The 2007 awards — each worth $1.5 million — are being announced through Oct. 15 and will be handed out by Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
All but one of the prizes were established in the will of Nobel, who earned his fortune developing dynamite. The economics award was established by Sweden's central bank in 1968."; NobelWinners[i++] = new Array("","Peace","Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ","http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/071012/071012_gore_hsmall_230a.standard.jpg","","", "", "", "", "", "right", "", "", "100", "148", "", "", "", "", ""); NobelWinners[i-1].body = "Ex-Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”
He said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization devoted to conveying the urgency of solving the climate crisis.
“His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change,” the Nobel citation said. “He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”
It cited Gore’s awareness at an early stage “of the climatic challenges the world is facing.
Gore, 59, has said he does not plan to run for president next year, despite a national movement to draft him, and Peace Prize committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said a possible run was not his concern.
“I want this prize to have everyone ... every human being, asking what they should do,” Mjoes said. “What he (Gore) decides to do from here is his personal decision.”
The last American to win the prize, or share it, was former President Carter in 2002.
The committee cited the Panel on Climate Change for two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”
Members of the panel, a network of 2,000 scientists, were surprised that it was chosen to share the honor with Gore, a spokeswoman said.
“We would have been happy even if he had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue,” spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante said.
The panel forecast this year that all regions of the world will be affected by climate warming and that a third of the Earth’s species will vanish if global temperatures continue to rise until they are 3.6 degrees above the average temperature in the 1980s and ’90s.
Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this year. The U.N. climate panel has been releasing reports, talks on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate are set to resume and on Europe’s northern fringe, where the awards committee works, there is growing concern about the melting Arctic.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.”
The committee often uses the coveted prize to cast the global spotlight on a relatively little-known person or cause. Since Gore already has a high profile some had doubted that the committee would bestow the prize on him “because he does not need it.”
In recent years, the committee has broadened the interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts outlined by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in creating the prize with his 1895 will. The prize now often also recognizes human rights, democracy, elimination of poverty, sharing resources and the environment.
Two of the past three prizes have been untraditional, with the 2004 award to Kenya environmentalist Wangari Maathai and last year’s award to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which makes to micro-loans to the country’s poor.
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NobelWinners[i++] = new Array("","Medicine","Mario Capecchi","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/071011/071011_Mario_Capecchi_nobel.htease.jpg","","", "", "", "", "", "right", "Ho", "Reuters", "110", "88", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
NobelWinners[i-1].body = "Two American scientists, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Martin Evans were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing a technology known as gene targeting. The groundbreaking and widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.
The first mice with genes manipulated in this way were announced in 1989. More than 10,000 different genes in mice have been studied in this way, the Nobel committee said. That's about half the genes the rodents have.
\"Gene targeting has pervaded all fields of biomedicine. Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come,\" the award citation said.
Capecchi's work has uncovered the roles of genes involved in organ development in mammals, the committee said. Evans has developed strains of gene-altered mice to study cystic fibrosis, and Smithies has created strains to study such conditions as high blood pressure and heart disease.
Capecchi, 70, who was born in Italy, is at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Smithies, 82, born in Britain, is at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Evans is at Cardiff University in England.
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NobelWinners[i++] = new Array("","Literature","Doris Lessing","http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/071011/071011_lessing_vsmall_420a.vsmall.jpg","","", "", "", "", "", "right", "Alonso Gonzalez", "Reuters file", "185", "148", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
NobelWinners[i-1].body = "Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature.
Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, was the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for “The Golden Notebook” and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric.
She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.”
A largely self-taught author who ended formal schooling at age 13, Lessing has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, exploring the divide between whites and blacks, most notably in 1950’s “The Grass Is Singing,” which examined the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. The academy called it “both a tragedy based in love-hatred and study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.”
A prolific author even in her 80s, Lessing was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran. Her many works include short stories, essays and such novels as “The Good Terrorist” and “Martha Quest,” the latter part of her semi-autobiographical “Children Of Violence” series.
But to millions she is known for “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962 and still a feminist classic although Lessing does not consider the book a political statement.
“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.
Lessing was also cited for her “vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life, noting such recent works as “Mara and Dann” and its sequel, “The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog,” published in 2005.
A seasoned traveler of the world, Lessing has known many homes, from Persia to Zimbabwe to South Africa to London, where she lives on a quiet block in a neighborhood long favored by artists and intellectuals.
Like other recent Nobel winners, Lessing has a history of political controversy. Because of her criticism of the South Africa’s former apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s who later rejected leftist ideology, had been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons.
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NobelWinners[i++] = new Array("","Physics","Albert Fert","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/071011/071011_Albert_Fert_nobel.htease.jpg","","", "", "", "", "", "right", "Yoan Valat", "EPA", "99", "148", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
NobelWinners[i-1].body = "France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.
Gadgets from powerful laptops to iPods owe their existence to the discovery.
The pair were recognized for revealing a physical effect called giant magnetoresistance.
\"It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years,\" the academy said in a statement.
Giant magnetoresistance -- GMR for short -- works through a large electrical response to a tiny magnetic input.
When atoms are laid down on a hard disk in ultra-thin layers, they interact differently than when spread out more. This makes it possible to pack more data on disks.
Fert, 69, and Gruenberg, 68, figured out how to stack nanometer-thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic atoms to produce the GMR effect.
\"The story of the GMR effect is a very good demonstration of how a totally unexpected scientific discovery can give rise to completely new technologies and commercial products,\" the Nobel committee wrote.
It works because of a property called spin. Electrons -- the charged particles within atoms -- \"spin\" in different directions under various circumstances, producing the changes in resistance that are used to store data.
\"It is the thing that has made iPods possible and anything that requires lots of data storage, like YouTube,\" said Chris Marrows, a physicist at Leeds University who specializes in a branch of technology known as spintronics.
Thanks to advances based on GMR, a typical laptop computer now holds about 100 gigabytes of data. That is equal to the information contained in a kilometer-long (3,280-foot) bookshelf, roughly an entire library floor of academic journals.
Ben Murdin, a physics professor at the University of Surrey in southeast England, described the technology as something practically out of a work of science fiction.
\"A computer hard disk reader that uses a GMR sensor is equivalent to a jet flying at a speed of 30,000 kilometers (19,500 miles) per hour ... at a height of just one meter above the ground, and yet being able to see and catalogue every single blade of grass it passes over,\" Murdin said.
Fert and Gruenberg each made the discovery independently of the other. They shared the 2007 Japan Prize for their work.
As Nobel physics laureates, the two join the ranks of some of the greatest names in science, including Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr and Wilhelm Rontgen. Rontgen won the first prize in 1901 for discovering X-rays.
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NobelWinners[i++] = new Array("","Chemistry","Gerhard Ertl","http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/071011/071011_Gerhard_Ertl_nobel.htease.jpg","","", "", "", "", "", "right", "Tobias Schwarz", "Reuters", "100", "148", "#000000", "", "", "", "");
NobelWinners[i-1].body = "Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding questions such as how pollution eats away at the ozone layer.
Ertl’s research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhaust and even why even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
His work has paved the way for development of cleaner energy sources and will guide the development of fuel cells, said Astrid Graslund, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
The academy said Ertl provided a detailed description of how chemical reactions take place on surfaces and studied some of the most fundamental mysteries in that field.
Ertl showed how to obtain reliable results in this difficult area of research, and his findings applied in both academic studies and industrial development, the academy said.
“Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere,” the award citation said.
Ertl, 71, is an emeritus professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin.
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