When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, I knew that Philip Roth had not won. A colleague condescended: “I never liked Roth,” a put-down to me, a Miltonist and teacher of Renaissance literature, who really doesn’t know better. A couple of decades ago, someone would have mentioned the more elegant, supposedly more disciplined and…
The global chemical weapons watchdog charged with overseeing destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile during a civil war won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a relatively small organisation with a modest budget, dispatched its experts after a sarin gas attack killed more than 1,400…
Canadian Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story”. “Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov,” the Swedish Academy said, comparing her to the…
The city of Brussels will name part of its famous Atomium monument after François Englert, the Belgian Jew who won the Nobel Prize in physics. A city official told Belgian media Wednesday that Englert, who won the prize the previous day together with Peter Higgs of Britain for their discovery of the Higgs particle, will…
Nobel Prize winner Arieh Warshel emigrated from Israel because he couldn’t get tenure at a prestigious institute — a potent illustration of the brain drain affecting science and research in the Jewish State. Warshel completed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at Technion Institute in Haifa in 1966. From there he went on to the Weizmann…
Three Jewish scientists won the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for pioneering work on computer programs that simulate complex chemical processes and have accelerated progress in areas from drugs to solar energy. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarding the prize of 8 million crowns ($1.25 million) to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh…
Francois Englert, a Belgian Jewish professor at Tel Aviv University and a Holocaust survivor, won a share the Nobel Prize in physics. Englert and Britain’s Peter Higgs won the prize on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. The…
The kind of basic science that helped Randy Schekman win the coveted Nobel medicine prize might never have been funded if he had applied today. Schekman, along with two other U.S.-based winners of the 2013 medicine prize, Thomas Suedhof and James Rothman, slammed recent spending cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder…
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