St. Louisan shares chemistry award

ST. LOUIS -- For much of his four decades at Monsanto Co., William S. Knowles lived the researcher's life: Married to a microscope, he seldom drew much attention in pursuit of the latest, greatest find.

Now 84 and long retired, the suburban St. Louisan is getting his due.

Knowles' anonymity vaporized with a 4 a.m. wakeup call Wednesday with a message he may have confused as a prank: Congratulations, the caller from Sweden said, you've won a share of the latest Nobel Prize in chemistry.

"It just kind of overwhelmed me. I made sure it wasn't a joke," Knowles said from his Kirkwood, Mo., home, hours after being told his breakthrough in the late 1960s was being rewarded. "It was like, 'What, little old me?' I haven't been to sleep since. It hasn't sunk in yet. I never even thought such a thing was in the offing. I just really never thought I had any chance."

Also Wednesday, three Americans won the Nobel prize for economics for developing ways to measure the power of information in a wide range of deals and investments, from used car sales to the recent boom and bust of high-tech stocks.

The award extends U.S. dominance of the prestigious Nobel awards, with eight Americans winning prizes so far this year, one more than in 2000.

George A. Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley, A. Michael Spence of Stanford University and Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University will share the economics prize, which is worth $943,000 this year.

Their theory on "asymmetric information" was lauded for giving experts an important tool for gauging how players with differing amounts of information influence financial markets and everyday transactions.

Though developed nearly three decades ago, the contributions continue to have a wide-ranging impact and "form the core of modern information economics," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

44 years with Monsanto

Knowles, who retired from Monsanto in 1986 after 44 years with the company, shares the prize with another American and a Japanese scientist for discoveries now used to make various medicines, including antibiotics, heart drugs and a widely used treatment for Parkinson's disease.

While working for Monsanto in 1968, Knowles found a way to produce the helpful form of the amino acid L-dopa, which is used to treat Parkinson's.

Knowles and Ryoji Noyori, 63, of Nagoya University in Japan, shared half of the $943,000 award. K. Barry Sharpless, 60, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., won the other half.

They overcame a key problem in making drugs: The molecules of many substances used as drugs come in two forms that are mirror images of each other, just as the left hand mirrors the right. And only one of these forms is helpful, while the other is inactive or even harmful.

The three men developed chemical catalysts to produce only the useful form of such molecules. The resulting batches of drug are more potent and lack the side effects that the other form of the molecule would cause.

"From time to time, we are fortunate enough that the science we pursue makes a profound difference in the world around us. This is one of those times," Robert Fraley, Monsanto's chief technology officer, said in a statement Wednesday.