2007 Nobel Prize Announcements

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Prize Announcements

The 2007 Nobel Prizes in Economics, Peace, Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine and Ig-Nobel Prizes have been announced!

While you're here, why not also read about past winners.

N.B. The time of the announcement is given in Stockholm time (Central European Time); subtract 6 hours to get the US Eastern Daylight Time).


    Date: Monday, October 15, 2007 (13:00 CEST at the earliest)
    Prize: ECONOMICS
    Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
    And the prize goes to...

    Leonid Hurwicz , Eric S. Maskin , and Roger B. Myerson

    "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".


    Date: Friday, October 12, 2007 (11:00 a.m. CEST)
    Prize: PEACE
    Awarding institution: The Norwegian Nobel Institute
    And the prizes go to...

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

    "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".


    Date: Thursday, October 11, 2007 (13:00 p.m. CEST. at the earliest)
    Prize: LITERATURE
    Awarding institution: The Swedish Academy
    And the prize goes to...

    Doris Lessing

    "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".


    Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 (11:45 a.m. CEST at the earliest)
    Prize: CHEMISTRY
    Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
    And the prize goes to...

    Gerhard Ertl

    "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces".


    Date: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 (11:45 a.m. CEST at the earliest)
    Prize: PHYSICS
    Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
    And the prizes go to... Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg

    "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance".


    Date: Monday, October 8, 2007 (11:30 a.m. CEST at the earliest)
    Prize: PHYSIOLOGY or MEDICINE
    Awarding institution: The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute
    And the prizes go to...

    Mario R. Capecchi , Sir Martin J. Evans , and Oliver Smithies

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


    Date: Thursday, October 5, 2007 (7:30 pm EDT)
    Prize: IG NOBEL PRIZES
    Awarding institution: The Annals of Improbable Research
    And the winners are:

    MEDICINE:
    Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
    REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer

    PHYSICS:
    L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
    REFERENCES:"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.
    "Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.
    "Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.

    BIOLOGY:
    Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
    REFERENCES: "Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.
    "Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.
    "Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.
    "A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk

    CHEMISTRY:
    Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
    REFERENCE: "Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto, International Medical Center of Japan.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto
    PRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

    LINGUISTICS:
    Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
    REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video

    LITERATURE:
    Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
    REFERENCE: "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Glenda Browne

    PEACE:
    The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
    REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

    NUTRITION:
    Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
    REFERENCE: "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North, Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.
    Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.
    WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Wansink.

    ECONOMICS:
    Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
    REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."

    AVIATION:
    Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
    REFERENCE: "Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9. WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Diego A. Golombek


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