Word: awards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although Altman and Cech did not collaborate directly, each benefited from the other's advances. "Like a Ping-Pong match, the ball went from one to the other," according to Bertil Andersson, a member of the Nobel Committee. Cech heard of the award while in Boston accepting another prize. "I am obviously excited about it," he said. "It was something that everyone has been telling me would happen, but I had no way of knowing when." What will the researchers do with their $470,000 prize? "I'll just go back to the lab and do more work," Altman said...
Most winners of the Nobel Prize respond with joy and gratitude to the singular, once-in-a-lifetime honor. But Norway's Trygve Haavelmo bluntly criticized the award last week after he was named the 1989 laureate in economics. Haavelmo, 77, a modest and shy University of Oslo professor emeritus, told a reporter, "I don't like the idea of such prizes...
While Haavelmo has lived for years in contented obscurity, many prominent economists welcomed his selection. Said Lawrence Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, who won the 1980 economics award for his work in econometrics: "Haavelmo had a tremendous influence on me and on many other young econometricians in the 1940s." Concurred Robert Solow of the Massachusetts $ Institute of Technology, the 1987 laureate: "It's like giving the Nobel Prize for Physics to Thomas Edison. You slap your forehead and wonder why they didn't do it sooner...
...fact, Haavelmo's prize reflected a situation that is unique to the award for economics. The Nobel Prizes were first given in 1901, but the economics citation was not added until 1969, when it was established by Sweden's central bank. That late start has prompted the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to choose many older economists whose work could not be recognized when it was first published. "They're clearing up the backlog," says Harvard economist Zvi Griliches, who hailed this year's choice. "They haven't got to the point of recognizing something interesting that happened...
...this restriction doesn't apply to private organizations. In Philadelphia, an abortion clinic sued protesters who picketed their clinic weekly for nine years. The case was complicated by the fact that the defendants broke in a couple of times and damaged the clinic's equipment. The $108,000 award to the clinic was essentially a death sentence for the defendants' group...