Stockholm: October 10

Americans Thomas Sargent of New York University and Christopher A. Sims of Princeton University have won the Nobel prize in economics. They won the 2011 economics Nobel prize on Monday for work on the relationship between policy measures and how they can affect the economy.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which made the award, said the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.5 million) prize recognised their “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”.

The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel’s 1895 will. Since the economics Nobel was first awarded in 1969, more than 40 Americans have received the award.

Last week, American Bruce Beutler and Frenchman Jules Hoffmann won the medicine prize for their research on innate immunity, when receptor proteins activate the first line of defense in the immune system after they recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body.

They shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, who died three days before the announcement, and who was honored for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity.

U.S.-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess won the physics prize for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, while Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman won the chemistry award for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible.

Acclaimed Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer won the literature prize and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen shared the Nobel Peace Prize “for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”.

 

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