Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2008. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - December 10, 2008
Amid traditional pomp and circumstance, Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf handed out the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.2 million) awards in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and economics in Stockholm.
The Nobel Peace Prize was presented at a separate ceremony in Norway to Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, for decades of peace work, including a 2005 deal that ended fighting between the Indonesian government and Aceh rebels.
Five Europeans, four Americans and three Japanese were singled out by the Nobel committees when the 2008 prizes were announced in October.
The 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel stipulates that the prizes, first awarded in 1901, should be given to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
The Swedish Academy continued a trend of honoring European writers by selecting Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio for the literature award. The author of more than 40 works including "The Book of Flights" and "Desert," Le Clezio holds dual nationality with Mauritius and spends much of his time in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
"Your work is a story of migration; you are yourself are a nomad of the world," Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, said in presenting the award.
The medicine prize jury cited French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983. They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
Japan's Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the chemistry prize for discovering and developing a fluorescent protein. Their work has helped researchers track such processes as the development of brain cells, the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer cells.
Japanese scientists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa split the physics award with American Yoichiro Nambu for theoretical advances that help explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter. Nambu, 87, canceled his trip to Stockholm for health reasons and was set to receive his award at a ceremony in Chicago.
U.S. economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect international trade patterns. The prize is not one of the original Nobels, but was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory.
In a speech to hundreds of guests at a banquet following the prize ceremony, Krugman recalled getting the call from the Nobel award committee and thinking it was an "elaborate practical joke."
But as reality sank in "what I felt was not pride but a sense of astonished humility," he said.
The prizes - including a diploma and a gold medal - are handed out Dec. 10 to mark the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. The inventor of dynamite died in San Remo, a link that the Italian city marks by sending flowers to the ceremony.
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