MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

The 2009 Nobel Prizes round winners includes five women

German author, Romanian born, Herta Müller depicts the landscape of the dispossessed

With economists Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson the round of 2009 Nobel Prizes comes to an end. Of the thirteen, five are women with a first in Economics.

Last Friday US President Barack Obama in a decision which triggered controversy was awarded the Peace Nobel.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to German author, Romanian born, Herta Müller, “who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”

A short release from the Academy states that Müller “writes short stories, novels, poems and essays, but all her work deals with the experience of oppression, of exile, of conforming to family and state. It deals with the difficulties of being oneself”.

Two women and a man were awarded the Nobel in Medicine: Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak. They solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes – the telomeres – and in an enzyme that forms them – telomerase.

Ms. Blackburn was born in Australia and is a researcher at the University of California; Ms. Greider is native US and professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine and Szostak was born in the UK and is a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Two men and a woman were jointly awarded the Chemistry Nobel Prize for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. They are: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK; Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, US and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Ribosomes translate DNA information into life. They produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms and since they are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics. The three scientists showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Finally but the first of Nobel prizes to be announced, Physics, was awarded to Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication” and the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor”.