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Nobel Prizes honor AIDS researchers, French writer
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-11 09:32

Researchers who discovered the AIDS virus and glowing proteins, an outspoken US economist and a globe-trotting French writer have received their Nobel Prizes.

The winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, acknowledges the applause after receiving his medal in the concert hall in Stockholm December 10, 2008. [Agencies]

Amid traditional pomp and circumstance, Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf handed out the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.2 million) awards Wednesday in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and economics in Stockholm.

The Nobel Peace Prize was presented at a separate ceremony in Norway to Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, for decades of peace work, including a 2005 deal that ended fighting between the Indonesian government and Aceh rebels.

Five Europeans, four Americans and three Japanese were singled out by the Nobel committees when the 2008 prizes were announced in October.

The 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel stipulates that the prizes, first awarded in 1901, should be given to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

The Swedish Academy continued a trend of honoring European writers by selecting Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio for the literature award. The author of more than 40 works including "The Book of Flights" and "Desert," Le Clezio holds dual nationality with Mauritius and spends much of his time in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

"Your work is a story of migration; you are yourself are a nomad of the world," Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, said in presenting the award.

The medicine prize jury cited French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983. They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

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