—File Photo

PARIS: Four Nobel prize winners have joined forces with dozens of artists and writers to demand that access to books be made a priority for disaster relief, once victims’ basic needs have been met.

While food, shelter and health will always come first, the petition spearheaded by Libraries Without Borders (LWB) argues that “more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward.”

“Books, writing, and learning should not be denied to victims of humanitarian disasters,” read the text sent to AFP.

Signatories include Nobel Literature Prize winners Toni Morrison, JM Coetzee and Doris Lessing as well as the South African former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Frederik Willem de Klerk.

Based on its work after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, LWB said it found that access to books and information improved outcomes for the displaced.

“Books and expression help sustain intellectual stimulation and promote self-worth and resilience amid crisis.”

“Whether through books, computers, legal assistance or training, access to information and cultural resources empowers individuals and gives them the tools to reconstruct what has been lost,” said the text.

LWB called on international organisations to expand reading, cultural and educational programmes and make the provision of access to information and books a priority for international humanitarian relief.

Other backers of the petition include the US writers Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz and David Eggers, Princeton academic Anne-Marie Slaughter, Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, the French actor Jean Reno and novelist Amelie Nothomb and Cannes film festival chief Thierry Fremaux.

In this handout photograph released by the University of Wisconsin-Madison on September 29, 2012, technician Andy Francis (L) and associate scientist and co-principal investigator Antoine Lutz (R) outfit Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (seated) with a 128-channel geodesic sensor net in preparation for conducting an electroencephalography (EEG) test at the EEG facility in the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison on June 5, 2008. — Photo by AFP

UPPER DOLPA: As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the fresh Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had ever tested.

The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.

“It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” the Frenchman told AFP.

Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves, those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory, “never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, Davidson said.

The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.

Research into the phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity”, is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of ground-breaking experiments along with other leading scientists across the world.

“We have been looking for 12 years at the effect of short and long-term mind-training through meditation on attention, on compassion, on emotional balance,” he said.

“We’ve found remarkable results with long-term practitioners who did 50,000 rounds of meditation, but also with three weeks of 20 minutes a day, which of course is more applicable to our modern times.”

The 66-year-old, accompanying other senior Tibetan monks at a festival in the remote Nepalese Himalayan region of Upper Dolpa, has become a globally respected Buddhist and is one of the religion’s leading western scholars.

But he has not always been on the path to enlightenment.

Ricard grew up among the Paris intellectual elite as the son of celebrated French libertarian philosopher Jean-Francois Revel and abstract watercolour painter Yahne Le Toumelin.

“All these people used to come around, most of Paris intellectual life. We had all the French painters and I was myself interested in classical music so I met a lot of musicians,” he said. “At lunch we’d have three Nobel Prize winners eating with us. It was fantastic… Some of them were wonderful but some could be difficult.”

By the time he got his PhD in cell genetics from the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 1972 he had become disillusioned with the dinner party debates and had already begun to journey to Darjeeling in India during his holidays.

Eschewing intimate relationships and a career, he moved to India to study Buddhism and emerged 26 years later as something of celebrity thanks to “The Monk And The Philosopher”, a dialogue on the meaning of life he wrote with his father.

“That was the end of my quiet time because it was a bestseller. Suddenly I was projected into the western world. Then I did more dialogues with scientists and the whole thing started to spin off out of control.

“I got really involved in science research and the science of meditation.”A prominent monk in Kathmandu’s Shechen Monastery, Ricard divides his year between isolated meditation, scientific research and accompanying the Dalai Lama as his adviser on trips to French-speaking countries and science conferences.

He addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos at the height of the financial crisis in 2009 to tell gathered heads of state and business leaders it was time to give up greed in favour of “enlightened altruism”.

His other works include “Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill” and several collections of photographs of the landscape, people and spiritual masters of the Himalayas.

Ricard donates all proceeds of his books to 110 humanitarian projects which have built schools for 21,000 children and provide healthcare for 100,000 patients a year.

He was awarded the French National Order of Merit for his work in preserving Himalayan culture but it is his work on the science of happiness which perhaps defines him best.

Ricard sees living a good life, and showing compassion, not as a religious edict revealed from on high, but as a practical route to happiness.

“Try sincerely to check, to investigate,” he said. “That’s what Buddhism has been trying to unravel, the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.”

Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz,(L), a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University and Dr Brian Kobilka of Stanford University. – Reuters Photo

CHICAGO/LONDON | Thu Oct 11, 2012 - For some scientists, winning a Nobel Prize marks the end of a long and successful career.

But the work, in a sense, is just beginning for newly minted Nobel laureates in chemistry Dr. Brian Kobilka, 57, of Stanford University in California, and his mentor, Dr. , 69, of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

“There is still a lot to do,” Kobilka said in a telephone interview from his home in Palo Alto, California, where he learned of his prize early on Wednesday morning. “There is a lot to do.”

In research spanning four decades, the scientists working separately and together have helped to characterize the exact structure of an important class of proteins known as G-protein-coupled receptors or GPCRs, which serve as a main conduit for chemicals to get past a cell’s membrane and be taken up by a cell.

Roughly 1,000 human genes carry genetic codes for the receptors, which affect a variety of functions, from the beating of the heart to the workings of the brain and even how cells in the nose detect odors.

A subset of these receptors, some several hundred, respond to hormones and neurotransmitters in the body, and these have been targets for drug discovery, in many cases even before researchers knew these receptors existed.

About 40 percent of drugs already use these receptors or doors to get inside of cells, including Eli Lilly’s antipsychotic drug Zyprexa and Bristol-Myers’ diabetes treatment Byetta.

The problem is that drugs often act on more than one receptor, and so they have side effects.

“We hope the more we know about the structure of these proteins, the more we’ll be able to develop safer, more effective drugs,” Kobilka said in the interview.

Lefkowitz set out in the 1970s to prove these receptors existed, and that they could be studied, cloned and manipulated to develop new drugs.

Kobilka, who worked in Lefkowitz’s lab in the 1980s, extended that research by helping to define the exact crystal structure of every atom of these receptors at a molecular level, something that had eluded researchers.

“Their findings have shone a light onto the staggeringly complex world of how hormones, neurotransmitters and drugs control cellular function and opened the door to the development of new therapeutics with potential to treat a vast array of diseases,” said Bernadette Byrne of Imperial College London.

This is what people have been awaiting for years, said longtime drug researcher Sid Topiol, chief scientific officer of New Jersey-based computer-aided drug design company 3D-2Drug.

“Far and away, the most significant class of drug proteins are these GPR-coupled receptors,” said Topiol, adding that Kobilka’s work characterizing the structure of these proteins in 3D “opened up a watershed of new opportunities for drug discovery.”

LOCK AND KEY

Topiol, who has been in the early stages of drug design for the past three decades, said people traditionally talk about drugs using a lock and key model.

“The drug is the key, and you are designing it to be a perfect match for the lock you are interested in,” he said.

But while researchers had detailed information about the keys, for years there was nothing known about the lock itself. Now researchers are using Kobilka’s discoveries to precisely characterize the structure of those GPCR locks.

“There are now 14 or 15 published GPCR structures, several from Kobilka’s laboratory, and new drugs are being designed using the new knowledge of GPCR structure and function that will eventually improve medical treatments,” said Richard Henderson of the University of Cambridge.

Fiona Marshall, founder and chief scientific officer at British-based Heptares, a private drug company that specializes in GPCRs, said many of the drugs that currently target these proteins – beta-blockers, antihistamines and atypical antipsychotics for schizophrenia – represent the low-hanging fruit.

She sees lots of potential to develop new medicines as well as making more targeted versions of existing treatments with fewer side effects.

“The breakthroughs that the Nobel Prize relates to is understanding the structure of the proteins at the molecular level,” she said.

“That means you can actually design a compound using knowledge of the protein structure, which should result in much better and safer medicines that are more specific to the target,” she said.

Heptares, which has done drug development deals with large drugmakers including AstraZeneca, Takeda, Novartis and Shire, is working on one of the first drug candidates to be developed using the new protein structures, which have been characterized in the past few years.

The drug, a molecule that the company is developing in partnership with Shire, targets neurological diseases and could enter clinical trials as early as next year.

Other illnesses that might benefit from these discoveries include Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

Marshall said she thinks companies could develop better drugs using these discoveries.

“A lot of existing drugs that target GPCRs could be improved on because they often hit multiple different GPCRs and therefore have side effects. For example, atypical antipsychotics hit around a dozen GPCRs, whereas probably only one or two are important for the therapeutic effect,” she said, noting that the other ones cause weight gain and sedation.

Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of the Edhi Foundation, is the most renowned philanthropist in Pakistan. – Photo by Dawn.com

STOCKHOLM: Russian dissidents and religious leaders working for Muslim-Christian reconciliation are among the favourites to win the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize when the result is announced on Friday.

“I’m pretty sure the committee would like to honour the monumental events in the Middle East,” said Jan Egeland, the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe.

“But as the Arab Spring turns to ‘autumn’, this is becoming very difficult, so an approach may be to look at those who work for dialogue among religions,” said Egeland, a former United Nations under-secretary general.

The betting agency Unibet favours Maggie Gobran, a Coptic Christian nun who runs a children’s mission in Cairo, giving her a 13 per cent chance of winning.

Others mentioned include Pakistani philanthropist and welfare worker Abdul Sattar Edhi and Nigerian religious leaders John Onaiyekan and Mohamed Sa’ad Abubakar, who have helped to calm their country’s Christian-Muslim violence this year.

A direct recognition of the Arab Spring is unlikely, however, as the committee gave part of its 2011 award to the journalist Tawakkol Karman to recognise her work in Yemen’s transformation, and it rarely visits an issue two years running.

The committee could recognise the struggle to prevent an erosion of human rights in Russia.

Although the Norwegian Nobel Committee is independent of the government, its members are picked by parliament and Jagland is a former prime minister, so foreign governments often see it as an affiliate of the Norwegian state.

Criticism of Russia’s human rights record grew louder this year as the government cracked down on free speech ahead of presidential elections, and members of the punk band Pussy Riot were jailed for a protest in Moscow’s main cathedral against Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dominant leader for almost 13 years.

The list of potential Russian laureates includes Svetlana Gannushkina and the civil rights society Memorial that she helps to lead, and the radio station Ekho Moskvy and its editor Alexei Venediktov.

Other names in vogue include Gene Sharp, a retired American professor of political science known for his work on non-violent struggle, and the Afghan doctor and politician Sima Samar, an advocate of women’s rights in the Muslim world.—Reuters

A combo of two photos, left, released by CNRS (French National Research Center) on October 9, 2012 shows French physicist Serge Haroche posing on October 8, 2009 in Paris and, right, released in Washington, WC, on October 9 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology shows US physicist David Wineland. Haroche and Wineland won the Nobel Prize on October 9, 2012 for work in quantum physics that could one day open the way to revolutionary computers.-AFP Photo

STOCKHOLM: Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the US won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for work in quantum physics that could one day open the way to revolutionary computers.

The pair, both 68, were honoured for pioneering optical experiments in “measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems,” the Nobel Physics jury said in its citation.

“Their groundbreaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics,” it said.

“Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century.”Wineland cautioned on Tuesday such a super-computer was “a long, long way” off.

“I think many of us feel that it will eventually happen,” he said in a pre-dawn phone interview recorded and posted on the Nobel committee website.

The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks, it said.

Haroche said the award was “fairly overwhelming.”

”I was in the street, passing near a bench, and was able to sit down immediately,” he told journalists via a live link to Stockholm.

“I was walking with my wife, when I saw the Swedish area code, I realised.””I think we will have champagne,” he added.
Wineland said he was wakened in the middle of the night at his home in Boulder, Colorado with a phone call from the committee in Stockholm.

“I was sleeping and my wife got the call and woke me up,” he said, adding that it was “a wonderful surprise, of course.”

French President Francois Hollande praised Haroche for his win, calling it a “source of pride for our country.”

Specialists in optics, the two scientists worked independently of each other to trap particles, enabling the quantum state to be examined and manipulated at ultra-low temperatures.

Jim al-Khalili, a professor of physics at Britain’s University of Surrey, said the research had taken quantum out of the realm of “science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists.”

Both Wineland and Haroche specialise in quantum entanglement, a phenomenon of particle physics that has been proven by experiments but remains poorly understood.

When two particles interact, they become “entangled,” which means one particle affects the other at a distance. The connection lasts long after they are separated.

In entanglement, particles also go into a state called superposition, which opens the way to hoped-for supercomputers.

Today’s computers use a binary code, in which data is stored in a bit that could be either zero or 1.

But in superposition, a quantum bit, known as a qubit, could be either zero or one, or both zero and one at the same time.

This potentially offers a massive increase in data storage, greatly helping number-crunching tasks such as running climate-change models and breaking encrypted codes.

But many technical hurdles remain to be overcome. Haroche and Wineland’s achievement has been to measure and control these very fragile quantum states, which were previously deemed inaccessible, so that the particles can be observed and counted, the jury said.

The Institute of Physics society in London hailed the award.

“Haroche and Wineland have made tremendous advances in our understanding of quantum entanglement, with beautiful experiments to show how atomic systems can be manipulated to exhibit the most extraordinary coherence properties,” said Peter Knight, the institute’s president.

Haroche is a professor at College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, while Wineland is a group leader at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.

On Monday, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and John Gurdon of Britain won the Nobel Medicine Prize for work in cell programming, a frontier that has nourished dreams of replacement tissue for people crippled by disease.

The Nobel prize announcements continue on Wednesday with the announcement of the chemistry prize, followed by the literature prize on Thursday.

Perhaps the most-watched award, the one for peace, will be announced Friday and the economics prize will wind up the Nobel season on October 15.

The laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

The Nobel Foundation has slashed its prize sum to eight million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million, 930,000 euros) per award, from the 10 million kronor awarded since 2001, due to the economic crisis.

John Gurdon attends a news conference after winning the Nobel prize for medicine in London October 8, 2012. Briton John Gurdon and Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka won the 2012 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for research which revolutionised understanding of how cells and organisms develop, the award-giving body said on Monday. -Reuters Photo

LONDON: British scientist John Gurdon, awarded the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday, admitted on Monday that he had done the bulk of the cell programming work for which he was honoured half a century ago.

The 79-year-old, with a shock of swept-back greying blond hair, held a hastily-arranged press conference in London, just hours after being telephoned by the Nobel academy with the news of his award.

He told reporters his ground-breaking work “was essentially to show that all the different cells of the body have the same genes.
“The work that I did was to test that proposition. In the 1950s we really didn’t know.

“The outcome was that they do. That means that, in principle, you should be able to derive any one kind of cell from another because they’ve all got the same genes.

“That was the contribution I made at that time. Some people say, ‘that was done 50 years ago, have you been sitting round gardening ever since?’”Gurdon, who shared the Nobel with Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka for work in cell programming, said he was “immensely honoured” by the award.

Walking in carrying a black leather briefcase and wearing a blue jumper over a blue-and-white check shirt, Gurdon, who uses hearing aids, had a glint in his eye as he surveyed the bank of microphones before him.

“I am immensely honoured to be awarded this spectacular recognition, and delighted to be due to receive it with Shinya Yamanaka, whose work has brought the whole field within the realistic expectation of therapeutic benefits,” he said.

“It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.”

An early riser who still works full time, Gurdon said he was in his lab at 8:30am when “a very nice man from the Swedish academy called up and said ‘we’ve decided to award you this prize’.

“He said enough things to make me believe he was in fact the right person, because you can always have people pulling your leg.

“If you stop the random person in the street, they might just have heard of the Nobel Prize. It has to be ranked as perhaps the most important scientific award.”

He said the bulk of the work he has been recognised for was done in 1958 but was not published until 1962.

Gurdon, an emeritus professor of developmental biology at the University of Cambridge, might never have made it had his school tutors and the army had their way.

His schoolmaster said it would be a “total waste of time” for all concerned if he studied science, while his mother and doctor got him out of two years’

national service by playing up a cold as a touch of bronchitis.

Gurdon said he would likely put his prize money towards helping doctorate students to stay on for a fourth year.

He said the institute named after him at Cambridge was planning to hold a drinks party for him at 6:00 pm, but he was nonetheless planning to be back in the lab early on Tuesday.

Born in 1962 in a Japan beginning a decades-long manufacturing boom, Yamanaka was the only son of a factory owner who produced parts for sewing machines.
But even as the country’s industries exploded in the 1970s, his father told him he should not follow the traditional Japanese path and take over the family business, but become a doctor.

Half a century later and after a stint as an orthopedic surgeon, he is a leading authority on how cells work.

Kyoto University-based Yamanaka was being celebrated Monday for his work, alongside Briton John Gurdon, on how cells can be reprogrammed.

So-called “nuclear reprogramming” uses a fully-developed adult cell to create a stem cell — a kind of blank slate that has the potential to become any other kind of cell in the body.

Scientists say in this way they can generate materials either to experiment on, or to use within the body — perhaps as a means of repairing or even replacing damaged or diseased organs.

Gurdon’s work proved that mature cells maintain the “memory” of what they could have been; a brain cell that specialises in transmitting messages retains its ability to absorb nutrients like a cell in the wall of the intestine.

To do this, he took the nucleus from a specialised cell and implanted it into an egg without a nucleus. Allowed to develop naturally, this becomes an early-stage embryo containing stem cells.

Harvesting those cells necessitates the destruction of that embryo. Yamanaka got fully developed adult cells to create stem cells without the need for an embryo to be created — or destroyed.

Writing in the journal Nature in 2010, Yamanaka explained his work. “The stable states of differentiated cells are now known to be controlled by dynamic mechanisms that can easily be perturbed.

“An adult cell can therefore be reprogrammed, altering its pattern of gene expression, and hence its fate, to that typical of another cell type.” Yamanaka called his discovery “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells”.

His work was hailed as a breakthrough because it demonstrated that it was possible to sidestep the sticky ethical issue of embryonic stem cell research.
Despite its huge promise, many balked at the idea of using — destroying — an embryo to get the important stem cells.

It was less of a problem in animal experiments but became a huge hurdle when moving to work on human cells. Religious conservatives, amongst others, objected and stem cell research was stymied.

“If embryo stem cell research is the only way to help patients, then I think that is what we should do,” Yamanaka once said.

“At the same time… as a natural feeling, I do want to avoid the usage of human embryos… Human embryos are not like skin cells, they can be babies if transplanted. That is why we are doing what we are doing” with iPS cells.
Stem cell research is seen as having the potential to save lives by helping to find cures for diseases such as cancer and diabetes or to replace damaged cells, tissues and organs.

It also has been touted as a promising intervention for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, as well as helping create new drugs and improving research.

Yamanaka is acutely aware of how controversial his science can be and says it needs to be strictly regulated.

“We should limit the application of technology to treatment or what can make patients happier,” he has said. “We may be able to generate new life (with this technique), so we are presented with another ethical issue.” He draws the line at creating a new life simply to grow new organs, theoretically possible using his technique.

“It is technically very difficult (but) organ shortage is a big problem right now in many countries. We need some kind of regulation,” he has said.
Yamanaka was recognised in 2009, alongside Gurdon, with the Lasker Prize for stem cell research. This year he shared the 1.2-million-euro Millennium Technology Prize with a software engineer.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at a press conference in Oslo, Friday, June 15, 2012.—AP Photo

OSLO: Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi finally accepted her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Saturday after spending a total of 15 years under house arrest and said full political freedom in her country was still a long way off.

“Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal,” Suu Kyi said in her acceptance speech during her first trip to Europe in nearly 25 years.

“Hostilities have not ceased in the far north; to the west, communal violence resulting in arson and murder were taking place just several days before I started out the journey that has brought me here today.”

Suu Kyi, the Oxford University-educated daughter of General Aung San, Myanmar’s assassinated independence hero, advocated caution about transformation in Myanmar, whose quasi-civilian government continues to hold political prisoners.

“There still remain such prisoners in Burma. It is to be feared that because the best known detainees have been released, the remainder, the unknown ones, will be forgotten,” Suu Kyi, 66, told a packed Oslo City Hall.

A day earlier, she arrived from Switzerland to a jubilant reception as dancing and chanting crowds filled Oslo’s streets and showered her with flowers.

Suu Kyi, who spent a total of 15 years under house arrest between 1989 and her release in late 2010, never left Myanmar even during brief periods of freedom after 1989, afraid the military would not let back in.

Her sons, Kim and Alexander had accepted the Nobel prize on her behalf in 1991, with her husband Michael Aris also attending the ceremony. A year later Suu Kyi announced she would use the $1.3 million prize money to establish a health and education trust for Burmese people.

She was unable to be with Aris, an Oxford academic, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and died in Britain in 1999.

Instrumental

Suu Kyi, who was elected to parliament in April, thanked Norway – a tiny Nordic nation of just 5 million people – for its support and the instrumental role it played in Myanmar’s transformation.

In 1990, the Bergen-based Rafto Foundation awarded its annual prize to Suu Kyi. The award provided lasting publicity for her non-violent struggle against the country’s military junta, putting her in the international spotlight and setting the stage a year later for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Norway has also provided a home to the Democratic Voice of Burma, an opposition television and radio outlet, which broadcasts uncensored news into Myanmar, in much the same way Radio Free Europe did behind the Iron Curtain decades earlier.

During her acceptance speech, Suu Kyi skirted the issue of sectarian violence between Rakhine Buddhists and stateless Muslim Rohingyas, which has tested Myanmar’s 15-month-old government.

“We hope ceasefire agreements will lead to political settlements founded on the aspirations of the people, and the spirit of union,” she said.

The violence, which displaced 30,000 people and killed 29 by government accounts, stems from an entrenched, long-standing distrust of around 800,000 Muslim Rohingyas, who do not even hold citizenship, and much of Myanmar’s public regards them as illegal immigrants.

The crisis has also put President Thein Sein in a tight spot. His government is under pressure from rights groups and Western countries to show compassion towards the Rohingyas but a policy shift risks angering the public.

Nobel Peace Laureates (L to R) former Polish President Lech Walesa, former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, and former US President Jimmy Carter participate in a panel discussion at the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on April 23, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. — Scott Olson/AFP

CHICAGO: Nobel peace laureates gathered for an annual summit said Monday the work that earned them their prizes is far from over and rallied support for their fight for human rights and global justice.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who as president of the Soviet Union helped end the Cold War and open the communist regime to democracy, said the time has come for “a new global order” that must be “more stable, more just and more humane.”But he warned that tremendous challenges still lie ahead.

Nuclear weapons are once again threatening mass destruction, poverty and deprivation shackle billions of people, while climate change and pollution deprive people of clean water, air and food amid an age-old conflict of man against nature.

“As Nobel laureates, we have the moral right to speak out and we need to take the situation in hand,” said Gorbachev, who launched the annual summit 12 years ago.

“Even though we’re not getting any younger, we must commit our hearts and our souls and we must continue to raise these issues and to speak the truth to power.”Governments are ignoring commitments made to the United Nations and to their citizens, taking a “condescending attitude to the people” and using “old tricks” to benefit vested interests, he said.

“We must unite, we must have solidarity, we must work resolutely to change the world for the better,” Gorbachev told a packed auditorium at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An audience also followed the speech online.

Frederik de Klerk, who as president of South Africa helped to end apartheid, said poverty and a “failure to manage diversity” were at the root of misery that is not only unjust but also leads to social unrest, conflict and terrorism.

“Where do the terrorists come from? They come from countries where the masses do not have good living conditions and it is stimulated by fanaticism in its worst form,” de Klerk said.

“They are vulnerable because they have nothing to lose.” While South Africa is now troubled by the government’s failure to honor its commitments to citizens such as good education, its history also provides a lesson in the power of diplomacy over threats of violence or embargoes.

“From the South African experience, I can testify that we did not change because of the many big sticks wielded, at times that delayed reform,” de Klerk said.

“Haven’t we had too much big stick and isn’t it time for speaking softly?” he asked, in reference to US President Theodore Roosevelt’s slogan “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Lech Walesa, who led Poland’s Solidarity movement and served as the nation’s first post-communist president, warned of the threat of unsustainable economic disparities.

“This capitalism, unless we improve it and reform it, will not survive this century,” Walesa said through a translator.

“Certainly we will retain the free market economy and private ownership, but certainly not the kind of injustice we’ve had in place.” The repercussions of disparities in social benefits and taxation are reflected in the current European economic crisis, but they are also spread throughout the world, Walesa said.

“We must find jobs for everyone. If we fail to do that, they will start a revolution,” he said.

“We need to identify the targets along which we will move, leveling the disparities in order to enlarge freedom for all of us.” Asked how to engage young people in the fight for social justice, Walesa joked: “If if I knew the answer to that question I could win another Nobel Prize.” Technology and social media have amplified the voices of activists and enable dramatic changes like the Arab Spring revolutions that have swept through North Africa and the Middle East, said former US president Jimmy Carter.

“You don’t need a leader like Walesa anymore,” said Carter, who won his Nobel Prize for humanitarian work after he left office in 1981.

“Now every student, or everyone who believes in freedom or the end of war can speak independently. And their voices combine and make a powerful weapon.”

The 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates convenes in Chicago today and runs through Wednesday, April 25.