dpa
Copenhagen
The winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes, including 10 scientists, one writer and one peace organization, received their awards in Oslo and Stockholm on Tuesday.
The heads of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization representing survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings - Terumi Tanaka, Shigemitsu Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mimaki - received their Nobel Peace Prize medals in Oslo. The award was for Nihon Hidankyo’s “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” according to the official citation. In his presentation on behalf of the organization, Terumi Tanaka described his impressions as a 13-year-old of the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki and warned of the immense damage that nuclear weapons could cause today.
“Please try to imagine: There are 4,000 nuclear warheads, ready to be launched immediately. This means that damage hundreds or thousands of times greater than that which happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen right away,” Tanaka said.
The South Korean author Han Kang - the only woman among this year’s honorees - and 10 other winners in medicine, physics, chemistry and economic sciences were then presented their Nobel medals by Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Han, who became known internationally in 2007 for her novel “The Vegetarian,” received the award “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” the official citation said.
Artificial intelligence researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics, followed by David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper in the chemistry category for their work building and predicting protein structures. Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
