Sir Martin Evans photo via bbc.co.uk

According to Associated Press, winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine, 2007 are U.S. citizens Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans of Britain for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a technique for manipulating mouse genes.

via wikipedia

The Nobel Prizes […] are awarded for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. The first five prizes were instituted by the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel through his will in 1895; they were first awarded in 1901. […]

[…] The five initial Prizes were instituted by the final will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist, who was the inventor of the high explosive dynamite. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, and signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on November 27, 1895. Nobel’s work had directly involved the creation of explosives, and he became increasingly uneasy with the military use of his inventions. […]
quoted from wikipedia

What is the Importance of New Discoveries for Medicine?

The three Nobel Laureates pioneered gene targeting in mice which can be used to inactivate single genes to create “knockout” mice. Over ten thousand mouse genes have been knocked out and studied thus far and over five hundred different mouse models of human disorders have been created.
quoted from eyeondna.com

UPDATE (October 9)

Nobel Prize Physics

Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Nanotechnology Researchers For Technology Behind Hard Disc Drives for Computers. This year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks.

It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.
Quoted from azonano.com

via Yahoo - France’s Albert Fert

According to Yahoo News, “Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for a discovery that lets computers, iPods and other digital devices store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks. France’s Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg independently discovered a physical effect in 1988 that has led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks. That sensitivity lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.”

UPDATE (October 11)

Nobel Prize for Literature

via www.smh.com.au

According to Bits of News, “British author Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007, by The Swedish Academy, which described her as, ‘that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’.”

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