Nobel laureates handed out prizes

STOCKHOLM - Agence France-Presse

(Lto R) 2012 Nobel Prize laureates Brian K Kobilka, John B Gurdon, Shinya Yamanaka and Mo Yan attend the Nobel prize awarding ceremony. AFP photo

The 2012 Nobel laureates in medicine, literature, economics, physics and chemistry received their prizes from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf at a gala ceremony in Stockholm on Dec 10.

The formal event, held as tradition dictates on the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel in 1896, took place at Stockholm’s Concert Hall.

The Nobel Literature Prize was handed to Mo Yan, one of China’s leading writers of the past half-century, who was honored for a body of work that the Swedish Academy said mixes folk tales, history and the contemporary.

Mo has walked a tightrope during his stay in Stockholm, with some pundits supporting his own claims that he is “independent” and others casting him as a Beijing stooge.

The Medicine Prize was presented to Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and John Gurdon of Britain for work in cell programming, a frontier that has nourished dreams of replacement tissue for people crippled by disease.

Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the United States were meanwhile awarded the Physics Prize for pioneering optical experiments in quantum physics that could one day open the way to revolutionary computers.

Two Americans, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka, picked up the chemistry prize for identifying a class of cell receptor, yielding vital insights into how the body works at the molecular level.

Finally, US scholars Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley collected the economics prize for their work on how to best match supply and demand that has potential applications in organ donation, education and on the Internet.