Nobel Prize

As a Boy Scout in my native Minnesota, Augusts were spent paddling in the wilderness canoe area at the U.S.-Canada border west of Lake Superior -- a vast, watery expanse that fueled my imagination. As an adult, I have continued this canoeing tradition with my family, and we have taken trips farther into Canada. But my lifelong fantasy -- formed long before I ever thought to become a scientist or dreamed of joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins -- had always been the trek to Hudson Bay, that subarctic region more familiar to polar bears than to most humans.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank By David Plotz. Random House. Random House, 288 pages, $24.95. The idea had a certain eccentric appeal: asking the world's smartest men to donate sperm for the evolutionary betterment of mankind. But it also represented certain drawbacks, and not just the image of Nobel Prize winners walking down hallways with plastic cups and Playboys. There were also inevitable fears about the creation of a genetically engineered master race.

PHILADELPHIA - Here's one of the most fascinating news bites of recent days: A group of Iraqi Christians in San Diego has launched an online petition to nominate Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. They've gathered 6,000 signatures so far. If Iraq does pull through its troubles and establish representative government - and if Iraqi elections do inspire other Arab publics - prime credit will be due this elderly cleric who hardly ever leaves his study. The frail, white-bearded Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has single-handedly prevented civil war from exploding in his country.

One of the stars of the biological research world is a millimeter long and probably lives in your back yard. Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm with no heart, bones or blood, has been used by one group of scientists to win a Nobel Prize and by others to explore how life works. The growing army of researchers who work with C. elegans appreciate it for practical and scientific reasons. Most important, the tiny creatures have something in common with humans. C. elegans became the first multicellular organism to have its genome sequenced in 1998.

Ryan Marques Harrison is not your typical overachiever. He's the kind of kid who falls off trees, gets chased by a Rottweiler, nearly fails Spanish and admits he is terrible at sports. But yesterday, the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute senior was named a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, a contest dubbed the "junior Nobel Prize." Ryan is the first Baltimore student to reach the final round of the prestigious contest since 1958, according to organizers, when a Baltimore City College student was named a finalist.

Julius Axelrod , 92, a scientist with the National Institutes of Health who won the Nobel Prize for his work on how nerve cells communicate and affect behavior, died Wednesday at his home in Rockville. The neuroscientist shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with two other scientists, Bernard Katz of Britain and Ulf von Euler of Sweden. Their work on the chemicals released by nerve endings enabled the development of antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft. Earlier in his career, Dr. Axelrod helped identify acetaminophen, which drug maker Johnson & Johnson uses in the pain reliever Tylenol.

COMING UP He's a Nobel Peace Prize winner. A respected author and speaker. A Boston University professor. A Holocaust survivor. He's Elie Wiesel. And he'll be speaking at the Yeshivat Rambam school's 14th anniversary event Sunday at the Lyric Opera House. "An Evening With Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel" features an uplifting talk by Wiesel, who will discuss his belief that through faith and hope, human beings can overcome and survive any and all obstacles. The evening will include tributes to noted supporters of the school.

THE economists who won a Nobel prize Monday did what economists often do: state the blindingly obvious in the form of algebra. Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott argued that -- this is the English version -- the best solution to today's problems might not be the best solution tomorrow, but that frequent policy fiddling to reap short-term benefits can cause its own problems. You or I, pointing this out to our spouse at dinner, will get, "Sure, hon. Pass the sprouts." Kydland and Prescott got the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as it is officially known, plus $1.3 million to share.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Kenyan environmentalist and human rights activist Wangari Maathai, who has worked for nearly 30 years combating deforestation, stamping out corruption and empowering women in Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. Mobilizing thousands of women to plant 30 million trees on farms and public lands and in forests across Kenya, Maathai staved off the ruin of her country's fragile landscape while providing desperately needed jobs for the poor. Maathai, the first African woman to win the Peace Prize, was praised by the awarding committee as "a strong voice speaking for the best forces in Africa to promote peace and good living conditions on that continent."

The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded yesterday to Austrian novelist, poet and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, a feminist writer with an uncompromisingly dark, disturbing and occasionally brutal vision of human nature. Jelinek, a little-known author on this side of the Atlantic but one of the most celebrated voices in the German language, was lauded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for "her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power."