Nobel prizes

Gunter Blobel, 63, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Rockefeller University, has won the 1999 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine. He was awarded the prize for his discovery that "proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localisation in the cell". He was born in Germany and studied at the University of Tubingen and University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Gerardus 't Hooft, 43, professor at the University of Utrecht, and Martinus J. G. Veltman, 68, professor emeritus at Bilthoven, the Netherlands, have won the 1999 Nobel prize for physics. They receive the prize for having placed particle physics theory on a firmer mathematical foundation. Both were born in the Netherlands and studied at the University of Utrecht. Veltman has been professor of physics at Utrecht and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Ahmed Zewail, 53, Linus Pauling professor of chemical physics at the California Institute of Technology, has won the Nobel prize for chemistry for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. He was born in Egypt and he studied at the University of Alexandria and the University of Pennsylvania.

Canadian-born Robert Mundell, 66, professor of economics at Columbia University, New York, has won the Nobel prize for economics for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas. He studied at the University of British Columbia, University of Washington, MIT, LSE and University of Chicago.