Nobel Prize

Dr. Carol Greider may be the only Nobel laureate to have been folding laundry when she got the call. After she hung up, she woke up her two children and told them she had won the Nobel Prize in the category physiology or medicine. As she told the New York Times: "In the newspapers, there's a picture of me and my kids right there. How many men have won the Nobel in the last few years, and they have kids the same age as mine, and their kids aren't in the picture? That's a big difference, right?

Kathleen Mahoney, a registered nurse studying at the University of Pennsylvania, is savoring her piece of the Nobel Peace Prize. Mahoney, 28, spent three years in Amazon country battling malaria, other health threats and government indifference as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders. The private medical-aid organization, known by its French name of Medecins Sans Frontieres, was announced as the winner yesterday of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo, Norway. The prizes are awarded Dec. 10. "I'm very enthusiastic about spreading the word about what is a truly exceptional organization," said Mahoney, who already had several speeches scheduled for local audiences.

No question about it: The Karolinska Institute realized it would create a stir when it chose to award the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco. The prize went to Prusiner for describing an entirely new genre of disease-causing agents, deeply strange entities that he named prions. Only a few years ago, most biologists considered prions a scientific heresy. Even today, some senior scientists are unconvinced.

Wislawa Szymborska, a reclusive 73-year-old Polish poet whose bittersweet lines have inspired a rock song and an acclaimed film, was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature yesterday in Stockholm. Called the "Mozart of Polish poetry," Szymborska is perhaps Poland's most famous woman writer, but she is relatively unknown outside her homeland and had been considered a long shot for the prize. In making the award to the shy widow, the Swedish Academy praised the "ease with which her words seem to fall into place.

Three Americans won the Nobel Economics Prize yesterday for developing theories that have helped investors gain a deeper understanding of modern financial markets and company finance. Harry F. Markowitz of the City University of New York, Merton Miller of the University of Chicago and William Sharpe of Stanford University will share the $710,000 prize. Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences cited the three for "pioneering work in the theory of financial economics and corporate finance.

Kenzaburo Oe, the 59-year-old Japanese novelist and essayist whose leftist political activities and existential fictions have led some Western critics to see him as the Jean-Paul Sartre of Japan, is the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday. Although Japanese literature is considered one of the world's most sophisticated and diverse, Oe (OH-eh) is only the second Japanese writer to win the literature prize in the award's 94-year history.

Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet and playwright once praised by literary great Robert Graves for understanding the "inner magic" of English better than virtually any other writer of his generation, has won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday in Stockholm. "In him West Indian culture has found its great poet," the 18-member Academy declared of Walcott, 62, calling his work "sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.

Joseph Brodsky, an exiled Russian poet who has lived in the United States since 1972, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. In citing Brodsky, who at 47 is one of the youngest writers to win the prize, the Swedish Academy called him "a masterly renewer of poetical language and poetical forms of expression. " "For Brodsky," the academy said in a brief statement, "poetry is a divine gift. The religious dimension that one meets in his work is of a nature that adheres to no creed.

MONROVIA, Liberia - Africa's only female president, who was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping stabilize this war-torn nation, led in unofficial results released Wednesday. But the early tally indicates she didn't receive the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. That means Harvard-educated Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will likely need to face a second round of voting. That will pit her against the party of a popular soccer star who has appealed to voters by portraying Sirleaf as an Ivy Leaguer out of touch with the country's impoverished population.

A University of Pennsylvania graduate, a fellow researcher at New Jersey's Bell Laboratories and a Shanghai-born scientist will share the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics for work on the optical side of the digital revolution. George E. Smith, who got his B.A. from Penn in 1955 and lives in Waretown, Ocean County, and Nova Scotia-born Willard S. Boyle invented the charge-coupled device, an image-capturing technology that led to digital cameras in 1969. They'll share half of the $1.4 million prize with Charles K. Kao, who in 1966 determined how to transmit light over long distances through optical glass fibers, which can carry information - text, music and pictures - more compactly and with less signal loss than metal wires.