Nominees announced for 'European Inventor of the Year' award
An international jury chaired by former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok has nominated inventors from eleven countries for the title of 'European Inventor of the Year'. The winner will be announced in Brussels on 3 May The candidates are divided into six categories: industry; small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs); universities and research institutions; new EU Member States; non-European countries; and lifetime achievement. 'The jury's choice shows there is a good basis for leading-edge technology in Europe,' said EU Enterprise and Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen, who will present the award together with President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Alain Pompidou. 'The panel's selection is clear evidence that major [research and development] achievements, especially in marketable high-tech fields, are nowadays primarily the result of teamwork and cooperation,' said Mr Pompidou. The majority of the nominations are for work in the fields of information technology, communications or medicine. Nominees include Claude Berrou and the late Alain Glavieux from France, who developed Turbo Codes in 1993. The coding allows data to be transferred with almost perfect reliability at a rate close to the theoretical maximum. Zbigniew Janowicz and Cornelius Hollenberg, researchers at a German spin-off company, are nominated for their method for making proteins in Hansenula yeast. The technology is a key component in the production of an affordable hepatitis B vaccine, and is now used worldwide in UNICEF's vaccination programmes. Four researchers at Dutch company Affymax's US research institute are nominated for their invention of the Very Large Scale Immobilised Polymer Synthesis, more commonly known as the DNA chip. A single chip can hold more than 400,000 probe molecules, allowing biologists to carry out huge numbers of experiments at the same time. Peter Grünberg from the Jülich Research Centre in Germany has been selected for a discovery that enabled a 50-fold increase in the hard drive capacity of a typical workstation. The three nominees for the lifetime achievement award are: Karlheinz Brandenburg, who invented the MP3 format; James Dyson, for his bagless vacuum cleaner; and Federico Faggin, the first person to fit an entire central processing unit (CPU) on a single chip.