Balzan Prizes honor work in humanities, science

MILAN — Three Americans were among the winners of this year’s Balzan Prize, announced Monday, for their work in the fields of moral philosophy, musicology and biotechnology. Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and scholar at the University of Chicago, won for “her transformative reconception of the goals of social justice, both globally and locally,” the Balzan Foundation said in its citation. Another University of Chicago faculty member, ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, was recognized for his work focusing primarily on European and Jewish music. Robert Langer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the biotechnology prize for what the Milan-based Balzan Foundation called pioneering research and advances in mRNA vaccines and tissue engineering, paving the way “for breakthroughs in the controlled release of macromolecules with many medical applications.” The final prize was shared by Danish palaeoclimatology professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen and Dutch climatologist Johannes Oerlemans of the University of Utrecht for glaciation and ice-sheet dynamics. The Balzan citation noted their joint and complementary work on the dynamics of glaciation and ice sheets which has helped to create “more reliable projections of ice sheet behavior related to changes in sea level.” The Balzan Foundation awards two prizes in the sciences and two in the humanities each year, rotating specialties to highlight new or emerging areas of research and sustain fields that might be overlooked elsewhere.