Shaw Prize honours five international scientists with prestigious award
As five international scientists honoured, Nobel Prize could be next step
The city's top annual science award has become a stepping stone to the Nobel Prize, a leading academic revealed yesterday.
Seven winners of the Shaw Prize, founded in 2002 by late film mogul Sir Run Run Shaw, have become Nobel laureates since after receiving the annual honour in Hong Kong, said Professor Kenneth Young, vice-chairman of the board of adjudicators.
Young made the remark during yesterday's announcement of this year's winners. Five eminent scientists in the United States and Germany have won or shared top prizes in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.
"We are all pleased to see that quite a number of Shaw Prize-winners had gone on very shortly to win the Nobel Prize - I believe there are seven - and I think that shows the quality of the adjudicating process that identifies the top scientists, the best ones in the world," the Chinese University professor of physics said.
The Prize for Life Sciences and Medicine was shared by Professor Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University and E. Peter Greenberg of the University of Washington for the discovery of quorum sensing that sheds new light on bacteria communication and offers ways to interfere that have significant health applications.
And the Mathematics prize was also awarded in equal shares to Professor Gerd Faltings, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and Professor Henryk Iwaniec of Rutgers University in the United States for developing tools in number theory to resolve classical problems with wide application in daily life, such as credit card or internet security coding systems.
According to Young, the Life Science category received the highest number of nominations at more than 100.
After almost six months of intense deliberation among the three selection committees, names of the awardees were submitted to the Shaw Prize Council, which confers a medal, a certificate, and US$1 million to the winner, or winners, to share. The nature of the exercise warrants no requirement on transparency.
"This is an award set up under the Shaw Foundation and there is no public money involved. So transparency doesn't apply here. The adjudicating process is the same with that of the Nobel Prize," he said.
Into its 12th year, Young believes the Shaw Prize will build on its esteem through the top level of award winners, among which astronomy and mathematics categories have become well-known in the international scholarly circuit.
But he was not worried about the question of how the winners' work would be used. "These awards concern top science and scientists, which address not today or tomorrow, but the distant future of mankind," he said.
