German Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize
Gerhard Ertl of Germany has won the Nobel Chemistry Prize,
coming as he celebrates his 71st birthday on Wednesday, for work
that has become invaluable to the modern chemical industry and
helped the fight to fix the ozone hole. Ertl is a professor
emeritus at Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, which is part of
the Max Planck Society.
Accolades
The Nobel committee lauded him as a forerunner in surface
chemistry, a branch that evolved in the 1960s, and one of the
first to understand the potential of modern technology for
exploring the new field.
"This science is important for the chemical industry and can
help us to understand such varied processes as why iron rusts,
how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work,"
the jury said in its citation.
It can also explain why Earth's protective ozone layer is
damaged through chemical reactions on the surfaces of minute ice
crystals in the stratosphere, the panel explains.
The Work
Ertl's achievement was to build a rigorous step-by-step
experimental method to build up a complete picture of a chemical
reaction on a solid surface.
These experiments are high-ticket affairs, as they require a
laboratory that is utterly free of contamination and able to
apply individual layers of atoms and molecules to a pure surface
to observe each phase of the reaction.
Ertl "laid the methodological foundations for an entire field
of research," the citation said.
"The great reliability of Ertl's results is due to the
meticulous precision in his work combined with an outstanding
capacity to refine problems. He has painstaking and
systematically searched for the best experimental techniques to
investigate each separate question."
Born on October 10, 1936 in Bad Cannstadt, Ertl has received
numerous honours and awards throughout his career, and is a
member of several scientific academies.
"I was speechless at first when I got the news from Stockholm,"
Ertl says, “Mainly I feel proud."
He described the honour as a once-in-a-lifetime birthday
present.
"I can't say I expected the prize but I knew I was on the list
of candidates,"
he said.
Nobel 2007
Ertl is the second German to win a Nobel Prize this year. On
Tuesday, Peter Gruenberg shared the physics prize with Albert
Fert of France for a discovery that led to the miniaturised hard
disk.
On Monday, the Nobel Medicine Prize went to Mario Capecchi
and Oliver Smithies of the United States and Martin Evans of
Britain for their work in creating "knockout mice," or
genetically manipulated mice that replicate human disease.
The literature prize will be awarded on Thursday and the
prestigious peace prize on Friday.
The economics prize will wrap up this year's Nobel season on
Monday.
The 2007 laureate receives a gold medal, a diploma and 10
million Swedish kronor equivalent to 1.53 million dollars or
1.08 million euros.
The formal prize ceremony will be held as tradition dictates on
December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prize's
creator, Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred
Nobel.
The prizes were first awarded in 1901.
AFP/YINKA
