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Nobel prize winner Hideki Yukawa

Notable Japanese Nobel Laureates

Portrait of Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) by Gösta Florman (1831–1900).

The Nobel Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious annual international set of awards that can be bestowed on any person. Alfred Bernhard Nobel (October 21, 1833 – December 10, 1896), was a Swedish inventor whose will established the prizes in 1895. He owned Bofors, a Swedish company that formerly produced iron and steel  but later became a major manufacturer of cannon and other types of armaments. Alfred Nobel held over 300 patents; dynamite was the most famous.

Portrait of Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) by Gösta Florman (1831–1900).

His amassed fortune posthumously subsidizes the annual awarding of the Nobel Prize such as medals, diplomas, and money. The purse depends on the Nobel Foundations and what it can award each year. The purse has increased since the 1980s when the prize money was about U.S. $350,000 per prize. In 2009 it was around U.S. $1.4 million, and it decreased in June 2012 to less than $1.2 million.

The Swedish and Norwegian committees award prizes in several categories, namely: Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. The prizes for these categories were first awarded in 1901. The category for Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was created in 1968. The Peace Price is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.

There have been nineteen Japanese Nobel Prize winners since 1949 beginning with Hideki Yukawa, to the most recent Japanese laureate from 2012, Shinya Yamanaka. Here are some more:

Nobel prize winner Hideki YukawaHideki Yukawa (1907–1981)–a theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate in Physics in 1949 for his work in “his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces.”

Hideki Yukawa

He published his theory of mesons (hadronic subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction).  Yukawa’s theory explained the interaction between protons and neutrons, and it was a major influence on the research on elementary particles.

Eisaku Satō  (1901–1975)–a Japanese politician considered the second longest serving Japanese prime minister in the history of Japan, having served a total of seven years, seven months, and 28 days. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 with Seán MacBride.Eisaku Sato

Satō introduced the Three Non-Nuclear Principles in 1967 which means non-production, non-possession, and non-introduction of nuclear weapons.

Eisaku Satō. | 内閣官房内閣広報室

He also later on suggested the “Four-Pillars Nuclear Policy” and while he was prime minister he entered the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) an international treaty that entered into force in 1970, whose objective is “to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.”

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka

Shinya Yamanaka (1962– )–a physician and researcher of adult stem cells, he is the most recent Japanese Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 “for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent” and he shares his award with John B. Gurdon.

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka.

He is currently the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University, a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California, and a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

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