Neuroscientist, chemist win 2009 Balzan prizes

MILAN — Discoveries on human memory and the development of a solar panel that imitates the workings of plants were among the achievements that earned four researchers Balzan prizes on Monday.

The awards — each worth 1 million Swiss francs ($943,000) — are meant to highlight new or overlooked fields of study, and half of the prize money must go toward funding research projects carried out by young scholars or scientists.

Brenda Milner, a British and Canadian scientist, was awarded for research that helped understand how memories are formed and retained. The research was key to the study of Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases, judges said.

“Her pioneering work has greatly influenced the field of cognitive neurosciences for more than half a century,” the judges wrote in a statement.

The German-born Swiss chemist Michael Graetzel received an award in the field of new materials for developing solar cells that use dyes to capture light and generate electricity, much like green plants use chlorophyl to get energy from the sun in the photosynthesis process.

Graetzel’s cells are less expensive than the more common ones based on silicon and are “one of the most promising approaches to the exploitation of solar power,” the judges said.

The study of 16th century literature and the history of science were the fields chosen for two other 2009 Balzan prizes.

They went respectively to British scholar Terence Cave, known for his work on French literature from the Renaissance on, and to Italian philosopher Paolo Rossi for his studies on the history of science and on philosophers including Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz.

The awards will be handed out at a Nov. 20 ceremony in Berne, Switzerland, the International Balzan Foundation said.

The foundation, based in Milan and Zurich, was established by the family of Italian journalist Eugenio Balzan, who fled his homeland to Switzerland in the 1930s to oppose Fascist pressure on the media.

Each year, the Balzan prizes are awarded in different subjects, with two prizes in the humanities and two in the sciences. By rotating subjects, the Balzan Foundation says it is able to focus on new or emerging areas of research and to sustain fields of study that may have been overlooked elsewhere.

Next year’s prizes will be awarded in the fields of European history, history of theater, biology of stem-cells and mathematics.