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Kazuo Ishiguro Wins Nobel Prize for Literature | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro


British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his book “The Remains of the Day,” has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said.

Ishiguro, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” the Academy wrote.

The prize is worth 9 million kronor ($1.1 million).

A revolutionary technique dubbed cryo-electron microscopy, which has peered closer at the Zika virus and an Alzheimer’s enzyme, earned scientists Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday.

Thanks to the international team’s “cool method”, which uses electron beams to examine the tiniest structures of cells, “researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they have never previously seen,” the Nobel chemistry committee said.

This has been “decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals,” it added. 

The ultra-sensitive imaging method allows molecules to be flash-frozen and studied in their natural form, without the need for dyes.

It has laid bare never-before-seen details of the tiny protein machines that run all cells.