams was born on Oct. 9, 1950, and earned (1984) a master's degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. For more than a decade, she worked to influence U.S. foreign policy in Central America as coordinator of the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project and as associate director of Medical Aid to El Salvador. By November 1991 these interests had brought her into contact with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF), which, along with the German-based group Medico International, formed ICBL, with Williams as campaign coordinator. The campaign built upon the failures of the 1980 Geneva Convention on Inhumane Weapons, which was unable to achieve an absolute ban on antipersonnel land mines--although attending nations, reconvening later in the mid-1990s, agreed to standardize some specifications for producing the weapons. Under Williams, ICBL expanded into a coalition of about 1,000 nongovernmental humanitarian, medical, and developmental groups from more than 50 nations. Its steering committee, under the leadership of the VVAF, was made up of nine international organizations. Williams was coauthor, with Shawn Roberts, of After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines (1995). TOM MICHAEL Prize for Physics The 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to two American scientists and a French colleague for developing techniques for using laser light to cool and trap atoms so that they can be studied in detail. Other scientists extended the methods in 1995 to achieve a new state of matter termed a Bose-Einstein condensate and in 1997 to make an atom laser. (See MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES: Physics.) Additional applications are just around the corner, stated the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the prize. It cited superior atomic clocks for more accurate determinations of position on Earth and in space and new ways of making very small electronic components. The new methods have contributed greatly to increasing our knowledge of the interplay between radiation and matter, the Nobel citation added. The prize was shared by Steven Chu of Stanford University, William Daniel Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md., and Claude Nessim Cohen-Tannoudji of the Collge de France and the cole Normale Suprieure, Paris. Chu was born on Feb. 28, 1948, in St. Louis, Mo., and received a doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1990 he became a professor at Stanford. Phillips, born on Nov. 5, 1948, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., received a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cohen-Tannoudji was born on April 1, 1933, in Constantine, Alg., and received a doctoral degree from the cole Normale. The three physicists worked independently, each moving the technology farther ahead. In 1985 Chu and his co-workers at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J., developed the original method for cooling atoms. The techniques were needed because atoms and molecules in gases move so fast--e.g., 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph) for atoms and molecules in air at room temperature--that detailed observations are difficult. Scientists knew that lowering the temperature could reduce the speed of the particles. To slow atomic and molecular motion enough for detailed study, intense chilling to temperatures near absolute zero (0 K, or -273.15 C, or -459.67 F) was needed. At such cold temperatures, however, gases normally condense and freeze. Chu and associates made an apparatus that allowed gases to be chilled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero without freezing. It consisted of six laser beams that bombard the gas's constituent particles from all directions, slowing their motion. The laser light acts much like an extremely thick liquid, which has been dubbed optical molasses, that slows movement of the particles. Individual atoms thus can be studied in great detail, and scientists can get glimpses of their inner structure, the Royal Academy observed. The apparatus created a glowing pea-sized cloud containing about one million chilled atoms. In the initial experiments Chu's group cooled atoms to a temperature of about 240 microkelvins (mK), or 240 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Atoms at that temperature were slowed to a speed of about 30 cm (12 in) per second. Subsequent addition of magnetic coils to Chu's device allowed scientists to trap the atoms so that they could be studied or used for experiments. Phillips and his associates designed a similar experiment, developing several new methods for measuring temperature. By 1988 his group had achieved temperatures of 40 mK. Between 1988 and 1995 Cohen-Tannoudji and his colleagues made further advances, finally cooling atoms to a temperature within 1 mK, which corresponded to a speed of only 2 cm (0.8 in) per second. Intensive development is in progress concerning laser cooling and the capture of neutral atoms, the Academy noted. Among other things, Chu has constructed an atomic fountain, in which laser-cooled atoms are sprayed up from a trap like jets of water. Chu visualized the device as the basis of a new generation of ultraprecise atomic clocks. Existing atomic clocks are accurate to about one second in 32 million years. Chu's work could make them accurate to one second in three billion years.MICHAEL WOODS Prize for Physiology or Medicine An American scientist who discovered an entirely new kind of disease-causing agent, called a prion, won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Prions are believed to cause a number of degenerative brain diseases in humans and other animals. They include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, which forced wide destruction of cattle herds in the U.K. beginning in the late 1980s, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. Recent evidence suggested that a newly discovered variant of CJD can be transmitted from cows with BSE to humans. The Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, awarded the prize to Stanley Ben Prusiner of the University of California, San Francisco. It was the first time since 1987, and only the 10th time in the last 50 years, that the prize had gone to a single scientist. Nobel Prizes often have recognized originators of unpopular theories who were finally vindicated after years of struggle against opposition from colleagues. As of 1997, however, the prion controversy showed little sign of ending, with skeptics questioning whether prions exist and with some insisting that BSE, CJD, and other diseases actually are caused by still-undiscovered viruses. Stanley Prusiner has added prions to the list of well known infectious agents including bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, the Nobel Assembly stated. discovery provides important insights that may furnish the basis to understand the biological mechanisms underlying other types of dementia-related diseases, for example Alzheimer's disease, and establishes a foundation for drug development and new types of medical treatment strategies. Prusiner was born on May 28, 1942, in Des Moines, Iowa, and was educated at The University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1964; M.D., 1968). He began his research in 1972 after a patient died of CJD, a rare brain disease that results in dementia. Other scientists had established that CJD, and related conditions termed kuru and scrapie, could be transmitted in brain tissue. Kuru occurred among cannibalistic people in Papua New Guinea who ate the brains of tribesmen who had been infected with kuru. Scrapie is a brain disease in sheep that causes the animals to scratch and scrape off their skin. Nevertheless, no conventional agent could be isolated from infected tissue. Furthermore, the tissue remained infectious despite treatment that would have destroyed the DNA or RNA of any viruses or bacteria present. Scientists had proposed several theories about the agent responsible for these diseases. Some blamed an unusual, slow-acting virus. In the 1960s British scientists Tikvah Alper and J.S. Griffith proposed that an infectious agent lacking nucleic acid could cause scrapie. a sensational hypothesis since at the time all known infectious agents contained the hereditary material DNA or RNA, the Nobel Assembly explained. Prusiner and his associates embraced this idea. By 1982 they had announced discovery of an unusual protein in the brains of scrapie-infected hamsters that was not present in healthy animals. To describe this proteinaceous infectious particle Prusiner coined the term prion. Whereas the scientific community greeted this discovery with great skepticism, the Assembly stated, an unwavering Prusiner continued the arduous task to define the precise nature of this novel infectious agent. Prusiner's group later showed that humans and other animals have a gene that specifies the production of prion protein. The protein's amino acid chain can fold into two distinct forms with different three-dimensional structures. One is a tightly coiled, unstable, normal form that does not cause disease. The other is an unwound, more stable, abnormal form. Prusiner's research indicated that the abnormal protein causes CJD, scrapie, and other prion diseases by a catalytic process in which it, on contact with the normal protein, causes the latter to change its structure and become abnormal. In a chain reaction ever more of the abnormal protein is produced, and after months or years it finally accumulates to levels that cause obvious brain damage. Prusiner's work could help scientists understand Alzheimer's disease and other more common brain disorders. For example, some researchers believed that Alzheimer's disease is caused by a structural change in certain nonprion proteins, which leads to the accumulation of abnormal deposits in the brain. His research also suggested possible ways of treating and preventing prion diseases in humans and animals. Prusiner's group, for instance, was trying to develop drugs that attach to normal prion protein and stabilize it, so that the protein resists unwinding. Prusiner also suggested breeding sheep and cows that lack the prion gene, which did not seem essential for normal life.MICHAEL WOODS