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Nobel Prize Recipients

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27.01.2004

Irène Joliot-Curie

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Biljana Nacevska   I-3  High School ”Kiril Pejcinovic”, Tetovo

Macedonia

Monika Kostovska I-3, High School ”K.Pejcinovic”, Tetovo

Macedonia

Joliot-Curie, Irène (1897-1956), French physicist and Nobel laureate. She and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work in the synthesis of radioactive substances.

 Irène Curie was born in Paris, the daughter of the French physicists and Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie. She graduated from the College Sevigne in Gagny, France, in 1914 and began her graduate education at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Her graduate education was interrupted by World War I (1914-1917). In 1918 she resumed her education at the University of Paris, and received her Ph.D. degree in 1925 for her work on alpha particles (positively charged nuclear particles consisting of two protons bound to two neutrinos). Also in 1918 she began assisting her mother at the Radium Institute where she met Frédéric Joliot, whom she married in 1926. They subsequently worked together as a scientific team, and both assumed the name of Joliot-Curie.

 The Joliot-Curies specialized in the field of nuclear physics. In 1933, inspired by the research of German physicist Walther Bothe, they made the important discovery that radioactive elements can be artificially prepared from stable elements. In separate experiments they bombarded aluminum foil and boron with alpha particles, temporarily changing the aluminum into radioactive phosphorus and producing a radioactive form of nitrogen from the boron. This was the first instance of creating artificial radioactivity.

 In 1936 Joliot-Curie became a full professor at the University of Paris after lecturing there since 1932, and also served in the French cabinet as undersecretary of state for scientific research. She was a member of the French Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1951 and director of the Institute of Radium after 1947. She became an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1939 and received many other honors for her contributions to nuclear science. Her death, on March 17, 1956, was caused by leukemia, which she contracted in the course of her work.

Alfred Nobel

       Alfred Nobel was a Sweden, born in Stockholm on  21st  October 1833.His father came from a poor peasant family.
       As a young man Alfred spent about one year in the United States as a student. Returning to Europe, he became known as an inventor. Together with his father, he began experimenting with explosives. Father and son opened a small workshop for their researches, and for producing nitroglycerine. One day a nitroglycerine explosion destroyed the plant, and Alfred’s youngest brother and several other men were killed
       When his father died, Alfred had to carry on alone. He now began to set up new factories in Norway and Germany but nitroglycerine remained very dangerous, and no other country allowed it to be made on its territory.
       At last Nobel solved the problem by adding some materials which made it possible to store and transport nitroglycerine safely. To explode it now required a special detonator. This new form of nitroglycerine explosive was called dynamite.
       In 1871 Nobel built a plant in Scotland which later became one of the world’s largest dynamite factories. He had factories in almost every country in Europe, and two in the United States.
       He spoke several languages and, visiting his factories in various countries, he became something of an international citizen. Fully aware of the deadly weapon which his inventions had put into the hands of military powers, he supported various organizations which were working for peace in Europe.
       When Nobel died in 1896 he left more than three million pounds in a fund, the interest from which was to provide five international prizes each year. These are awarded in Stockholm on the anniversary of his death to those who have made the greatest contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, medical science, world literature, and friendship among the nations. This last, the Peace Prize, expressed Nobel’s hope that the world would not misuse his inventions.
       The first Peace Prize, in 1901 , went to Jean Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross.

Kohn, Walter (1923- ), Austrian-born American physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Kohn shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry with British chemist John Pople for their development of methods that allow chemists and physicists to calculate the properties of atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules are the basic units of matter. Atoms contain a positively charged nucleus surrounded by a cloud of tiny, negatively charged particles called electrons. Molecules are groups of atoms that have bonded together by merging their electron clouds. Kohn developed a simplified way of understanding the location of electrons in large molecules. His technique, called the density functional theory, is considered revolutionary because it allows scientists to make calculations for molecules with up to 1,000 atoms, while the limit before Kohn’s theory was about 10 atoms.

Kohn was born in Vienna, Austria, but spent all of his adult life in North America. He moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1941 to attend the University of Toronto. Kohn graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 with a B.A. degree in mathematics and physics. He continued at the University of Toronto and received a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1946. He then moved to the United States, where he earned his doctoral degree at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, only two years later, in 1948. He was an instructor at Harvard University until 1950, when he moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as an associate professor. He remained there until 1960, when he moved to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where he remained until 1979. He was the chairman of the physics department there from 1961 to 1963. From 1979 to 1984 Kohn was the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at UCSD. In 1984 he moved back to the physics department of UCSD. He became an emeritus and research professor there in 1991.

The work for which Kohn won the Nobel Prize was based on one of the basic ideas of quantum mechanics . Quantum mechanics is a theory that describes both light and matter in terms of both waves and particles. Using quantum mechanics, physicists can describe the motion of an electron (a tiny, negatively charged particle that is part of an atom) with an equation called a wave function.

Wave functions are very useful for describing simple atoms, but for molecules with many electrons, the equations quickly become too complex and unwieldy to be useful. Kohn simplified the mathematics involved in these calculations. His approach uses the average number of electrons at any point—or the density of electrons—rather than trying to calculate the positions of all of the electrons of a molecule. This simple adjustment of the calculation allows scientists to calculate not only average positions and energies of electrons but also the overall energy of molecules. Kohn developed his theory—called density-functional theory—during his work with metal alloys (different metals melted together) at UCSD in the 1960s.

The nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2003 has been jointly awarded to Paul C Lauterbur (Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, University of Illinois, USA) and Peter Mansfield (Magnetic Resonance Centre, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, UK) for their discoveries concerning "magnetic resonance imaging".

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 has been awarded "for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes", with one half of the prize going to Peter Agre (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA) "for the discovery of water channels". The other half went to Roderick MacKinnon (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, USA) "for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels".

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2003 has been jointly given to Alexei A. (Abrikosov, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, USA), Vitaly L. Ginzburg, (P. N. lebedev physical institute, Moscow, Russia) and Anthony J. Leggett (University of Illinois, USA) "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and super fluids.

We human beings consist to about 70% of salt water. This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards two scientists whose discoveries have clarified how salts (ions) and water are transported out of and into the cells of the body. The discoveries have afforded us a fundamental molecular understanding of how, for example, the kidneys recover water from primary urine and how the electrical signals in our nerve cells is generated and propagated. This is of great importance for our understanding of many diseases of e. g. the kidneys, hearts, muscles and nervous system.

That the body's cells must contain specific channels for transporting water was suspected as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. Peter Agre determines that a protein isolated from cell membranes in the late 1980s is the key to this process. Discovery of this long-sought water channel allowed scientists to follow in detail a water molecule on its way through cell membranes. In addition, the finding elucidated why only water- and not other small molecules or ions- can pass through the channel. Dubbed aqua Orin, the proteins are vital to proper functioning of a variety of organs including the kidneys, which process urine and allow most of the water to be reabsorbed by the body. This decisive discovery opened the door to a whole series of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of water channels in bacteria, plants and mammals. Today, researchers can follow in detail a water molecule on its way through the cell membrane and understand why only water, not other small molecules or ions, can pass.

The other type of membrane channel which is the subject of the year's Prize is the ion channel. Roderick MacKinnon was honored for is work with a different type of membrane channel: the ion channel. These passageways permit selected ions, notablypotasium and sodium, to pass form cell to cell. Such signaling allows muscles and the nervous system function correctly. In 1998, MacKinnon determined the structure of the potassium ion channel using X-ray crystallography and illustrated why potassium ions can navigate it whereas smaller sodium ions cannot. Because disturbances in cystic fibrosis and cardiac arrhythmia, the finding should help scientist develop novel pharmaceutical treatments. Thanks to this contribution we can now "see" ions flowing through channels that can be opened and closed by different cellular signals.

The ion channels are important for, among other things, the function of the nervous system and the muscles. What is called the action potential of nerve cells is generated when an ion channel on the surface of the nerve cell is opened by a chemical signal sent from an adjacent nerve cell, whereupon an electrical pulse is propagated along the surface of the nerve cell through the opening and closing of further ion channels in the course of a few milliseconds.

This year's prize illustrates how contemporary biochemistry reaches down to the atomic level in its quest to understand the fundamental processes of life.

 Amy Johnson was a very famous pilot. She was born on 1st July 1903.Amy Johnson flew from London to Australia and she went alone
          She flew in a small aeroplane called Jason and the journey took 19 days. She started her journey to Australia on Monday 5th May and finished on Saturday 24th May. She stopped many times on small airfields on Europe and Asia and on islands in the Pacific Ocean.
            She was national hero when she came back to Britain and the Newspaper gave her 10 000 pounds.
            Amy Johnson made many more record-breaking flights. In 1931 she flew to Japan and Siberia and in 1936 she broke the record for a flight from London to Cape Town in South Africa.
            She made some of the flights alone and some with another famous pilot called Jim Mollison. In August 1932 Amy married Jim and in 1933 they flew from Britain to the United States of America. She was the first woman to fly across to the Atlantic Ocean from east to west. Amy died in a plane accident in January 1941.