2008 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences announced: committee recognizes work with viruses, symmetry breaking and a fluorescent protein.

Physiology or Medicine

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The $1.4 million Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008 will be shared by three European scientists for identifying the roles of sexually transmitted viruses in causing cervical cancer and AIDS.

Half of the prize goes to Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg for his discovery that the human papillomavirus, or HPV, causes cervical cancer. He and his team isolated HPV DNA from cervical tumors in the lab and identified HPV-16 and HPV-18--the two strains that cause most cervical cancers. Zur Hausen made his recombinant samples of viral DNA available to other scientists, and the subsequent research cleared the way for the HPV screening and vaccines available today.

"It's certainly very satisfying to see that the vaccines are very efficient," zur Hausen says.

The other half of the prize will be shared by Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris that culminated in the 1983 discovery of HIV.

Their research was confirmed by Robert Gallo and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. Eventually both teams were credited as codiscoverers. But the Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi paper came first, says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.

The early HIV findings paved the way for a test for the virus, for blood supply screening and for the development of drugs to combat HIV.

Physics

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Three theorists will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for advances involving symmetry breaking, a cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics.

Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago. He began formulating his mathematical description of a type of symmetry violation, known as spontaneous broken symmetry, as early as 1960.

"Nambu was the first to apply the idea of a spontaneously broken symmetry in elementary particle physics--that is, a symmetry that is an exact property of the underlying equations of the theory, but is not realized in the solutions of these equations, and hence not easily apparent in the properties of elementary particles," says 1979 Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin.

The other half of the 2008 physics Nobel is shared by Japanese researchers Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba and Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto University.

Kobayashi and Maskawa discovered the origin of another type of symmetry violation that had been observed but not explained. Their work successfully predicted that nature must have at least three families of quarks, the building blocks of neutrons and protons and various other particles.

The winners' accomplishments tie in to the "most essential ideas in our understanding of modern physics," says physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University.

Chemistry

The 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry will be awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein, or GFR The men will share the prize equally.

The barrel-shaped protein makes jellyfish glow green under ultraviolet light and has become an important and widely used tool for biologists studying living cells and proteins.

Shimomura, of both the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University, discovered the protein in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in 1962. He also discovered the chemical mechanisms that jellyfish use to glow, or bioluminesce.

Chalfie, of Columbia University, realized that the protein was more than a curiosity and could be used as a tag to track and study cells. He went on to develop the gene for the fluorescent protein for use as such a biological tag. He demonstrated its usefulness by coloring six cells in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

Tsien, of the University of California, San Diego and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, tweaked the structure of the protein to make it glow in a rainbow of colors. That ability enables scientists to track a number of different proteins or cells at the same time, allowing for a deeper understanding of biological interactions.

In 1968, at age 16, Tsien won the top prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition (now the Intel Science Talent Search). His project explored the orientation of an ion in transition metal complexes. The competition is owned and operated by Society for Science & the Public (then Science Service), which publishes Science News.