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News: • Nobel Notebook • Overview Background: • Interactive map: Laureate Locator • Mini-profiles of the 1998 Laureates The Prizes: • Chemistry • Economics • Literature • Medicine • Peace • Physics Discussion: • Message Board: What do Gandhi, Jimmy Carter and the pope have in common? • Pyramids Debate: Which writers deserve a literature prize?

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- For most of those who received Nobel Prizes in the Swedish capital on Thursday, science is a way of improving the human condition, but for one it's a means of describing it.

Literature laureate Jose Saramago of Portugal often uses eerie, almost-credible scientific events as metaphors for addressing philosophical issues. In his most-recent novel "Blindness," people suddenly and inexplicably go blind in an allegory of social disintegration.

"The Stone Raft" from 1986 posits the Iberian Peninsula snapping off from the rest of the European continent and floating into the North Atlantic in a metaphorical search for identity away from the standardizing nature of the European Union.

Saramago and winners of the physics, chemistry, medicine and economics prizes received their prizes in an afternoon ceremony at Stockholm's imposing Konserthuset hall. They will later be feted at a banquet in the castle-like city hall.

The prizes are given every year on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who established the prizes in his will.

INTERACTIVE:

José Saramago Nobel lecture in Literature at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. (IPIX plugin required)

Each laureate receives a medal and 7.6 million Swedish kronor (about $950,000).

Nitric oxide work draws medicine prize

The medicine prize is shared by Americans Robert Furchgott of the State University of New York, Louis Ignarro of the University of California-Los Angeles and Ferid Murad of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, for their work in discovering how nitric oxide does its lifesaving work of dilating blood vessels.

Nitric oxide also plays a role in the working of the anti- impotence drug Viagra and the laureates say it is likely to have wide new applications in counteracting asthma and coronary disease.

Amartya Sen, an Indian scholar, won the economics prize for his work in examining the causes behind famines and other catastrophes. He is a specialist in welfare economics, the discipline that tries to establish quantitative ways of assessing quality of life.

The physics prize goes to Robert Laughlin of Stanford University, Horst Stormer of Columbia University and Daniel Tsui of Princeton University for discovering how electrons can change behavior and act more like fluid than particles.

INTERACTIVE:

Seating arrangements for the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall of Stockholm (IPIX plugin required)

The chemistry prize went to Walter Kohn of the University of California at Santa Barbara and John Pople of Northwestern University for developing ways of analyzing molecules in chemical reactions. Kohn did not come to Stockholm because of an illness in his family; he plans to come for the 1999 ceremony, according to the Nobel Foundation.

The Nobel Peace Prize winners, David Trimble and John Hume of Northern Ireland, also received their prizes on Thursday, in ceremonies in Oslo, Norway.