SWEDEN—Although the sun may set in Stockholm just after noon, the world’s brightest scientific minds are shining here this week at a round of lectures and symposia leading up to the awarding of the 2001 Nobel Prizes on Monday night.
Every living Nobel Laureate has been invited to Sweden for the ceremony, and many have agreed to speak at the Karolinska Institute (one of the world’s premiere medicine and science research universities) and at the University of Stockholm.
Many of the lectures were technical discussions—chaired by leaders in the fields of molecular biology, chemistry and physics—for the benefit of specialists in these disciplines. But several high-profile scientists took time last Friday afternoon to address more holistic issues about the nature of scientific research and its potential to benefit humanity in the twenty first century.
The panelists agreed that the 1900s could be viewed as the “century of the atom”—meaning that science learned to probe the fundamental nature of matter and comprehend the constituents of everyday stuff over the last one hundred years. But the coming century, said Bengt Norden, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, will be the age of the molecule—in which science will be able to build chemicals artificially, from scratch, atom by atom—making new drugs and other technologies that were previously unimaginable.
But a talk by fomer U. S. National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus brought Norden’s proselytizing sentiment down to earth by reminding the symposium delegates that although tremendous scientific advances have been made in the developed world, much of the Earth’s population continues to live in abject poverty. He stressed that a global culture of science must be fostered and he urged leaders of developed countries to increase their spending on foreign aid to make such a culture a reality.
