The 2005 Nobel Prize for Peace was shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. The announcement, made on October 7, noted, “At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation. This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its director general.” The award was made 60 years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, by the U.S. during World War II, the fourth time a major anniversary of the bombings had been marked with the peace prize. It was the 12th prize for the United Nations or an affiliated agency.
The IAEA, an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Vienna and linked to the UN, was established in 1957. It grew out of recommendations made by U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1953 speech, “Atoms for Peace,” before the UN. The agency promoted peaceful applications of atomic energy and also worked to prevent its use for military purposes. It gradually came to take an active role in attempts to prevent nuclear proliferation, with efforts first centred on Iraq and The Sudan, in which cases the agency claimed success, and later on North Korea and Iran. The committee remarked, “At a time when disarmament efforts appear deadlocked, when there is a danger that nuclear arms will spread both to states and to terrorist groups, and when nuclear power again appears to be playing an increasingly significant role, IAEA’s work is of incalculable importance.”
Mohamed ElBaradei was born in Cairo on June 17, 1942. His father, a lawyer, was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. The son received a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Cairo in 1962 and a doctorate in international law from New York University in 1974. During the 1960s he was a member of the Egyptian diplomatic corps, twice serving on missions to the UN in New York City and in Geneva. From 1974 to 1978 ElBaradei was assistant to Egypt’s foreign minister. In 1981 he became a senior fellow in charge of the International Law Program at the UN Institute for Training and Research, and he was an adjunct professor in international law (1981–87) at New York University. ElBaradei became a member of the IAEA secretariat in 1984, working as counsel and, beginning in 1993, as assistant director general for external relations. Appointed director general of the agency in 1997, he was reappointed to a second term in 2001 and, despite opposition from the U.S., to a third term in 2005.
Although ElBaradei sometimes took a tough stance toward uncooperative governments, he was also known as an advocate of patient diplomacy. In 2002 he challenged U.S. claims, correctly as it turned out, that Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein had restarted a nuclear program, and he resisted U.S. efforts to impose sanctions on Iran. In response to the announcement that he had been given the award, he said, “The prize recognizes the role of multilateralism in resolving all of the challenges we are facing today. It will strengthen my resolve and that of my colleagues to continue to speak truth to power.”
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded in 2005 to Robert J. Aumann of Israel and American Thomas C. Schelling for their respective contributions to the greater “understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.” The results of their separate work on game theory—or interactive decision theory—facilitated the development of noncooperative game theory to explain why some groups and countries are able to cooperate while others are in conflict. This widened the theory’s application throughout the social sciences.
Aumann employed a mathematical approach to show that long-term social interaction could be analyzed by using formal noncooperative game theory. Through his methodologies and analyses of so-called infinitely repeated games, he identified the outcomes that could be sustained in long-term relations and demonstrated the prerequisites for cooperation in situations where there are many participants, infrequent interaction, or the potential for a break off in relations and when participants’ actions lack transparency. Aumann also extended game theory with his investigation into its cognitive foundations. He showed that peaceful cooperation is attainable in a repeated game even when the short-term interests of the parties are in conflict. Aumann’s repeated game theory was applied in analyses ranging from business cartels and farming cooperatives to international territorial disputes.
Schelling extended the use of game theory to assist in the resolution of conflict and avoidance of wars. In the mid-1950s the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union prompted him to apply game-theory methods to global security and the arms race. He published his results in The Strategy of Conflict (1960), which became a classic. In seeking to ascertain how nuclear powers might successfully deter each other, Schelling focused on ways in which the negotiating power of the parties could be affected by such factors as the initial alternatives available to them and their ability to influence the employable alternatives in the negotiating process. He concluded that uncertain retaliation is more credible and efficient than certain retaliation and argued that a country’s best defense against nuclear war is the protection of its weapons rather than its people because a government needs to demonstrate the ability to respond to a nuclear attack. In contrast to Aumann, Schelling’s strength lay in his ability to generate new ideas and concepts without emphasizing the underlying mathematical techniques.
Aumann was born on June 8, 1930, in Frankfurt am Main, Ger., and immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1938. He was educated at the City College of New York (B.S., 1950) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1955), followed by postdoctoral work at Princeton University. In 1956 he moved to Israel, where he served on the mathematics faculty at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, as an instructor (1956–58), lecturer (1958–64), associate professor (1964–68), professor (1968–2001), and professor emeritus (from 2001). He also held visiting professorships at various American universities. Aumann was on the editorial and advisory boards of several academic journals, notably International Journal of Game Theory (from 1971), Journal of Mathematical Economics (from 1974), and Games and Economic Behaviour (from 1989). He received the Israel Prize in Economics in 1994. Aumann was the author of six books and nearly 100 scientific papers, including What Is Game Theory Trying to Accomplish? (1985).
Schelling was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, Calif., and studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1944), and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1951). He began his career working for the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (1945–46), the Marshall Plan in Europe (1948–50), and the Executive Office of the President (1951–53). He then taught economics at Yale University (1953–58), Harvard (1958–90), where he was named Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1969, and the University of Maryland (1990–2003). He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Economic Association (president, 1991). In addition to his work on military strategy and arms control, Schelling wrote on such varied topics as energy and environmental policy, terrorism, racial integration, and health policy. His books included Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978) and Choice and Consequence (1984).
British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature for work of insight and originality that “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” The author of more than 30 plays, Pinter was also an accomplished actor, director, poet, and writer for radio, television, and film. In addition, he was an outspoken and often controversial activist in defense of human rights. He had emerged as part of the “new wave” of postwar dramatists responsible for the renaissance of British theatre in the late 1950s and ’60s, but he developed independently from his contemporaries and represented a distinct and provocative voice in contemporary theatre. As a playwright Pinter used the stage as a means to explore the anguish of the human condition through a personal mode of language and situation that came to be commonly regarded as “Pinteresque.”
Pinter was born on Oct. 10, 1930, in Hackney, a working-class section in the East End of London. He was the son of a Jewish tailor and early in childhood experienced the social and cultural ramifications of anti-Semitism. At the outbreak of World War II, he left London and lived from 1939 to 1942 in Cornwall. Pinter returned to London when he was 12 years old, and he left school at age 16. He decided to pursue an acting career and received a grant in 1948 to study in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; he later continued his studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1951 Pinter began acting with regional and provincial touring companies, performing in the 1950s under the stage name David Baron. Pinter published his first poems in the early 1950s and debuted as a dramatist with his one-act play The Room, performed in 1957 at the University of Bristol’s Drama Studio. The play introduced the thematic elements and emotional intensity that defined Pinter’s methodology and artistic sensibility, juxtaposing the known with the unknown and the mundane with the inexplicable. Within the parameters of their confined space, his characters vie with each other for position and control, searching for relevance and identity in an atmosphere pervaded by uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence.
Audiences were generally unprepared for Pinter’s form of drama, and critical reaction to his early so-called comedies of menace ranged from consternation and confusion to disregard and rejection. His first full-length play, The Birthday Party, opened in Cambridge in 1958 and then transferred to the West End in London. Though the play was almost uniformly panned by reviewers (it closed after one week), it was later recognized as one of Pinter’s most celebrated and enduring accomplishments as a dramatist. His second full-length play and first commercial success was The Caretaker (1960; filmed 1963 [released in the U.S. as The Guest]), for which he received the Evening Standard Award for best play.
Following The Homecoming (1965; filmed 1973), often cited as his most compelling work for the stage, Pinter entered a period of experimentation with plays such as Landscape and Silence (produced jointly in 1969), Old Times (1971), Monologue (1973), and Betrayal (1978; filmed 1983). After the overthrow (1973) of Chile’s Pres. Salvador Allende, Pinter became increasingly politicized as a writer. Later plays with social and political implications included One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (2000). He became a vocal critic of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies and campaigned against a broad range of issues: the persecution and imprisonment of dissident writers, Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, Turkish treatment of the Kurds, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Pinter’s screenplay for The Servant (1963), adapted from Robin Maughman’s novel, earned him Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and New York Film Critics Circle awards. His critical reputation was further enhanced by The Pumpkin Eater (1964), which received the BAFTA Award for best screenplay; Accident (1967), which shared the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Grand Prize; and The Go-Between (1970), which won the Grand Prize at Cannes. Later film adaptations included The Last Tycoon (1976), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Turtle Diary (1985), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and The Trial (1993).
Pinter received the Laurence Olivier Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre in 1996. He was made CBE in 1966 and in 2002 was appointed Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 1980 Pinter married his second wife, the novelist and historian Antonia Fraser.
The 2005 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three scientists—one French and two American—who developed metathesis, one of the most important types of chemical reactions used in organic chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the $1.3 million award to Yves Chauvin, honorary research director of the French Institute of Petroleum in Rueil-Malmaison, France; Robert H. Grubbs, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech); and Richard R. Schrock, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The term metathesis comes from the Greek words meta (“change”) and thesis (“position”). In metathesis, substances called catalysts create and break double carbon bonds of organic molecules in a way that causes different groups of atoms in the molecules to change places with one another. (A catalyst promotes chemical reactions that otherwise would not take place or would occur very slowly.) The shift of groups of atoms from their original position to a new location yields new molecules with new properties. With the development of metathesis, the academy said, “fantastic opportunities have been created for producing many new molecules.” The academy also cited many useful products that had been made through metathesis, including advanced plastics, fuel additives, agents to control harmful plants and insects, and new drugs for medical conditions such as osteoporosis and arthritis.
Researchers in the chemical industry discovered metathesis in the 1950s. They found that various catalysts could be used to carry out metathesis reactions, although the initial catalysts did not work well. Since the scientists did not understand how the catalysts worked at a molecular level, the hunt for better catalysts was purely a hit-and-miss endeavour or, as the academy put it, “fumbling in the dark.”
Chauvin, a French chemist, was born on Oct. 10, 1930. He spent most of his career conducting chemical research at the French Institute of Petroleum and was a member of the Academy of Sciences in France. In 1970 he achieved a breakthrough when he described the mechanism by which a metal atom bound to a carbon atom in one group of atoms causes the group to shift places with a group of atoms in another molecule. Although the catalyst starts the chemical reaction in which two new carbon-carbon bonds are formed, it comes away from the chemical reaction unaffected and ready to start the reaction again. Chauvin’s work showed how metathesis could take place, but its practical application required the development of new catalysts.
Schrock, born on Jan. 4, 1945, in Berne, Ind., received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1971 and joined the faculty of MIT in 1975. He systematically tested catalysts that contained tantalum, tungsten, or other metals in an effort to understand which metals could be used and how they worked. In a major advance in 1990, Schrock and his associates reported the development of a group of efficient metathesis catalysts that used the metal molybdenum. The new catalysts, however, were sensitive to the effects of air and water, which reduced their activity.
Grubbs was born on Feb. 27, 1942, near Possum Trot, Ky. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University, New York City, in 1968 and joined the faculty of Caltech in 1978. In 1992, while furthering research on metathesis, Grubbs and his associates reported the discovery of a catalyst that contained the metal ruthenium. It was stable in air and worked on the double carbon bonds in a molecule selectively, without disrupting the bonds between other atoms in the molecule. The new catalyst also had the ability to jump-start metathesis reactions in the presence of water, alcohols, and carboxyl acids.
The academy pointed out that many other researchers had also made important contributions to the field. As scientists sought to develop new metathesis catalysts for specific applications, research in the field continued to be very active. One area of research was the synthesis of compounds found in nature that had potential commercial use in medicine or other fields. Such “natural products” usually had very complex structures and were very difficult to make in the laboratory. “Considering the relatively short time Schrock’s and Grubbs’s catalysts have been available, it is remarkable to note the breadth of applications they have found,” the academy said.
The academy also noted that the catalysts for metathesis had played a role in the development of “green chemistry”—the design of chemical processes and products in which the need for and the generation of various hazardous substances was reduced or eliminated. Metathesis catalysts had been used in the development of reactions for synthesizing chemical compounds that were more efficient and required fewer steps, fewer ingredients, and smaller quantities of ingredients. The reactions were simpler because they worked at ordinary temperatures and pressures, and they were more environmentally friendly because they used noninjurious solvents and produced less-hazardous waste products.
Two Americans and a German won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics for their contributions to the field of optics, the branch of physics that deals with the physical properties of light and its interactions with matter. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave one-half of the $1.3 million prize to Roy J. Glauber, a professor of physics at Harvard University. The other half was shared by John L. Hall, a fellow of JILA (a research institute operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] and the University of Colorado at Boulder), and Theodor W. Hänsch, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and a professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.
Glauber was born in New York City on Sept. 1, 1925. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and briefly conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., and at the California Institute of Technology before he returned to Harvard in 1952. Glauber was cited by the academy for his development of a theory that advanced the understanding of light by describing the behaviour of light particles (light quanta, or photons). The theory, presented by Glauber in the early 1960s, merged the field of optics with quantum physics (which deals with the behaviour of matter on the atomic and subatomic scales), and it formed the basis for the development of a new field, quantum optics. Glauber’s work helped clarify how light had both wavelike and particlelike characteristics and explained the fundamental differences between the light emitted by hot objects, such as electric light bulbs, and the light emitted by lasers. (Hot sources of light emit incoherent light, which consists of many different frequencies and phases, whereas lasers emit coherent light, light with a uniform frequency and phase.) Practical applications of Glauber’s work included the development of highly secure codes in the field known as quantum cryptography. His work also had a central role in efforts to develop the new generation of computers, so-called quantum computers, which would be extraordinarily fast and powerful and use quantum-mechanical phenomena to process data as qubits, or quantum bits, of information.
Hall was born in Denver in 1934. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1961 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, and joined JILA in the National Bureau of Standards (which later became the NIST) later that year. Hänsch was born Oct. 30, 1941, in Heidelberg, Ger., and he received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1969. In awarding Hall and Hänsch the Nobel Prize, the academy specifically cited their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy, the use of lasers to determine the frequency (colour) of light emitted by atoms and molecules. A focus of their careers had been to make precise frequency measurements. In the 1980s it led to very precise measurements of the speed of light in a vacuum (299,792,458 m per second), and as a consequence the metre, the fundamental unit of length in the International System of Units, was redefined in terms of the speed of light. Despite such advances, it was very difficult to measure optical frequencies (frequencies of visible light). It required a procedure, called an optical frequency chain, to relate them to the output frequencies of an atomic clock and was so complex that it could be performed in only a few laboratories. The optical frequency comb technique, in which ultrashort pulses of laser light create a set of precisely spaced frequency peaks that resemble the evenly spaced teeth of a hair comb, proved a practical way of obtaining optical frequency measurements to an accuracy of 15 digits, or one part in one quadrillion. Hänsch originated the idea for the technique in the late 1970s, but it took until 2000 for Hänsch, with key contributions by Hall, to work out the details. Their success soon led to the development of commercial devices with which very precise optical frequency measurements could readily be made.
Practical applications of the work of Hall and Hänsch included the development of very accurate clocks, improved satellite-based navigation systems such as the Global Positioning System, and the synchronization of computer data networks. Their work was also used by physicists to verify Einstein’s theory of special relativity to very high levels of precision and to test whether the values of fundamental physical constants related to optical frequencies were indeed constant or changed slightly over time.
Two Australian scientists who discovered that stomach ulcers are an infectious disease caused by bacteria shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize, termed the discovery by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren “remarkable and unexpected.” Marshall was a senior principal research fellow at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands. Warren was retired from the Royal Perth (Australia) Hospital.
Before Marshall and Warren discovered the role of the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, physicians believed that peptic ulcers (sores in the stomach lining) were caused by an excess of gastric acid that was released in the stomach as the result of emotional stress, the ingestion of spicy foods, or other factors. Peptic ulcers cause pain, nausea, and—if they begin to bleed—even more serious problems. The standard treatment had included antacid medicines, hospital bed rest, and a diet in which large amounts of milk and cream were used to soothe the stomach. Some patients underwent surgery to remove parts of the stomach. Although the treatments often gave patients temporary relief, stomach pain and other symptoms often returned and caused life-long problems. “Thanks to the pioneering discovery by Marshall and Warren, peptic ulcer disease is no longer a chronic, frequently disabling condition but a disease that can be cured by a short regimen of antibiotics and acid-secretion inhibitors,” said the citation from the Karolinska Institute.
Warren was born June 11, 1937, in Adelaide, S.Aus. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Adelaide in 1961 and worked at several hospitals before he began working in 1968 as a pathologist at Royal Perth Hospital, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. In 1979 he first observed the presence of spiral-shaped bacteria in a biopsy of the stomach lining from a patient. It defied the conventional wisdom that bacteria could not survive in the highly acidic environment of the stomach. Many scientists in Australia and other countries dismissed his reports on the topic as impossible, but his research during the next two years showed that the bacteria were often in stomach tissue and almost always in association with gastritis (an inflammation of the stomach lining).
Marshall was born Sept. 30, 1951, in Kalgoorlie, W.Aus. He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Australia in 1974. He worked (1977–84) at Royal Perth Hospital and later taught medicine at the University of Western Australia. While a young staff member in Perth Hospital’s gastroenterology department in 1981, Marshall became interested in Warren’s research, and the two began working together to pin down the clinical significance of the bacteria. After they developed a way to grow the bacteria in laboratory culture dishes, Warren and Marshall identified the microbe as a new species. They conducted a study of stomach biopsies from 100 patients that systematically showed that the bacteria were present in almost all patients with gastritis, duodenal ulcer, or gastric ulcer. On the basis of the findings, Warren and Marshall proposed that H. pylori was involved in causing those diseases.
Physicians were skeptical that peptic ulcer disease could be an infectious condition and clung to the traditional treatments for the disease. Marshall and Warren persisted in their research and continued to gather evidence. At one point Marshall chose to become his own guinea pig in what was one of the most notable instances of self-experimentation in the history of medicine. Deciding that the best way to prove their findings was to show exactly what happened when a person was infected with H. pylori, Marshall drank a culture of the bacterium. Within a week he began suffering stomach pain and other symptoms of acute gastritis. Stomach biopsies confirmed that he did have gastritis and showed that the affected areas of his stomach were infected with H. pylori. Marshall then took antibiotics and was cured.
The research solved the long-standing puzzle of why peptic ulcers often returned after traditional treatment. Bland diets and antacids reduced stomach acidity and allowed inflamed areas of the stomach lining to heal, but the bacteria responsible for the inflammation remained and were able to cause new bouts of inflammation. Studies showed that H. pylori infected the stomachs of at least 50% of the world’s population. Although most people never experienced symptoms, 10–15% eventually developed stomach ulcers or gastritis. Infection also put people at higher risk of stomach cancer. Genetic differences were believed to influence who developed peptic ulcer disease. “The discovery that one of the most common diseases of mankind, peptic ulcer disease, has a microbial cause has stimulated the search for microbes as possible causes of other chronic inflammatory diseases,” the Karolinska Institute noted in its citation. Researchers had evidence that bacterial infections might be involved in conditions ranging from arthritis to atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging disease that underlay most heart attacks and many strokes.