Who are the 2007 Nobel Prize Winners?

There are other awards and honours which can be earned by scientists – but the Nobel Prize is the best known. It’s like the Academy Awards of Science.

A month from now, on Dec 10th, eleven people and one organisation will be awarded Nobel Prizes in recognition of their contributions in various fields and activities.

The prize is awarded annually on the anniversary of the death of it’s founder, Alfred Nobel in 1896. It’s fairly well known that Nobel, who funded the prize with the bulk of his estate upon his death, was the inventor of dynamite.

In his will, Alfred Nobel asked that the bank interest on the funds he made available (US$ 4.2 million in 1896) would be ‘…annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.’ He went on to define the prize categories for achievements in medicine, literature, physics, chemistry and a peace prize. The Prize in Economics was instituted by the Bank of Sweden in 1968.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

The 2007 Peace Prize will be shared between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based in Geneva, Switzerland and United States businessman, environmental activist and former vice-president, Al Gore.

The Nobel committee were motivated in their decision by their belief that signs of change in the Earth’s climate have potential consequences too serious to not take seriously. Not only could weather change drastically, but so might growing seasons, temperature, shipping routes, access to resources and many others. During an interview in 1999, Klaus Toepfer, director-general of the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that growing regional populations which do not have a corresponding increase in drinking water will result in wars.

The IPCC has managed a massive collaboration between scientists and governments to help bring about an informed scientific awareness and broad agreement regarding the human contribution to a changing climate. Al Gore is mentioned in the Peace Prize press release as ‘…probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine

"for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells"

The Prize in Medicine is shared by three people, Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah USA, Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University UK and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill USA.

Collaborating on different aspects of the process, three scientists have discovered techniques to produce what are called ‘knockout mice’. These aren’t rodents which will make your cat cower in terror – or wait by the door like muggers for you to return from grocery shopping! The term ‘knockout’ refers to a process by which specific mouse genes have been de-activated, or knocked out. Capecchi, Evans and Smithie started off with changing the genetic information in single cells. Later, their technique matured to allow the injection of a genetically modified mouse embroyonic stem cell into a mouse blastocyst, which is then implanted into a surrogate mouse mother – and the embryo begins to develop. The resulting mice can have genes either ‘knocked out’ or added in.

Since the late 1980’s research labs have used ‘knock out’ mice to study the function of specific genes in these mice. As humans and mice share much of the same DNA genetic structure, this research is exteremely valuable for discovering causes and cures of many human genetic diseases.

Read on for the 2007 Nobel Prizes in Physics, Literature, Chemistry and Economics