YEAR IN REVIEW 2000: NOBEL-PRIZES

Prize for Chemistry Ahmed H. Zewail won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing a technique that allows scientists to study chemical reactions in slow motion, visualizing in real time what actually happens when chemical bonds break and new bonds form. The discovery opened a new field of chemistry, femtochemistry, which uses ultrafast laser flashes to probe the innermost secrets of chemical reactions. The flashes take place on the same time scale in which chemical reactions occurfs (femtoseconds). One femtosecond is 0.000000000000001 second, or 1015 second. This field of physical chemistry thus became known as femtochemistry. Professor Zewail's contributions have brought about a revolution in chemistry and adjacent sciences, since this type of investigation allows us to understand and predict important reactions, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the prize. Femtochemistry has fundamentally changed our view of chemical reactions. One ultimate goal of femtochemistry, the Nobel Assembly said, is to gain better control over the outcome of chemical reactions. Many chemical reactions that produce industrial and commercial products also yield unwanted products that add to the cost of production. These products must be separated from those that are desired. Knowledge gained from femtochemistry may eventually enable chemists to orchestrate reactions so that selected bonds are broken or not broken to produce precisely the desired product. Zewail, Linus Pauling professor of chemical physics and professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, was born in Damanhur, Egypt, on Feb. 26, 1946. After receiving undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Alexandria, he earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship and joined the Caltech faculty in 1976. Chemical reactions are responsible for changes that occur in matter. Reactions occur when molecules collide, and some of the bonds holding their atoms together break. Atoms or groups of atoms in the original substances are redistributed, and new bonds form to produce new substances. The speed of a reaction generally increases with temperature. Increasing the temperature imparts energy to molecules and makes them move faster. When molecules collide at ordinary temperatures, they simply bounce apart, and no reaction occurs. High-temperature collisions, however, are so violent that the molecules react with one another and new molecules form. Researchers long believed that molecules must be activated, pushed over an invisible energy barrier, in order to react. They knew little, however, about a molecule's movement up the barrier, the form that it assumes at the top of the barrier (in a condition termed the transition state), or the substances, called intermediates, formed in the split second during which a reaction proceeds from the original reactants to the final products. Many assumed that the transition state and intermediates lasted such an incredibly brief period of time, typically 10100 fs, that it would never be possible to study those events during a chemical reaction. In the late 1980s, however, Zewail supplied the method, femtosecond spectroscopy, for performing such studies. It was based on new laser technology capable of producing light flashes lasting just tens of femtoseconds, the same time scale as the events in chemical reactions. Zewail and his associates used the technology to build a camera that the Nobel Assembly compared to the slow-motion cameras used to freeze rapidly occurring plays in football and other sporting events. In femtosecond spectroscopy molecules being studied are mixed together in a vacuum chamber. An ultrafast laser then beams in two pulses. One, called the pump pulse, supplies energy needed to drive the molecules up the energy barrier to the transition state. A second, weaker beam called the probe pulse is tuned to the wavelength necessary for detecting the original molecules or an altered form of the molecules. The pump pulse starts the reaction, and the probe pulse examines the ongoing reaction. By studying characteristic spectra, or light patterns, from the molecules, researchers can determine the structure of molecules at the transition state as well as the intermediate products. With femtosecond spectroscopy we can for the first time observe in slow motion' what happens as the reaction barrier is crossed, the Nobel Assembly said. Scientists the world over are studying processes with femtosecond spectroscopy in gases, in fluids and in solids, on surfaces and in polymers. Applications range from how catalysts function and how molecular electronic components must be designed, to the most delicate mechanisms in life processes and how the medicines of the future should be produced. Michael Woods Prize for Economics The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences bestows on its recipients international recognition for research that may or may not have been widely acknowledged in the past. Canadian-born Robert Alexander Mundell, who won the 1999 award for his work on monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas, already had a worldwide reputation in the field of international monetary economics. His researchinto the effects of government policy in international capital markets, whether the value of a national currency should be fixed (hold one steady exchange rate) or should float (be continuously adjusted), and the desirability of a national currencyhad changed the direction of macroeconomic theory for open economies and was the inspiration for much international research in the area. Mundell's macroeconomic analysis of exchange rates and their effect on monetary policies dated back to the early 1960s, when he worked (196163) in the research department of the International Monetary Fund. In 1961 he put forward the theory that a single currency would be viable in an economic region, or optimum currency area, in which there was free movement of labour and trade. Among other things, a single currency offered the advantage of lower transaction costs in trade and greater certainty about relative prices. A major disadvantage of a single currency for more than one country was maintaining employment or wages in a particular area where, for example, there was a fall in demand. Mundell's initial research focused on whether Canada's currency should be fixed to, or floated against, the U.S. dollar. At a time when it was deemed important for countries to have their own currencies and most had fixed exchange rates, Mundell's research was considered unorthodox. He was the first economist to study the effect of a floating of exchange rates in response to market forces. Previously, models based on the domestic economy influenced economists, particularly Americans, because of the size of the U.S. home market. By introducing foreign trade and capital movements into earlier closed economy models, Mundell showed that it was the extent of international capital mobility that influenced stabilization policies. He concluded that a country's rate of exchange was determined in capital markets by the willingness and desire of people to possess he currency of that country. This in turn was determined by their perception of national economic prospects, inflation, and monetary policies. More than 30 years after their introduction, the application of Mundell's theories made them extremely topical and relevant. They were widely seen as having paved the way for the creation of the euro, the single currency adopted by 11 of the 15 members of the European Union on Jan. 1, 1999. The introduction of the euro remained controversial partly because factors were not sufficiently mobile for Europe to conform to Mundell's definition of an optimum currency area. Nevertheless, in the 1990s many companies and nation-states saw globalization as a key factor in determining their economic survival and competitiveness, and exchange-rate uncertainty was perceived by some as a barrier to this. Mundell demonstrated that monetary policyby which central banks control a country's money supplyhas only a limited impact on economies with fixed exchange rates (where the central bank has no power to intervene in the currency market). Nevertheless, it is the best way to stimulate economies with floating exchange rates that allow free capital movements across borders. Mundell was born in Kingston, Ont., on Oct. 24, 1932, and was educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 1953), the University of Washington (M.A., 1954), the London School of Economics, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1956). He was a postdoctoral fellow in political economy at the University of Chicago (195657), where he later served as a professor of economics (196671) and as an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Other academic appointments included a summer professorship at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (196575). From 1974 he taught at Columbia University, New York City. Mundell also held prestigious and influential positions with international agencies and organizations, as well as serving as an adviser to several governments and being the author of scores of articles and several books, notably Man and Economics (1968) and Monetary Theory: Interest, Inflation and Growth in the World Economy (1971). Mundell's previous honours included the Guggenheim Prize (1971), the Jacques Rueff Medal and Prize (1983), and the Docteur Honoris Causa (University of Paris, 1992). In September 1998 he delivered the Ohlin Lectures, and shortly thereafter he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Janet H. Clark Prize for Literature German author Gnter Grass, who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, was praised by the Swedish Academy for his uncompromising tenacity in portraying the forgotten face of history. Although known primarily for his fiction, Grass, a prolific and versatile writer, was also a highly regarded poet, playwright, journalist, and ballet librettist. His enormous range of talent also extended to graphic arts, sculpting, and painting. Grass played a significant role in the revival of German literature in the aftermath of World War II and achieved critical acclaim following the 1959 publication of his controversial epic first novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1962); together with writers Heinrich Bll and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, he came to personify the moral conscience of the postwar German experience. Fusing literature with social and political activism, Grass confronted the horror of war and the Holocaust as a means to reconcile both past and present. Grass was born on Oct. 16, 1927, in Danzig (now Gdansk, Pol.), at that time a designated free city. A predominantly German-speaking enclave, Danzig became a strategic political objective in Adolf Hitler's campaign for European dominance prior to World War II and would later serve as a recurring motif in Grass's fictional oeuvre. Following the German occupation of Poland, Grass was absorbed into the Hitler Youth movement and at age 16 was drafted into the military. Wounded near Cottbus, Ger., in April 1945, he was later captured by American forces and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria. Released in the spring of 1946, Grass worked as a farm labourer and then in a potash mine before moving in 1947 to Dsseldorf, Ger., ostensibly to study painting at the Academy of Art. Instead, he became apprenticed to a stonemason and later relocated to what was then West Berlin, where he studied sculpture and worked as an artist. In 1954 Grass married Anna Schwarz, a Swiss dancer who sparked his interest in ballet; together they had four children. It was during this period that Grass began writing poetry and experimental plays that generated interest and later financial support from the prestigious literary association Gruppe 47. His first collection of poetry appeared in 1956, the same year Grass and his wife moved to Paris. There he began work in earnest on Die Blechtrommel, which together with Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse, 1963) and Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years, 1965) formed what became the Danzig Trilogy. One of the most provocative novels of the second half of the 20th century, Die Blechtrommel was a nightmarish journey into the schism of human degradation, evoking the rise of Nazism as seen through the tormented gaze of Oskar Matzerath, the boy with the tin drum and glass-shattering voice whose existence reflects the decadence and decay of the age in which he lives. Based in part on autobiographical elements, Oskar is also a reflection of Grass himself, each in his own way intertwined in the struggle between good and evil. For Oskar the confrontation spirals out of control, and his chaotic descent into violence and rage ends in madness, the echo of his constant drumming a form of protest against a dissonant and unforgiving world subdued into silent resignation. Grass was more fortunate and in his own survival finds redemption as well as artistic purpose and direction. The haunting experience of war and its consequences would inform both Katz und Maus and Hundejahre, which further enhanced his critical reputation and secured for Grass a position as a writer of major importance within contemporary German literature. It was during this same time that he became increasingly involved in the German political system, supporting the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and actively campaigning for Willy Brandt, who in 1969 became chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. Disheartened but not disillusioned by Brandt's resignation in 1974following the disclosure that a high-level assistant had in fact been an East German spyGrass remained a tireless and undaunted advocate for human rights and global accord. The merger of politics and literature firmly established Grass as a formidable and influential public figure but simultaneously proved detrimental to his personal life, as evinced in his massive narrative Der Butt (1977; The Flounder, 1978), and in 1978 his marriage ended in divorce. The following year Grass married Ute Grunert. With persistent and unrelenting conviction, Grass continued to be an outspoken critic of contemporary society as well as a productive author of exceptional merit. His other literary works include Unkenrufe (1992; The Call of the Toad, 1992), Ein weites Feld (1995; to be published in 2000 as Too Far Afield),and Mein Jahrhundert (1999; My Century, 1999), in which Grass tells a story for each year that together forms a narrative chronicle of the 20th century. Steven R. Serafin Prize for Peace The 1999 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Doctors Without Borders (in French, Mdecins sans Frontires), a privately funded, independent humanitarian organization based in Paris. The group was dedicated to relieving the suffering of those who were victims of political violence or of natural disasters or who needed other medical or health-related assistance. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee said that the group adhered to the fundamental principle that all disaster victims, whether the disaster is natural or human in origin, have a right to professional assistance given as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Because of the dangerous circumstances under which they often worked, the members of the organization sometimes put themselves at considerable personal risk. Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971 by 10 French physicians who were dissatisfied with the neutrality of the Red Cross. Having worked in Biafra (a breakaway state of Nigeria) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the doctors believed that they had the right to take the initiative in intervening wherever they saw a need for their services, rather than waiting for an invitation from the government. They also believed that they had a duty to speak out about injustice, even though this might offend the host government. According to the Nobel committee, National boundaries and political circumstances or sympathies must have no influence on who is to receive humanitarian help. By maintaining a high degree of independence, the organization has succeeded in living up to these ideals. Doctors Without Borders had, in fact, been expelled from individual countries because of its outspoken criticism of governments' actions and policies. This happened, for example, in 1995 in Zaire and Tanzania after the group charged that refugee camps in those countries were under the control of Hutu officials who had earlier been responsible for genocide in Rwanda. In the first major undertaking following its formation, Doctors Without Borders helped victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua in 1972. Other major relief missions were undertaken to care for victims of fighting in Lebanon (1976), treat casualties of war in Afghanistan (1979), give medical assistance following an earthquake in the then Soviet republic of Armenia (1988), and aid victims of fighting in the Russian republic of Chechnya (1995). There were a number of major efforts in the 1980s and 1990s in such African countries as Somalia, Ethiopia, The Sudan, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, and Zaire, where Doctors Without Borders worked to relieve famine, offer medical care to casualties of war, and deal with the problems of refugees. In 1989, as governments began to collapse, the organization established health programs in a number of countries in Eastern Europe, and in 1991 it aided Kurdish refugees in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. In 1996 a vaccination program was undertaken against meningitis in Nigeria. The organization also undertook projects such as family-planning services in Armenia and care for homeless people in Russia. Although by the late 1990s a quarter of those serving in Doctors Without Borders continued to be French, in all some 45 nationalities were represented, and the group was sending more than 2,000 volunteers to 80 countries annually. The doctors and other medical professionals working for the organization received a small monthly stipend. Although widely regarded for its work, Doctors Without Borders also had come to have a reputation for being a highly politicized group that was particularly skillful in achieving publicity for its efforts. It was also often cited as a model for the type of humanitarian organizations that developed worldwide beginning in the 1970s. The Nobel citation stated, In critical situations marked by violence and brutality, the humanitarian world of Doctors Without Borders enables the organization to create openings for contacts between the opposed parties. At the same time, each fearless and self-sacrificing helper shows each victim a human face, stands for respect for that person's dignity, and is a source of hope for peace and reconciliation. The Nobel Prize for Peace was first given in 1901, and this was the 19th time that an organization rather than an individual had received the honour. Other groups to have won the Peace Prize included the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and, only two years previously, in 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Robert Rauch Prize for Physics Two Dutch scientists won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics for having developed a way to predict mathematically the properties of both the subatomic particles that make up all matter in the universe and the forces that hold those particles together. Their work put particle physics on a firmer mathematical foundation and led to the discovery of a new subatomic particle, the top quark. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Martinus J.G. Veltman and his former graduate student Gerardus 't Hooft for work done in the 1960s and 1970s when both were with the State University of Utrecht, Neth. Veltman, born June 27, 1931 in Waalwijk, Neth., received a doctoral degree in physics in 1963 at Utrecht and worked there until moving to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1981. 'T Hooft was born July 5, 1946, in Den Helder, Neth., and received his doctoral degree at Utrecht in 1972, where in 1999 he served as a professor of physics. When Veltman and 't Hooft began their prizewinning research, the fundamental theory of particle physics, termed the standard model, was incomplete. Particle physics emerged in the 1950s, with development of large accelerators that allowed scientists to study the most fundamental components of matter. All physical matter in the universe is made from atoms, which consist of central nuclei surrounded by electron clouds. The nucleus of each atom consists of smaller, or subatomic, particles, called protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made from still smaller particles. The standard model groups all subatomic, or elementary, particles into three families of quarks and leptons. It describes how quarks and leptons interact via a number of exchange particles for two of the four fundamental forces in nature, the strong force and the electroweak force. Eight massless gluons mediate the strong force, and four other exchange particles (the photon, the W+, the W, and the Z) mediate the electroweak force. Rounding out the standard model's building blocks of matter is a very heavy particle (predicted but not yet observed) called the Higgs particle. The theoretical foundation of the standard model was at first incomplete mathematically and in particular it was unclear whether the theory could be used at all for detailed calculations of physical quantities, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman are being awarded this year's Nobel Prize for having placed this theory on a firmer mathematical foundation. Their work has given researchers a well-functioning theoretical machinery' which can be used for, among other things, predicting the properties of new particles. In the 1960s researchers collaborated in the development of a theory that unified two of the fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak force). It showed that both are manifestations of a single underlying force, now termed the electroweak force. The new theory predicted the existence of the W and Z particles, which were identified in 1983. Many researchers, however, questioned the validity of the electroweak theory. When they tried to use the theory to calculate properties of elementary particles, it produced unreasonable results. The situation resembled one that existed in the 1940s, when another bedrock theory of physics, quantum electrodynamics theory, also produced obviously incorrect results. That problem was solved by scientists who developed a method to change, or renormalize, quantum electrodynamics into a workable theory. As a newly appointed professor in the late 1960s, Veltman became convinced that it would be possible to renormalize the electroweak theory as well. 'T Hooft, then a 22-year-old doctoral student, joined him early in 1969 to work on the problem. In 1971 't Hooft published two articles that represented a major advance toward the goal, according to the Academy. With the help of a computer program developed by Veltman, the two researchers then completed the work that put the electroweak theory on a firm mathematical foundation. Veltman and 't Hooft used the knowledge immediately to identify the properties of the W and Z particles predicted by the electroweak theory. This enabled physicists to conduct the experiments with particle accelerators that eventually led to the particles' discovery. Likewise, physicists used the Veltman't Hooft method to predict the mass of the top quark and thus facilitated its discovery. The next great discovery from the research would probably be detection of the Higgs particle, whose existence the standard model also predicted. The Royal Academy said, however, that this might not occur until 2005, when a more powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, became operational. Michael Woods Prize for Physiology or Medicine The 1999 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Gnter Blobel, of the Rockefeller University, New York City, for discovering the cellular zip code, or address tag, system that enables proteins newly manufactured inside cells to find their proper destinations. Gnter Blobel's discovery has had an immense impact on modern cell biological research, said the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, which awards the medicine prize. It not only explained one of the most fundamental activities inside cells but also helped scientists understand the molecular basis of some hereditary diseases. A number of such diseases result from errors in a protein's address or in its transport to the proper site. They include cystic fibrosis and some forms of familiar hypercholesterolemia, a condition in which people produce extremely high levels of cholesterol. Blobel's research also contributed to the development of more effective ways of using cells as protein factories to produce human insulin, human growth hormone, and other drugs. An adult human has about 100 trillion cells, each composed of many individual units, or organelles. Separate compartments inside the cell, each organelle performs specialized functions essential for life. One organelle is the cell nucleus, which contains the genetic material DNA and its chemically encoded instructions for manufacturing proteins. Those instructions are used to make proteins in other organelles. Each cell contains about one billion protein molecules, which have a wide variety of specific functions. Some are used inside the cell as structural material for building new cell components. Others serve as enzymes that speed up biochemical reactions. Still other proteins must be transported to the cell membrane so they can be exported outside the cell to circulate in the blood to other parts of the body. Life and good health depend on the ability of each protein to reach the location inside or outside a cell where it is needed. For decades biologists did not understand two critical details of protein processinghow newly produced proteins are routed to their correct locations in a cell and how proteins pass through the tightly sealed membrane that surrounds each organelle. Blobel, a cellular and molecular biologist, solved both mysteries. He was born on May 21, 1936, in Waltersdorf, Silesia, Ger. (now Niegoslawice, Pol.), and received his medical degree at Eberhard-Karl University of Tbingen, Ger. He moved to the United States and in the late 1960s joined a renowned Rockefeller University protein laboratory then led by George Palade. Palade shared the 1974 Nobel medicine prize for his research into cell structure and transport of proteins. By 1980 Blobel had established the general principles of how proteins are targeted to specific organelles within a cell. Working in collaboration with other research groups, he conducted a series of what the Nobel Assembly described as elegant biochemical experiments. They showed that each protein carries an address code within its molecular structure, a signal sequence that directs it to the proper locale inside the cell. Proteins are made from chains of amino acids arranged in a very specific order or sequence. The address code consists of a sequence of amino acids, usually located at one end of the protein. The code specifies whether the protein will pass through the membrane of a specific organelle, become integrated into the membrane, or be exported out of the cell. Blobel also concluded that proteins enter organelles through a porelike channel that opens in the organelle's outer membrane when the correct protein arrives at the organelle. Researchers eventually showed that the same topography-based, or topogenic, signaling system exists in all other higher forms of life, including yeast, plant, and animal cells. Knowledge about the topogenic signals gave physicians important new insights into why diseases occur. If the signal in a protein is incorrect (owing to a defect in the DNA manufacturing instructions), the protein could end up in a wrong location in the cell. Such protein mistargeting is the reason why some hereditary diseases occur. The immune system also relies heavily on topogenic signals for proper functioning. Incorrect protein address tags can contribute to immune system disorders. The Nobel Assembly predicted that Blobel's discoveries would assume even greater practical importance in the future, with completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP). Information from the HGP, which was attempting to determine the location and structure of all human genes, would give scientists the ability to identify the topogenic signals in medically important proteins. This ability could open up new avenues for treating disease, such as developing drugs with a specific topogenic sequence; such drugs would be able to act on just one part of a cell. Michael Woods