The Diplomatic Dispatch

And so Nobel week comes around again.  For over a hundred years 10 December has been the day on which the world’s most prestigious prizes have been awarded by the Swedish King in the memory of Alfred Nobel.  It’s an event that has something of the feel of the Last Night of the Proms, a collective celebration that seems to symbolise something about the nation’s values. Without the flag-waving in Sweden’s case, of course…

As those of you that have followed this blog will know, this year’s Nobel prize ceremony is a particularly special one for Britain.  The eminent British Professor Bob Edwards will be awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the development of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy. Professor Edwards was a visionary and a fighter of the ilk that the Nobel committee choose from time to time to recognise.  This accolade goes to Professor Edwards not just because he foresaw in the 1950s that an in vitro process might be a treatment for infertility but also for the hard work that he put into making it a reality and the resistance that he endured in the interim.  And with colleagues such as the late Dr Patrick Steptoe Professor Edwards’ efforts were finally crowned by success with the birth of the world’s first “test tube baby” in 1978. A remarkable four million babies have so far been born following IVF.

Alongside Professor Edwards´s wife Ruth – who will receive the award on his behalf – are Professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of Manchester University who will receive the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking experiments with the two-dimensional material graphene. Graphene is a form of carbon. As a material it is completely new – not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. Graphene looks set to change the boundaries of experimentation in quantum physics but it also has plenty of practical applications.  As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it.

The London School of Economics is also celebrating the award of a third share in the Economics Prize to Professor Christopher Pissarides for his work on search theories, in particular helping us to understand the apparent mismatch between high unemployment and high labour market vacancies and how joblessness, job vacancies, and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy.

This year’s Nobel week is then an extraordinary expression of the strength of British science and a reflection not just of the individual brilliance of the prize winners but also of the quality of the research being undertaken at British academic institutions.  It is something that we can be proud of. In the UK, like Sweden, we know how much our research base contributes to economic growth and social well-being, which is why we have protected our national science budget despite the pressures on public funds at home. Sitting in Stockholm in Nobel Week it is not hard to understand why this kind of commitment to funding science is central to creating the next Geim/Novoselov or Watson/Crick partnership, and the benefits – for all of us – that come from the extraordinary things they do.

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