Major Developments Major Developments by Calendar Year

The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2007 was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson of the United States of America for their leading work on making markets work with more efficiency. They were awarded the prize for their work on Mechanism Design Theory, a branch of economics that looks at ways to make imperfect markets work efficiently. The markets may be either social or economic exchanges. The theory was initiated by Hurwicz in 1960, was later pursued by Maskin and Myerson in the late 1970s, and has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures. The theory helps identify mechanisms that realize the largest benefit from trade, maximize a seller’s expected gain, or provides an insurance scheme that gives the best coverage without inviting misuse. According to the classical theory of economics there exists an ideal world where markets work hundred percent efficiently to bring buyers and sellers together as they exchange rare resources. But, in the practical world, however, such markets rarely exist because the consumers may not be fully informed about their choices and there may also be social costs beyond price, pollution for example, that is to be taken into consideration. Similarly, the transactions within a company or between organizations may upset the workings of an idealized market place. The economists of the Mechanism Design Theory aim at making these imperfect markets as efficient as possible, calculating, and valuating very complex models in the process. A typical test would be to see whether social welfare provisions go to the most needy or to assess how government regulations affect specific sectors. The aim of this theory is to distinguish the conditions where the markets work efficiently from the conditions where they would not .

Leonid Hurwicz is the Regent’s Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and won the US National Medal of Science in Behavioral and Social Science for his outstanding work in mechanism design. Eric Maskin is professor of Social Science in Princeton University and Roger Myerson is professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.

The Nobel Prize for Economics was not mentioned by Nobel in his will. It was created by Swedish Central Bank to mark its tercentenary in 1968. It was awarded first in 1969 and is also funded by the bank. The prize includes a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million US dollars) to be shared between them.

The former United States Vice President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. The IPCC is a United Nations network of scientists. They were instrumental in spreading the harmful effects of global warming and climate change. A cautionary movie about the consequences of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth” won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary. The Nobel committee called Gore as the single individual who has done a lot of work to create a greater worldwide understanding of the needs to be adopted to save the planet. Mr Gore announced that he would give his portion of the $1.5million to the non-profit organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection, that he founded last year. Gore considered it the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to enhancing our understanding of the climate crisis.

Mr. Rajendra Prachauri who chairs the U.N. Body on climate change observed that the Nobel Prize committee had realized the value of knowledge in tackling the climate change crisis. The climate change panel was established in 1988 and had issued a series of reports assessing the climate conditions of our planet.

Mr.Al Gore was born in 1948 and was very active in politics and was the Vice President of the USA from 1993 till 2000.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Dorris Lessing for her deep autobiographical writing that has swept across continents reflecting her engagements with the social and political issues of her time. The Swedish Academy has 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 about $1.6 million.

Miss Lessing was born in Persia and never completed her high school. She largely educated herself through voracious reading. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays,nonfiction and two volumes of autobiography. Her name was on the shortlist for a long time that she had almost forgotten about it and had given up the hope of becoming a Nobel Laureate. She became quite noted with her breakthrough novel, “ The Golden Notebook”. The growing feminist movement saw this book as a pioneering work and which belonged to that category of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship. Ms.Lessing wrote about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should give up their choice and lifestyle for marriage or children.

“The Golden Notebook”, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wished to live freely and in some ways was Ms Lessing’s alter ego.
Ms Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in 1919 in what is now Iran. After a painful childhood in Zimbabwe, she moved to Southern Rhodesia. She published her first novel in 1949, in Britain, “The Grass Is Singing” which recorded the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant.

Her childhood experiences drawn from the cultural differences and the racial discrimination among the whites and the blacks in colonial Rhodesia formed the basis for her first novel. “The Golden Notebook” had only sold around 6,000 copies when it came into the market but they had galvanized the American female society to a great extent. Ms. Lessing’s other novels include “The Good Terrorist”,“Martha Quest” and “The Cleft”. She even dabbled in science fiction and some of her later works show her interest in Sufi mysticism,which according to her stresses a link between the fates of individuals and the society.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2007 was awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies (in the words of the Academy) “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells.” They have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries that led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. Gene targeting is often used to inactivate single genes, a process known as “gene knockout.” These experiments have helped us understand the roles of numerous genes in embryonic development, adult physiology, aging, and disease. With gene targeting it is possible to produce any type of DNA modification in the mouse genome. Gene targeting has already produced more than five hundred different mouse models of human disorder, which include cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative diseases, diabetes, and cancer. Information about the function of our bodies through out life is carried within the DNA, which is packaged in chromosomes, which occur in pairs- one from the father and one from the mother. Exchange of DNA sequences occur by a process called homologous recombination. Capecchi demonstrated that homologous recombination was possible between introduced DNA and the chromosomes with the mammalian cells. In this manner, defective genes could be repaired by homologous recombination with the incoming DNA. In his attempts, Smithies had discovered that endogenous genes could be targeted irrespective of their activity.

Martin Evans had worked with embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells, which could give rise to almost any cell type. Evans discovered that chromosomal normal cell cultures could be established directly from early mouse embryos, now referred to as embryonic stem cells (ES) cells. The reports which showed the homologous recombination in ES cells used to generate gene-targeted mice were publicized in 1989. Since then, gene targeting has developed into a versatile technology. We can now introduce mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or in organs, both during the development and the adult animal.

Mario R. Capecchi, US citizen, PhD in Biophysics, Harvard University. Presently Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT , USA.

Sir Martin J. Evans, British citizen, PhD in Anatomy and Embryology, University College, London UK. He is a Director of the School of Biosciences and professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, UK.

Oliver Smithies, US citizen, PhD in Biochemistry 1951, Oxford University, UK. He is a Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2007 was awarded to Gerhard Ertl, for his entire work that laid the foundations for modern surface chemistry. He had spent the most part of his life studying reactions on surfaces.

Surface chemistry is a very common phenomenon in the industrial and even everyday processes. From producing nitrogen to the destruction of ozone layer each process has a key step where in a deep understanding of the physical and chemical processes underlying the overall reaction plays a vital role in obtaining a higher yield of the product.

Prof Ertl’s work with the Haber-Bosch process was the highlight of the Nobel prize achievement. The process is used to create ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen in the presence of iron. Though the discovery of the process spawned Nobel prizes for both Haber(1918) and Bosch(1931), the reaction mechanism was unknown until Ertl’s work. To study the reaction mechanisms Ertl made use of a number of techniques, such as generating idealized iron surfaces, introducing precise amounts of gas at low pressure, using a litany of spectroscopic techniques that probed molecules at the surface, and also studying the reverse reaction of the process using heavy hydrogen as a tracer molecule. Prof Ertl discovered that the splitting of the triple bond in the Nitrogen molecule was the slowest step in the Haber-Bosch process. So, to speed up the production of ammonia, the nitrogen molecule cleavage had to be fastened.

Ertl’s work also included the detailed study of carbon monoxide being converted to carbon dioxide over platinum. This reaction – or the one that doesn’t use platinum- is the one that is used by catalytic converters in cars today to reduce the harmful emissions. The detailed and controlled methodology that Ertl used has given rise to modern surface chemistry and earned him the Nobel Prize.