Great minds gather for Nobel week

This year’s Nobel Prize laureates gathered in Stockholm today to reap the rewards of their often lifelong work and research.

The laureates, facing a week of festivities, lectures and media presentations, have made, as Alfred Nobel declared more than 100 years ago, some of the greatest discoveries and contributions to help mankind.

The annual Nobel week will culminate on Friday when the laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics receive their prizes from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm’s concert hall.

The ceremony is followed by the Nobel banquet in City Hall, one of the most famous dinners in the world, where the laureates will dine, dance and mingle with royalty, Cabinet ministers, ambassadors and other dignitaries and guests.

The peace prize will be given out on Friday at City Hall in Oslo, Norway, to Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s deputy environmental minister, for her work in sustaining and preserving the environment, along with improving human rights and democracy.

On Saturday, film star Tom Cruise and TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey will host the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at the Spektrum, featuring Diana Krall, Andrea Bocelli, Cyndi Lauper, Patti LaBelle and Chris Botti, among others.

This year’s literature winner, the controversial Austrian author and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, will not attend any of the events, citing her poor health and social phobia. However, she will give the traditional Nobel lecture in literature via a video. Jelinek recorded her lecture last month and it will be presented to a live audience Tuesday.

All the other winners will give lectures on their fields to a gathering of students, Nobel officials and journalists.

Jelinek will become the first literature laureate since British-born Australian Patrick White in 1973 to not attend the prize ceremony and the banquet. Unlike White – or Ernest Hemingway in 1954 and Winston Churchill in 1953, who also did not attend the banquet – Jelinek will not send someone else to read a banquet speech on her behalf, said Annika Ekdahl, spokeswoman for the Nobel Foundation.

The banquet speeches have become one of the highlights of the Nobel dinner - some of which have later been widely published – and Jelinek will be one of the few laureates in modern times not to present one.

This year’s Nobel Prize announcements began on October 4, with the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine going to Americans Richard Axel and Linda Buck for their work on the sense of smell.

Americans David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.

The chemistry prize was awarded to Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose for their work in discovering a process that lets cells destroy unwanted proteins.

Norwegian Finn Kydland and American Edward Prescott received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for shedding light on how government policies and actions affect economies worldwide.

The prizes include a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (€1.12m). The awards are always given out on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.