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- THE WEEK, Page 26NOBEL PRIZES
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- PEACE
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- Rigoberta Menchu, 33, Guatemalan Indian-rights activist
- whose family was killed in her country's bloody civil war; from
- Mexico, where she fled in 1981, Menchu has fought against
- persecution by rightist forces of tens of thousands of Indians.
- She "stands out as a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation
- across ethnic, cultural and social dividing lines," said the
- citation.
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- CHEMISTRY
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- Rudolph Marcus, 69, Canadian-born researcher at the
- California Institute of Technology; his theoretical work, done
- mostly in the 1950s and '60s, describes how and why chemical
- reactions differ in the speed at which they proceed, based on
- mathematical analysis of how electrons move and atoms change
- their positions. His work, according to the citation, "has
- greatly stimulated experimental developments in chemistry."
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- MEDICINE
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- Edmond Fischer, 72, and Edwin Krebs, 74, a scientific team
- for nearly 40 years, both emeritus professors at the University
- of Washington in Seattle; a colleague described them as
- "quintessential gentleman scholars." They were honored for their
- discovery in the 1950s of a mechanism cells use to regulate a
- range of metabolic processes. "We stumbled on it," said Fischer.
- The mechanism, reversible protein phosphorylation, a key to
- maintaining life in cells, has paved the way for research into
- cellular phenomena and diseases. Said the citation: "Their
- fundamental finding initiated a research area which today is one
- of the most active and wide ranging."
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- ECONOMIC SCIENCE
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- Gary Becker, 61, economics and sociology professor at the
- University of Chicago and Business Week columnist, pioneered the
- theory that people follow the same rational path whether making
- simple everyday decisions or complex business calculations.
- Honored for "extending the sphere of economic analysis to new
- areas of human behavior and relations," he has influenced
- demography and criminology with his research.
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- PHYSICS
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- Georges Charpak, 68, son of Polish immigrants, who served
- in the French Resistance in World War II and survived Dachau.
- A physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
- Research, near Geneva since 1959, he was honored for his 1968
- work in particle physics and invention of the "multiwire
- proportional chamber," a tool physicists use to probe the nature
- of matter. Charpak will use the award for research.
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