Gairdner lectures this weekThe “International Genome Symposium,” organized by the Gairdner Foundation, takes place this Thursday and Friday at U of T and is open to the public. Many Gairdner and Nobel Prize winners will be participating, including Craig Venter and James Watson. The keynote lecture on Friday night is entitled “The promise and perils of the human genome,” to be delivered by Dr. Eric Lander of the MIT Centre for Genome Research. Other lectures on Thursday and Friday are free. The Gairdner Foundation is a Canadian organization that awards leaders in medical research. Since its 1957 founding, 59 Gairdner Award winners have gone on to win Nobel prizes. For details of the symposium and the keynote lecture, visit www.gairdner.org.–Matt AsmaNobel PrizesThe 2002 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Medicine and Physics were announced last week in Sweden. In each category the prize was shared among three scientists, with the award winners representing four different nations. The Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to John Fenn of the United States, Koichi Tanaka of Japan and Kurt Wüthrich of Switzerland for their contribution to the further development of methods in mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance “to embrace biological macromolecules.”The Academy awarded the physics prize to Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan and Raymond Davis Jr. and Riccardo Giacconi of the U.S. for their pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which led to the emergence of the two new fields of neutrino and x-ray astronomy. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology to Robert Horvitz of the U.S. and Sydney Brenner and John Sulston of the U.K. “for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.” The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 based on the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Source: www.nobel.se–Sri Chaudhuri
