The wave of creativity that has swept through Latin American writing since the 1960s has turned the region into an engine for change on a global scale and Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the major figures in this Latin American renaissance. He was born in Peru in 1936 and his life, like his writing,…

Herta Müller has lived through the kind of vicious absurdity that most can only imagine. A member of Romania’s German minority, which was protected when Romania allied itself with Hitler, but was then persecuted under Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship, she will always be an outsider, someone whose past will never allow them to fit in. Born…

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has said that the French language is the only place where he feels a sense of belonging. He is someone who has always lived on the edge, and in-between, and is hard to identify with a single locality. Itinerant from childhood, he has continued to travel, and now divides his time…

Doris Lessing’s career, like that of Mario Capecchi, another 2007 Nobel Laureate, shows that a strict pattern of formal schooling is not the only way to success. Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran), to British parents, but her family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in hope of a better future. However, that future…

In this age of mass media, mass movement, and globalization it is likely that we will confront different cultures and different races as we go about our daily business. But Turkey, which straddles the intersection of East and West, has always had to deal with the problems and pleasures of diversity. The best-selling Turkish novelist…

Life on earth is built on carbon. Chains of carbon atoms, variously arranged, constitute the backbone of most of the molecules that form and regulate living systems. These molecules, large and small, of course contain several other elements too. But the greatest challenge to chemists, when they seek to replicate and even improve on nature’s…

At first sight it seems simple enough: DNA makes RNA makes protein, and, by extension, you and me and every living thing. But this ‘central dogma of biology’, as famously called it, requires some stupendously complicated machinery to make it happen, and much of the last half century of research has been devoted to unravelling…

The discoveries awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are a shining example of how fundamental research in one area of science can sometimes lead to highly beneficial applications in another. In this case, finding the key to how a marine organism produces light unexpectedly ended-up providing researchers with a powerful array of tools with…

Lying between your genes and you are molecular machines that allow the otherwise silent information wrapped-up in your DNA to speak. Working in turn to select, transmit, read and decipher the DNA code, they drive the production of all the components needed for life. Roger Kornberg’s research focuses on the earliest phases of this process,…

Scientific progress can be said to be determined not only by the ingenuity of basic findings but also by the key developments that expand their use. A prime example is Richard Ernst’s advances that have successfully brought a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, to the scientific and medical mainstream. In the late…