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The Nobel Prize has not excited Filipinos partly
because no Pinoy has won one and partly because many of the
subjects, such as those in the sciences, are considered esoteric by
many competition watchers. There have also been very few nominations
for the prestigious prize in numerous categories.
We do not have high expectations
for our few but talented scientists and researchers but why can’t
we win, Filipinos themselves, ask in the field of literature, for
example? Readers of F. Sionil Jose assert he has produced a body of
work that could compare with Asia’s best. A posthumous prize for
the great National Artist, journalist and fiction winner Nick
Joaquin, should be forthcoming, say lovers of literature.
We owe the prize founder, Swedish
industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel and the Swedish
Academy he created for seeking out, year after year, the best and
the brightest in the spheres of science, economics, literature and
peace. We have come to know the laureates and appreciate their work
through the painstaking work if the academy.
Two days ago, French novelist
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who is hardly known in these islands,
won the 2008 prize in literature for his poetic adventure and
“sensual ecstasy.” He began his career with “Desert” in
1980, a work the academy said “contains magnificent images of a
lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction
of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.”
Osamu Shimomura of Japan and
Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien of the US won the Chemistry Prize for
a fluorescent protein derived from a jellyfish that has become an
important tool in the laboratory.
Agence France-Presse has reported
that green fluorescent protein has revolutionized research in
medicine and biology, “enabling scientists to get a visual fix on
how organs function, the spread of disease and the response of
infected cells to treatment.”
The first of the prestigious
awards went to French and German scientists credited with the
discovery of the viruses behind AIDS and cervical cancer. The
Economics Prize will wrap up the awards in Stockholm on October 13.
Nobel laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million
Swedish kronos ($1.42 million).
President Corazon Aquino was
nominated for the Peace Prize for initiating peace talks with Moro
National Liberation Front (MNLF) leader Nur Misuari. There was no
nomination for President Gloria Arroyo who broke off talks with the
Muslim Independent Liberation Front (MILF) and declared there will
be no resumption of the peace negotiations with the secessionists.
The prizes were first awarded in
1901. Like the Olympic gold, it has eluded Filipino nominees. The
first Filipino to win the Nobel will be proclaimed a national icon
and will raise the Nobel Prize in the national consciousness.
The Ig Nobel Award
Which fleas can jump further—the ones living on dogs or those
residing on cats? Dog fleas can jump further, 20 centimeters on
average.
Of such profound research,
invention and discovery is the Ig Nobel Award made of, the
tongue-in-cheek option to the prestigious Nobel Prize handed out
yearly in Scandinavia. Ahtisaari Martti of Finland received the
Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Formal ceremonies will be held in
December.
Not to be upstaged, the annual Ig
Nobel awards were announced Thursday at Harvard University in
Massachusetts. An audience of more than 1,000—including famous
scientists, inventors and academicians—attended the ceremony.
The irreverent prize for genuine
but unusual research was produced by science humor magazine Annals
of Improbable Research. The editors said they created the award to
“make people laugh, and then make them think.” The studies
honored Thursday was a hit among the audiences, including the seven
laureates who had to pay their own way to receive the prize.
The award for nutrition went to
an Italian-British duo for “electronically modifying the sound of
a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be
crispier than it really is.”
US professors received the
physics prize for providing proof that hair, string, or anything
else of the kind will inevitably become tangled in knots, a process
called “spontaneous knotting of an agitated string.”
Previous prizes have been awarded
to researchers who proved it is safe to eat food three seconds after
dropping it on the floor and for a study on how sheets wrinkle.
The ceremony featured paper
airplanes, sword-swallowing and an eight-year-old girl whose duty
was to stop boring speeches.
William Lipscomb, 89, the genuine
1976 Nobel laureate for chemistry, handed out awards and acted as
the hero in the “win-a-date-with-a-laureate contest.”
But admirers do not feel the
18-year-old Ig Nobel Award is redundant. They welcome it as a parody
of a brainy profession, an idea that can give science a more popular
image and a time to enjoy a laugh in an overly serious world.
In that spirit, the producers
gave the Ig peace prize to Switzerland and its Ethics Commission on
Non-Human Biotechnology “for adopting the legal principle that
plants have dignity.”
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