The Nobel Prizes are generally considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in the world but depressingly few people are able to name the winners of the various categories. Compare this to the likelihood of people being able to name past and present Oscar Award winners or how readily sports fans can recite the entire histories of major sporting events. When it comes to the Nobel however, even experienced bloggers who write frequently about economics can get the name of the Nobel laureate in economics wrong, as Steven D. Levitt pointed out recently.

So I thought that listing this year’s winners and summarizing their accomplishments would make for a worthy blog post. We’ll start with the Nobel Peace Prize, which despite being the least objective and most disputed of the different categories, is easily the most well-known among the public. It is also the only one of the prizes to be judged by a Norwegian committee instead of a Swedish institution. Whereas the other Nobel prizes are traditionally awarded only many years after the original breakthrough to ensure that it is real and confers genuine benefits to humanity, the Peace Prize is occasionally awarded only to send a political signal or to encourage someone who is deemed to be on the right path but hasn’t really done much yet, as last year’s award to Barack Obama demonstrated.

Nevertheless, this year’s award goes to Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo. As the official press release explains, he has been involved in the struggle for fundamental human rights in China for over twenty years, having participated in the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and was a leading author of Charter ’08, a widely circulated manifesto calling for human rights in the country. As China’s global clout grows along with its economic strength, and the countries of the West becoming ever more wary of bringing it to account over the treatment of its own citizens, I’d say it’s a pretty timely choice. If we must have a Peace Prize at all, this is probably as good a use for it as it’s possible to find.

This year’s prize in physics was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for a discovery made through an experiment so simple that you wonder why no one has done it before. The pair created a new form of carbon crystal with the thickness of a mere atom at the University of Manchester in 2004. Called graphene, the crystal is strong, thin, transparent and possesses a variety of interesting electrical properties, making it suitable for a range of applications, such as touch-screens. They first made the new material by placing sticky tape on a piece of graphite, the type of carbon used in pencils, and then peeled it off. The thin layer of carbon that was stuck on the tape thus became graphene.

The prize for chemistry is divided between three people, Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, for inventing a new way to manipulate carbon molecules. This is because while the element is central to all life on Earth and plays a key role in all biological processes, it is frustratingly inert and difficult to work with. It will not burn, nor react with water nor bind with oxygen to rust. Therefore in order to work with carbon molecules, scientists need to make it more reactive. This started in the 1960s with work by Dr. Heck, of the University of Delaware,  who used palladium to promote reactions involving alkenes.

Dr. Negishi at Purdue University went on to improve the process by adding zinc compounds in addition to the palladium and Dr. Suzuki of Hokkaido University refined it further by adding borons. This set of chemical processes, known as palladium-catalyzed cross coupling, is today widely used in both the pharmaceuticals and electronics industry. It is also a fine example of the slow but inexorable progress of science with different researchers working separately at different times and places  to build upon each other’s work to create something that is useful to all of humanity.

The discovery for which the medicine or physiology prize  is awarded this year is known to everyone, though it is a little surprising that it took this long for it to be recognized. It goes to Robert Edwards for the invention of in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy, the technology that makes possible what is colloquially known as test-tube babies. Dr. Edwards first tested his methods on mice in the 1950s but had difficulty in replicating his results with human embryos until he teamed up with a gynecologist who was one of the pioneers of laparoscopy, or keyhole surgery, which allowed him to extract unfertilized eggs from women’s ovaries in reasonably large numbers without harm.

The eggs were then fertilized with sperm outside of the bodies of the women, bypassing the Fallopian blockage that was a common cause of infertility, and the embryos that results were then re-implanted into the women. In 1978, the birth of the first baby conceived using his method, Louise Brown, confirmed that it worked despite the barrage of objections the duo received on moral and religious grounds. Since then, more than four millions babies have been born using the method.

The prize for economics similarly goes to three people, Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides, for work in search market theory. Diamond realized that search markets are not frictionless as the search process consumes both time and resources. So, in a job market for example, even though there are both job applicants and vacancies that in theory match each other, they may not get into contact with each other due to the friction in the market. This explains why an economy can have both vacancies and unemployment at the same time.

Diamond analyzed the foundations of the theory while Mortensen and Pissarides expanded it and applied it to labor markets in particular. This has led to models that help us understand how employment, vacancies and wages are affected by economic policy and regulation, specifically the conclusion that more generous unemployment benefits leads to more unemployment and longer job search times, a fact that is particularly pertinent in the current economic climate.

Finally the Nobel Prize for literature goes to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Not much to comment on this one as I have no real knowledge on modern literature. I note that while the official Nobel Prize website lists an extensive bibliography for him, the actual press release is embarrassingly sparse. From what I can tell, his major work is his first novel, translated as The Time of the Hero, that was first published in 1963, and was a realistic and highly controversial account of his experience as a cadet in a military school in Lima, Peru.