Nobel prizes presented at solemn ceremonies
Baku, December 10 (AZERTAC). At a ceremony in Oslo, King Harald V of Norway will award the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to two women from Africa and one from the Middle East. On the same day in Stockholm King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden will hand out the Nobel awards for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Economic Sciences. Both ceremonies will be solemn. The 2004 Peace laureate passed away on September 25 and one 2011 Medicine-Physiology winner died just days before hearing the news.
Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and the first African woman to receive the prize, died on September 25.
The 2011 winners of the Peace Prize are Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president; her countrywoman Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist who challenged warlords; and Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni human rights leader seeking to overthrow an autocratic regime as part of the so-called Arab Spring. The committee noted that the women symbolized the nonviolent struggle to improve their nations and advance the role of women's rights throughout the world.
Forty-three women have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2011.
Tomas Tranströmer, a Norwegian poet, will receive the Literature prize "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." Dan Shechtman, an Israeli, will receive the Chemistry Prize "for the discovery of quasicrystals." One half of the Physics prize was awarded to Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States; with the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University in the United States; "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."
Bruce A. Beutler of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the United States and Jules A. Hoffmann, a President of the French National Academy of Sciences, will share one half of the Medicine or Physiology prize "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity."
Ralph M. Steinman, a Canadian, will receive the other half posthumously "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity."
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