Nobel Prize

PETR EBEN, 78 Czech composer Czech composer Petr Eben, whose wide variety of music has been performed around the globe, died Wednesday at his home in Prague, Czech Republic. He was battling an unspecified long-term illness. Mr. Eben showed musical talent at an early age. He was able to play piano at age 6 and organ at 9. A year later, he composed his first musical pieces. After World War II, during which he was interned by the Nazis in the Buchenwald concentration camp, he studied piano and composition at Prague's Academy of Music.

Orhan Pamuk. Elfriede Jelinek. Imre Kertesz. And ... J. K. Rowling? In recent years, the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to the first three authors on the preceding list. Heard of them or their books? Come on, be honest now. If you answered in the affirmative, congratulations on being a lover of obscure and unread literature. I want to state clearly that I have absolutely nothing against Mr. Pamuk, Ms. Jelinek or Mr. Kertesz. In fact, I'm thrilled for them. However, as a fellow author - one who is never going to be getting a call from anyone in Stockholm - I am disgusted with the elitist attitude of the academy's Nobel Prize nominating committee for literature.

THE YEAR in which Germany's capital moves back to Berlin and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder insists it is a great nation is the same year the Swedish Academy had to award the Nobel Prize in literature to Guenter Grass. He had been mentioned for 20 years."The Tin Drum," his breathtaking novel that cries out for honor, was published 40 years ago. Awarded to a living writer whose works have withstood the test of time, the Nobel Prize is for doing "something important" at a young age and living long afterward.

Dr. Daniel Nathans, the brilliant and reticent Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was regarded by many of his peers as the conscience of the Johns Hopkins University, died yesterday of leukemia at his home. He was 71.Proud and passionate about ideas, Dr. Nathans helped Hopkins sustain its sense of tradition during a time that brought wrenching changes to academic medical centers. In addition to teaching and conducting research, Dr. Nathans served the university as a valued adviser and interim president.

When Israel and Syria make peace, the butcher Assad should win the Nobel Prize.How about the Library of Congress pays the full $20 million it agreed for the M.L. King Jr. papers, not to his heirs but to legal services for the poor in former slave states?Now that the Ravens are winning games, they ought to pass a law saying this is still early October."Peanuts" forever!

Henry W. Kendall, 72, a Nobel Prize winner for physics for his work on the building blocks of matter and a co-founder of the anti-war group Union of Concerned Scientists, died Monday during an underwater photography dive in Wakulla Springs (Fla.) State Park.He was diving with a National Geographic magazine mapping team at the park when his body was found in shallow water, Wakulla County Sheriff's Capt. Gene McCarthy said. Investigators had not determined whether he died of a heart attack or encountered a problem in the water and drowned.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- He has won a Nobel Prize, says there are books he needs to write and is about to celebrate his 72nd birthday. So it came as something of a shock to Colombians when the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez recently bought a money-losing newsmagazine here and then promptly joined its reporting staff.To Garcia Marquez, the decision makes perfect sense. For years, he said, he had dreamed of using his Nobel Prize money to organize a newspaper, so when a group of young editors and reporters came to him with a proposal to buy and overhaul the newsweekly Cambio, he welcomed it as a chance to return to his first love.

A few months ago, Margaret E. Keck couldn't even spell Grawemeyer. Now she's won one.The Johns Hopkins University political science professor, who once wanted to write the great American novel, instead co-wrote a book judged to be one of the great "Ideas for Improving World Order," as the prize is called.As a result, she gets $100,000, half of a little-known but lucrative award named after H. Charles Grawemeyer, the Louisville, Ky., businessman who endowed it with $9 million in 1987.Keck and Kathryn Sikkink of the University of Minnesota won the $200,000 prize for "Activists Beyond Borders," a look at how nongovernmental organizations -- advocacy groups of various kinds -- have ridden the information highway to an increasingly important role on the international political stage.

Placing them in a select group of talented young scientists, two high school seniors from Howard County and two from Montgomery County have been named finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.Josh Greene, 17, of Oakland Mills High, and Sabyasachi Guharay, 17, of Wilde Lake High, each will each receive at least $1,000. One could receive as much as $40,000 if awarded the first-place prize.Perhaps more important, the highly competitive award is a flattering resume-booster for young scientists preparing for college.

Running is the way Joyce Carol Oates aerates her imagination, one of the most fertile in America. An hour each day in fall, two hours in summer, she winds through the streets near her house outside Princeton, N.J., opening her mind for new seed.It must work. Look what Oates is doing this fall:In October she published a collection of 27 tales of the grotesque. Her article on a fictionalized male writer who mistreats women appears in the current issue of Playboy. On her desk is a proof of the novel she will publish in July.

Carol W. Greider, who on Monday became the 33rd person associated with the Johns Hopkins University to win the Nobel Prize, is a triathlete, a mother of two and a methodical and modest genetic researcher who colleagues say shuns publicity in favor of pursuing her passion: fundamental, curiosity-driven science. Greider's breakthrough that won the ultimate scientific honor dates back two decades. During that time she has been catapulted to the top of her field - showered with grants, accolades and coveted prizes.

JEAN DAUSSET, 92 Nobel Prize winner Jean Dausset, a Nobel Prize-winning French immunologist and pioneer behind organ transplants and mapping of the human genome, died of natural causes June 6 in a hospital on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the French Health Ministry said. Dr. Dausset's discovery in 1958 of the human leucocyte antigen (HLA) tissue system allowed doctors to verify compatibility between donor and receiver for an organ transplant. Dr. Dausset was born in Toulouse on Oct. 19, 1916.

American, 2 Japanese share Nobel Prize STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Two Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for discoveries that help explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter. American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, two French researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for their role in that scientific breakthrough. Perhaps more notable than who won the award is who did not: Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the University of Maryland virologist who has long been credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus and whose early work led to a blood test for HIV that is believed to have saved millions of lives.

When the University of Maryland's medical school wanted to raise its profile in the burgeoning field of genomics, officials recruited one of the world's leading experts - and her 60-member team. When the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center saw a hole in its program dealing with public health preparedness and bioterrorism, its officials thought big too - and lured an entire institute of researchers then at the Johns Hopkins University. For others on the hunt for talent, the goal might be young researchers - preferably those with scientific credentials validated by a major grant underwriting their work.

PETR EBEN, 78 Czech composer Czech composer Petr Eben, whose wide variety of music has been performed around the globe, died Wednesday at his home in Prague, Czech Republic. He was battling an unspecified long-term illness. Mr. Eben showed musical talent at an early age. He was able to play piano at age 6 and organ at 9. A year later, he composed his first musical pieces. After World War II, during which he was interned by the Nazis in the Buchenwald concentration camp, he studied piano and composition at Prague's Academy of Music.

Dr. Peter Agre, the 2003 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, is returning to the Johns Hopkins University after two years at Duke University to lead Hopkins' high-profile fight against malaria. Agre, 59, will be director of the Malaria Research Institute at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Agre said he was returning largely for the malaria challenge. "I'm really excited about this," he said yesterday. "Taking the malaria job is something I've been very eager to do." The return is also a vindication of sorts for Hopkins, whose administration drew criticism for not doing enough to keep Agre when he left for Duke.

Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, yesterday won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.

Orhan Pamuk. Elfriede Jelinek. Imre Kertesz. And ... J. K. Rowling? In recent years, the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to the first three authors on the preceding list. Heard of them or their books? Come on, be honest now. If you answered in the affirmative, congratulations on being a lover of obscure and unread literature. I want to state clearly that I have absolutely nothing against Mr. Pamuk, Ms. Jelinek or Mr. Kertesz. In fact, I'm thrilled for them. However, as a fellow author - one who is never going to be getting a call from anyone in Stockholm - I am disgusted with the elitist attitude of the academy's Nobel Prize nominating committee for literature.

For 12-year-old Roger Kornberg, it was just an annoying commotion in the middle of the night. He had been roused from sleep with the news that his father Arthur, a Stanford University professor, had just won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Yesterday, it was his turn to wake his father in the middle of the night. Kornberg, like his father a faculty member of the Stanford University School of Medicine, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. "I was simply stunned; there are no other words," said the 59-year-old scientist of the 2:30 a.m. call from Sweden informing him that he was the sole recipient of the $1.37 million prize.