![Nobel Peace Prize 2010 Presentation Speech Nobel Peace Prize 2010 Presentation Speech](http://web.archive.org./web/20110613041300im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZXCKq_8ECvs/0.jpg)
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- Duration: 30:41
- Published: 28 Feb 2011
- Uploaded: 07 Mar 2011
- Author: thenobelprize
Coordinates | 38°53′35.7″N77°1′29.9″N |
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Name | The Nobel Prize |
Alt | A golden medallion with an embossed image of Alfred Nobel facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "MDCCCXXXIII" above, followed by (smaller) "OB•" then "MDCCCXCVI" below. |
Description | Outstanding contributions in Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Physiology or MedicineThe Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, identified with the Nobel Prize, is awarded for outstanding contributions in Economics. |
Presenter | Swedish AcademyRoyal Swedish Academy of SciencesKarolinska InstitutetNorwegian Nobel Committee |
Country | SwedenNorway (Peace Prize only) |
Year | 1901 |
Website | http://nobelprize.org |
The Nobel Prizes (phonetic: [nobél], definite form, singular, Swedish: Nobelpriset, Norwegian: Nobelprisen) are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895. The prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace were first awarded in 1901. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was instituted by Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 and was first awarded in 1969. Although it's not an official Nobel Prize, its announcements and presentations are made along with the other prizes, with the exception of the Peace Prize which is awarded in Oslo, Norway. Each Nobel Prize is regarded as the most prestigious award in its field.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Swedish Academy grants the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded by a Swedish organisation but by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Each recipient, or laureate, is presented with a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money which depends on the Nobel Foundation's income that year. In 2009, each prize was worth 10 million SEK (c. US$1.4 million). The prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless the winner of the prize has died after the prize's announcement. Nor may a prize be shared among more than three people. The average number of laureates per prize has increased substantially over the 20th century.
Alfred Nobel () was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family of engineers. He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1895 Nobel purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill, which he converted into a major armaments manufacturer. Nobel also invented ballistite, a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially cordite, the main British smokeless powder. Nobel was even involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite. Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, most of it from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous. In 1888, Alfred had the unpleasant surprise of reading his own obituary, titled ‘The merchant of death is dead’, in a French newspaper. As it was Alfred's brother Ludvig who had died, the obituary was eight years premature. Alfred was disappointed with what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered. This inspired him to change his will. On 10 December 1896 Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, at the age of 63 from a cerebral haemorrhage.
To widespread surprise, Nobel's last will requested that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, and literature. Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. The last was written over a year before he died, signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895. Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK (c. US$186 million in 2008), to establish the five Nobel Prizes. Because of the level of scepticism surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that it was approved by the Storting in Norway. The executors of Nobel's will, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of Nobel's fortune and organise the prizes.
Nobel's instructions named a Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize, the members of whom were appointed shortly after the will was approved in April 1897. Soon thereafter, the other prize-awarding organisations were established: the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June. The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded, and in 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly-created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II. In accordance with Nobel's will, the primary task of the Foundation is to manage the fortune Nobel left. Robert and Ludwig Nobel were involved in the oil business in Azerbaijan and according to Swedish historian E. Bargengren, who accessed the Nobel family archives, it was this "decision to allow withdrawal of Alfred's money from Baku that became the decisive factor that enabled the Nobel Prizes to be established". Another important task of the Nobel Foundation is to market the prizes internationally and to oversee informal administration related to the prizes. The Foundation is not involved in the process of selecting the Nobel laureates. In many ways the Nobel Foundation is similar to an investment company, in that it invests Nobel's money to create a solid funding base for the prizes and the administrative activities. The Nobel Foundation is exempt from all taxes in Sweden (since 1946) and from investment taxes in the United States (since 1953). Since the 1980s, the Foundation's investments have become more profitable and as of 31 December 2007, the assets controlled by the Nobel Foundation amounted to 3.628 billion Swedish kronor (c. US$560 million).
According to the statutes, the Foundation consists of a board of five Swedish or Norwegian citizens, with its seat in Stockholm. The Chairman of the Board is appointed by the Swedish King in Council, with the other four members appointed by the trustees of the prize-awarding institutions. An Executive Director is chosen from among the board members, a Deputy Director is appointed by the King in Council, and two deputies are appointed by the trustees. However, since 1995 all the members of the board have been chosen by the trustees, and the Executive Director and the Deputy Director appointed by the board itself. As well as the board, the Nobel Foundation is made up of the prize-awarding institutions (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee), the trustees of these institutions, and auditors. The committee awarded the Peace Prize to two prominent figures in the growing peace movement around the end of the 19th century: Frédéric Passy was co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and Henry Dunant was founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The Nobel Committee's Physics Prize shortlist cited Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays. The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize. In the last decades of the 19th century many chemists had made significant contributions. Thus, with the Chemistry Prize, the Academy "was chiefly faced with merely deciding the order in which these scientists should be awarded the prize." The Academy received 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van't Hoff. Van't Hoff was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics.
The Swedish Academy chose the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature. A group including 42 Swedish writers, artists and literary critics protested against this decision, having expected Leo Tolstoy to win. Some, including Burton Feldman, have criticised this prize because they consider Prudhomme a mediocre poet. Feldman's explanation is that most of the Academy members preferred Victorian literature and thus selected a Victorian poet. The first Physiology or Medicine Prize went to the German physicist and microbiologist Emil von Behring. During the 1890s, von Behring developed an antitoxin to treat diphtheria, which until then was causing thousands of deaths each year.
During the occupation of Norway, three members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee fled into exile. The remaining members escaped persecution from the Nazis when the Nobel Foundation stated that the Committee building in Oslo was Swedish property. Thus it was a safe haven from the German military, which was not at war with Sweden. These members kept the work of the Committee going but did not award any prizes. In 1944 the Nobel Foundation, together with the three members in exile, made sure that nominations were submitted for the Peace Prize and that the prize could be awarded once again. Although not technically a Nobel Prize, it is identified with the awards; its winners are announced with the Nobel Prize recipients, and the Prize in Economic Sciences is presented at the Swedish Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. The Board of the Nobel Foundation decided that after this addition, it would allow no further new prizes.
In 2008 the Physiology or Medicine Prize was shared among three virologists. French team Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi together shared half the prize for discovering that the virus now known as HIV causes AIDS. Harald zur Hausen shared the prize for his discovery that the human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer. The Chemistry Prize was shared among three biologists; Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien isolated and developed the green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish. The GFP has important applications in many areas of cell biology and biotechnology. Martti Ahtisaari received the Peace Prize "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts." The Physics Prize was awarded to Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio received the Literature Prize and was described as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation." The Economics Prize was awarded to Paul Krugman for his work on international trade and economic geography.
In 2009 the Chemistry Prize was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonath, for their work on the structure and function of the ribosome. The Physics Prize was awarded to Charles K. Kao for his research on the transmission of light through optical fibres and to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith for inventing a sensor that turns light into electrical signals, which made inventions such as the digital camera possible. Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson were awarded the Economics Prize for "their work in economic governance, especially the commons." Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Economics Prize. The Physiology or Medicine Prize was awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak for their research on telomeres. The Literature Prize was awarded to Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." The President of the United States, Barack Obama, was awarded the Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
Awards for physics, chemistry, and medicine require that the significance of the achievement is "tested by time." In practice, the lag between the discovery and the award is typically 20 or more years. For example, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Physics Prize for his 1930s work on stellar structure and evolution. Not all scientists live long enough for their work to be recognised. Some discoveries can never be considered for a prize if their impact is realised after the discoverers have died.
The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm occurs when each Nobel Laureate steps forward to receive the prize from the hands of the King of Sweden. In Oslo, the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presents the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of the King of Norway. Since 1902, the King of Sweden has presented all the prizes, except the Peace Prize, in Stockholm. At first King Oscar II did not approve of awarding grand prizes to foreigners, but is said to have changed his mind once his attention had been drawn to the publicity value of the prizes for Sweden.
Among the most criticised Nobel Peace Prizes was the one awarded to Henry Kissinger and Lê Ðức Thọ, who later declined the prize. This led to two Norwegian Nobel Committee members resigning. Kissinger and Thọ were awarded the prize for negotiating a ceasefire between North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973. However, when the award was announced hostilities still occurred from both sides. Many critics were of the opinion that Kissinger was not a peace-maker but the opposite; responsible for widening the war.
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin received the Peace Prize in 1994 for their efforts in making peace between Israel and Palestine. According to journalist Caroline Frost many issues, such as the plight of Palestinian refugees, had not been addressed and no lasting peace was established between Israel and Palestine. Immediately after the award was announced one of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members denounced Arafat as a terrorist and resigned. Additional misgivings about Arafat were widely expressed in various newspapers.
The award of the 2004 Literature Prize to Elfriede Jelinek drew a protest from a member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund. Ahnlund resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art." He alleged that Jelinek's works were "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure." The 2009 Literature Prize to Herta Müller also generated criticism. According to The Washington Post many US literary critics and professors had never previously heard of her. This made many feel that the prizes were too Eurocentric.
In 1949, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz received the Physiology or Medicine Prize for his development of the prefrontal leucotomy. The previous year Dr. Walter Freeman had developed a version of the procedure which was faster and easier to carry out. Due in part to the publicity surrounding the original procedure, Freeman's procedure was prescribed without due consideration or regard for modern medical ethics. Endorsed by such influential publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, lobotomy became so popular that about 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States in the three years immediately following Moniz's receipt of the Prize.
The Literature Prize also has controversial omissions. Adam Kirsch has suggested that many notable writers have missed out on the award for political or extra-literary reasons. The heavy focus on European and Swedish authors has been a subject of criticism. The Eurocentric nature of the award was acknowledged by Peter Englund, the 2009 Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, as a problem with the award and was attributed to the tendency for the academy to relate more to European authors. Notable writers that have been overlooked for the Literature Prize include; Émile Zola, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, August Strindberg, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Graham Greene and Mark Twain.
The strict rule against awarding a prize to more than three people at once is also controversial. When a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, the prize was awarded to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn for the development of mass spectrometry in protein chemistry, an award that did not recognise the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt. Similarly, the prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by an individual or collaborator who dies before the prize is awarded. In 1962, Francis Crick, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Physiology or Medicine Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin, a key contributor in that discovery, died of ovarian cancer four years earlier.
An example where discovery has been preferred over theory is Albert Einstein's prize. His 1921 Physics prize recognised his discovery of the photoelectric effect rather than his Special Theory of Relativity. Historian Robert Friedman proposes that this may be due to the Nobel Prize Committee's discrimination against theoretical science.
Two organisations have received the Peace Prize multiple times. The International Committee of the Red Cross received it three times: in 1917 and 1944 for its work during the world wars, and in 1963 during the year of its centenary. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has won the Peace Prize twice for assisting refugees: in 1954 and 1981.
Although no family matches the Curie family's record, there have been several with two laureates. Gunnar Myrdal received the Economics Prize in 1974 and his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Peace Prize in 1982. J. J. Thomson was awarded the Physics Prize in 1906 for showing that electrons are particles. His son, George Paget Thomson, received the same prize in 1937 for showing that they also have the properties of waves. William Henry Bragg together with his son, William Lawrence Bragg, shared the Physics Prize in 1915. Niels Bohr won the Physics prize in 1922, and his son, Aage Bohr, won the same prize in 1975. Manne Siegbahn, who received the Physics Prize in 1924, was the father of Kai Siegbahn, who received the Physics Prize in 1981. Hans von Euler-Chelpin, who received the Chemistry Prize in 1929, was the father of Ulf von Euler, who was awarded the Physiology or Medicine Prize in 1970. C.V. Raman won the Physics Prize in 1930 and was the uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the same prize in 1983. Arthur Kornberg received the Physiology or Medicine Prize in 1959. Kornberg's son, Roger later received the Chemistry Prize in 2006. Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Economics Prize in 1969, was the brother of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who received the 1973 Physiology or Medicine Prize. The other is Lê Ðức Thọ, chosen for the 1973 Peace Prize for his role in the Paris Peace Accords. He declined, claiming there was no actual peace in Vietnam.
During the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler hindered Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt, and Gerhard Domagk from accepting their prizes. All of them were awarded their diplomas and gold medals after World War II. In 1958, Boris Pasternak declined his prize for literature due to fear of what the Soviet Union government would do if he travelled to Stockholm to accept his prize. In return, the Swedish Academy refused his refusal, saying "this refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award."
* Category:Science and engineering awards Category:Organizations based in Sweden Category:Academic awards Category:1895 establishments
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Coordinates | 38°53′35.7″N77°1′29.9″N |
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Name | Muhammad Yunus মুহাম্মদ ইউনুস |
Caption | Muhammad Yunus at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 31, 2009 |
Birth date | June 28, 1940 |
Birth place | Chittagong, East Bengal, now Bangladesh) |
Death date | |
Occupation | BankerEconomist |
Known for | Grameen BankMicrocredit |
Alma mater | Chittagong University Vanderbilt University |
Spouse | Vera Forostenko (1970-1979)Afrozi Yunus (Present) |
Children | 2 |
Nationality | Bangladeshi |
Religion | Islam |
Awards |
Muhammad Yunus (, pronounced ) (born 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, an institution that provides microcredit (small loans to poor people possessing no collateral) to help its clients establish creditworthiness and financial self-sufficiency. In 2006 Yunus and Grameen received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Yunus himself has received several other national and international honors.
He previously was a professor of economics where he developed the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. He is the author of Banker to the Poor and a founding board member of Grameen America and Grameen Foundation. In early 2007 Yunus showed interest in launching a political party in Bangladesh named Nagorik Shakti (Citizen Power), but later discarded the plan. He is one of the founding members of Global Elders.
Yunus also serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner’s historic $1 billion gift to support United Nations causes. The UN Foundation builds and implements public-private partnerships to address the world’s most pressing problems, and broadens support for the UN.
During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, Yunus founded a citizen's committee and ran the Bangladesh Information Center, with other Bangladeshis living in the United States, to raise support for liberation. He became involved with poverty reduction after observing the famine of 1974, and established a rural economic program as a research project. In 1975, he developed a Nabajug (New Era) Tebhaga Khamar (three share farm) which the government adopted as the Packaged Input Programme. Introduced by then president Ziaur Rahman in late 1970s, the Government formed 40,392 village governments (gram sarkar) as a fourth layer of government in 2003. On 2 August 2005, in response to a petition filed by Bangladesh Legal Aids and Services Trust (BLAST) the High Court had declared Gram Sarkar illegal and unconstitutional.
Yunus finally succeeded in securing a loan from the government Janata Bank to lend it to the poor in Jobra in December 1976. The institution continued to operate by securing loans from other banks for its projects. By 1982, the bank had 28,000 members. On 1 October 1983 the pilot project began operations as a full-fledged bank and was renamed the Grameen Bank (Village Bank) to make loans to poor Bangladeshis. Yunus and his colleagues encountered everything from violent radical leftists to the conservative clergy who told women that they would be denied a Muslim burial if they borrowed money from the Grameen Bank. To ensure repayment, the bank uses a system of "solidarity groups". These small informal groups apply together for loans and its members act as co-guarantors of repayment and support one another's efforts at economic self-advancement. In 1989, these diversified interests started growing into separate organizations, as the fisheries project became Grameen Motsho (Grameen Fisheries Foundation) and the irrigation project became Grameen Krishi (Grameen Agriculture Foundation). as well as Grameen Telecom, which has a stake in Grameenphone (GP), biggest private sector phone company in Bangladesh. The Village Phone (Polli Phone) project of GP has brought cell-phone ownership to 260,000 rural poor in over 50,000 villages since the beginning of the project in March 1997.
The success of the Grameen model of microfinancing has inspired similar efforts in a hundred countries throughout the developing world and even in industrialized nations, including the United States. Many, but not all, microcredit projects also retain its emphasis on lending specifically to women. More than 94% of Grameen loans have gone to women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty and who are more likely than men to devote their earnings to their families. For his work with the Grameen Bank, Yunus was named an Global Academy Member in 2001.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was a vocal advocate for the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Muhammed Yunus. He expressed this in Rolling Stone magazine as well as in his autobiography My Life. In a speech given at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, President Clinton described Dr. Yunus as "a man who long ago should have won the Nobel Prize [and] I’ll keep saying that until they finally give it to him." Conversely, The Economist stated explicitly that Yunus was a poor choice for the award, stating: "...the Nobel committee could have made a braver, more difficult, choice by declaring that there would be no recipient at all."
in Davos, Switzerland.]] He has won a number of other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, the King Abdul Aziz medal in 2007, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the World Food Prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, and in December 2007 the Ecuadorian Peace Prize. Additionally, Dr. Yunus has been awarded 26 honorary doctorate degrees, and 15 special awards. Bangladesh government brought out a commemorative stamp to honor his Nobel Award. In January 2008, Houston, Texas declared 14 January as "Muhammad Yunus Day". He was invited and gave the MIT commencement address delivered on 6 June 2008, and Oxford's Romanes Lecture on 2 December 2008. He received the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service from the Eisenhower Fellowships at a ceremony in Philadelphia on 21 May 2009. He was also voted 2nd in Prospect Magazine's 2008 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.
Yunus was named among the most desired thinkers the world should listen to by the FP 100 (world's most influential elite) in the December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. On March 1, 2010, Yunus was awarded the prestigious Presidential Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. This is the highest honor available from the University.
On May 15, 2010, Yunus gave the commencement speech at Rice University for the graduating class of 2010.
On May 16, 2010, Yunus gave the commencement speech at Duke University for the graduating class of 2010. During this ceremony, he was also awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.
A documentary on Yunus' work titled To Catch a Dollar was shown at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and is due to be released in theaters in the US on September 2010. Another documentary film, "Bonsai - Celebrating the Vision of Muhammad Yunus", that looks at both microcredit and his social businesses is slated for release sometime in 2010.
In 2010, The British Magazine New Statesman Listed Muhammad Yunus at 40th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".
Yunus was keynote speaker in Microfinance Summit of South-East Asia in Indonesia 2008.
On 18 July 2007 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nelson Mandela, Graça Machel, and Desmond Tutu convened a group of world leaders to contribute their wisdom, independent leadership and integrity together to the world. Nelson Mandela announced the formation of this new group, The Global Elders, in a speech he delivered on the occasion of his 89th birthday. Archbishop Tutu is to serve as the Chair of The Elders. The founding members of this group include Machel, Yunus, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, and Mary Robinson. The Elders are to be independently funded by a group of Founders, including Richard Branson, Peter Gabriel, Ray Chambers; Michael Chambers; Bridgeway Foundation; Pam Omidyar, Humanity United; Amy Robbins; Shashi Ruia, Dick Tarlow; and The United Nations Foundation. Yunus is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP), an independent authority on Africa launched in April 2007 to focus world leaders’ attention on delivering their commitments to the continent. The Panel launched a major report in London on Monday 16 June 2008 entitled Africa's Development: Promises and Prospects.
In July 2009, Yunus became a member of the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation International Advisory Board to support the organisation's poverty reduction work. (S22E02).]]
;Articles by Muhammed Yunus
;On Muhammad Yunus
Category:Bangladeshi economists Category:Bangladeshi businesspeople Category:Development specialists Category:International development Category:Microfinance Category:Recipients of the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize Category:Nobel Peace Prize laureates Category:Bangladeshi Nobel laureates Category:Bengali Nobel laureates Category:Fulbright Scholars Category:World Food Prize laureates Category:Aga Khan Award for Architecture winners Category:Dhaka University alumni Category:Vanderbilt University alumni Category:Middle Tennessee State University faculty Category:Global Elders Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:1940 births Category:Living people Category:Ashoka Bangladesh Fellows
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Coordinates | 38°53′35.7″N77°1′29.9″N |
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Image width | 150px |
Birth date | May 31, 1941 |
Nationality | American |
Field | pharmacology |
Work institutions | UCLA School of Medicine, King Saud University |
Known for | nitric oxide |
Prizes | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1998) |
Louis J. Ignarro (born May 31, 1941) is an Italian American pharmacologist. He was corecipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad for demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide.
He is currently professor of pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine's department of molecular and medical pharmacology in Los Angeles, which he joined in 1985. Before relocating to California, he was a professor of pharmacology at Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, for 12 years. Ignarro has also previously worked as a staff scientist, research department, for the pharmaceutical division of CIBA-GEIGY Corporation in New York.
Ignarro has published numerous articles on his research. He received the Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association in 1998, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of cardiovascular science. That same year, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the following year, into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is the founder of the Nitric Oxide Society, and founder and editor-in-chief of Nitric Oxide Biology and Chemistry. Ignarro holds a B.S. in pharmacy, Columbia University, 1962, and a Ph.D. in pharmacology, University of Minnesota, School of Medicine, 1966. He also received a postdoctoral fellowship in chemical pharmacology from National Institutes of Health in 1968. He is a member of the scientific committee of Nicox, a French pharmaceutical company, a member of the Board of Directors of Antibe Therapeutics, a Canadian drug discovery company, a member of the Board of Directors of Operation USA, a non-profit organization, and a member of the Nutritional Advisory Board for Herbalife, a for-profit nutrition and weight-loss company.
Ignarro also promoted Niteworks' ingredients in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he can submit papers without review, and furthermore without disclosing his financial interest to the publication. After Ignarro's ties to Herbalife were revealed, the journal issued a correction to the article, citing Ignarro's undisclosed "conflict of interest." UCLA conducted its own investigation and determined that Ignarro did not act improperly as all the research was done in Italy and no research funds came from UCLA.[citation needed] Therefore, it was not legally necessary for him to disclose anything. Ignarro presents a one-hour Herbalife promotional video for Niteworks.
Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:American Nobel laureates Category:Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine Category:American pharmacologists Category:University of California, Los Angeles faculty Category:University of Minnesota alumni Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Tulane University faculty
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Coordinates | 38°53′35.7″N77°1′29.9″N |
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Name | Amartya Sen |
School tradition | Welfare economics , Development economics , Utilitarianism |
Color | lightblue |
Image name | Amartya Sen NIH.jpg |
Birth date | November 03, 1933Santiniketan, West Bengal, India |
Nationality | Indian |
Relegion | Atheism |
Citizenship | India |
Alma mater | Presidency College |
Field | Welfare economics, ethics |
Institution | Jadavpur UniversityUniversity of CambridgeHarvard UniversityMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyCornell UniversityUniversity of OxfordDelhi School of EconomicsLondon School of EconomicsUniversity of California, BerkeleyStanford University |
Influences | John RawlsPeter BauerJohn Stuart MillKenneth Arrow |
Influenced | Mahbub ul HaqKaushik BasuJean Dreze |
Contributions | Human development theory |
Awards | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1998)Bharat Ratna (1999) |
Signature | |
Repec prefix | e | repec_id = 1998_001 |
Amartya Sen, CH (, Ômorto Shen; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.
Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world".
Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941, in modern-day Bangladesh. His family migrated to India following partition in 1947. Sen studied in India at the Visva-Bharati University school and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics and emerged as the most eminent student of the well known batch of 1953. Subsequently in the same year, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also earned a First Class (Starred First) BA (Honours) in 1956. At Cambridge he was elected as the President of the Cambridge Majlis in 1956. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity College, he met Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis, after returning to Calcutta, recommended Sen to Triguna Sen, the then Education Minister of West Bengal. After Sen had enrolled for a Ph.D. in Economics to be completed at Trinity College, Cambridge, he arrived in India on a two year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him as Professor and the Founder-Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, which was his very first appointment, at the age of 23. During his tenure at Jadavpur University, he had the good fortune of having economic methodologist, A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching in Benares, as his supervisor. Sen returned to Cambridge after two years of full time teaching to complete his Ph.D. in 1959.
Subsequently, Sen won a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked, during which he took the radical decision of studying philosophy. That proved to be of immense help to his later research. Sen related the importance of studying philosophy thus: “The broadening of my studies into philosophy was important for me not just because some of my main areas of interest in economics relate quite closely to philosophical disciplines (for example, social choice theory makes intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral philosophy, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation), but also because I found philosophical studies very rewarding on their own.”
To Sen, then Cambridge was like a battlefield. There were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics and the diverse contributions of Keynes’ followers, on the one hand, and the “neo-classical” economists skeptical of Keynes, on the other. Sen was lucky to have close relations with economists on both sides of the divide. Meanwhile, thanks to its good “practice” of democratic and tolerant social choice, Sen’s own college, Trinity College, was an oasis very much removed from the discord. However, because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory whether in Trinity or Cambridge, Sen had to choose a quite different subject for his Ph.D. thesis, after completing his B.A. He submitted his thesis on “the choice of techniques” in 1959 under the supervision of the brilliant but vigorously intolerant Joan Robinson. During his time at Cambridge, and according to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society "The Apostles".
Between 1960–1961, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Visiting Professor. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Berkeley, Stanford, and Cornell.
He has taught economics also at the University of Calcutta and at the Delhi School of Economics (where he completed his magnum opus Collective Choice and Social Welfare in 1970), where he was a Professor from 1961 to 1972, a period which is considered to be a Golden Period in the history of DSE. In 1972 he joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Economics where he taught until 1977. From 1977 to 1986 he taught at the University of Oxford, where he was first a Professor of Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1986 he joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics. In 1998 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University.
In May 2007, he was appointed as chairman of Nalanda Mentor Group to steer the execution of Nalanda University Project, which seeks to revive the ancient seat of learning at Nalanda, Bihar, India into an international university.
In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price gouging, all connected to the war in the region. In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems. These issues led to starvation among certain groups in society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person's actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.
In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme. This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality.
Sen's revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of 'capability' developed in his article "Equality of What." He argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. This is because top-down development will always trump human rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt (is a 'right' something that must be provided or something that simply cannot be taken away?). For instance, in the United States citizens have a hypothetical "right" to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. In order for citizens to have a capacity to vote, they first must have "functionings." These "functionings" can range from the very broad, such as the availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls. Only when such barriers are removed can the citizen truly be said to act out of personal choice. It is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum capabilities guaranteed by that society. For an example of the "capabilities approach" in practice, see Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development.
He wrote a controversial article in The New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (see Missing women of Asia), analyzing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia. Other studies, such as one by Emily Oster, have argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has recanted some of her conclusions.
Sen was seen as a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century economists for his insistence on discussing issues seen as marginal by most economists. He mounted one of the few major challenges to the economic model that posited self-interest as the prime motivating factor of human activity. While his line of thinking remains peripheral, there is no question that his work helped to re-prioritize a significant sector of economists and development workers, even the policies of the United Nations.
Welfare economics seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community. Sen, who devoted his career to such issues, was called the "conscience of his profession." His influential monograph Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), which addressed problems related to individual rights (including formulation of the liberal paradox), justice and equity, majority rule, and the availability of information about individual conditions, inspired researchers to turn their attention to issues of basic welfare. Sen devised methods of measuring poverty that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions for the poor. For instance, his theoretical work on inequality provided an explanation for why there are fewer women than men in India and China despite the fact that in the West and in poor but medically unbiased countries, women have lower mortality rates at all ages, live longer, and make a slight majority of the population. Sen claimed that this skewed ratio results from the better health treatment and childhood opportunities afforded boys in those countries, as well as sex-specific abortion.
Governments and international organizations handling food crises were influenced by Sen's work. His views encouraged policy makers to pay attention not only to alleviating immediate suffering but also to finding ways to replace the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects, and to maintain stable prices for food. A vigorous defender of political freedom, Sen believed that famines do not occur in functioning democracies because their leaders must be more responsive to the demands of the citizens. In order for economic growth to be achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and public health, must precede economic reform.
His present wife, Emma Georgina Rothschild, is an economic historian, an expert on Adam Smith and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Sen usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he likes to go on long bike rides, and maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."
Sen is a self-proclaimed atheist and holds that this can be associated with Hinduism as a political entity. In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:
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