Laureate Heineken Prizes

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences 2014 to Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, head of department at NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Professor of Organic Geochemistry at Utrecht University (Netherlands).
Professor Sinninghe Damsté received the prize for his tremendous contributions to the discovery and development of ‘chemical fossiles’, which help us reconstruct the history of the earth’s biosphere.

Researcher
Jaap Sinninghe Damsté was born in Baarn (Netherlands) on 1 January 1959. He commenced a study in Chemical Engineering at the Technical University Delft (Netherlands), but gradually became more interested in fields like biology and geology.
His Ph.D. research brought all of these fields together. In 1988 he graduated in Delft on a geochemical study into the origins of organic sulfur present in crude oil.
Sinninghe Damsté became a researcher for the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) in Den Burg (Netherlands). Using a ‘Pioneer’ grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), he initiated a programme called ‘Molecular paleontology of marine sediments’ in 1993. In this programme, he began developing and widely applying chemical fossils.
Sinninghe Damsté (co)authored about six hundred published papers, 35 of which appeared in Science or Nature. With more than 23,000 citations he ranks among the most productive and most cited sedimentary research scientists worldwide.
He is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In 2004, he received a Spinoza Grant (€ 1.5 million) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). In 2008 he was awarded a € 2.5 million ‘Advanced grant’ from the European Research Council (ERC) reserved for ‘exceptional established research leaders […] to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects’.

Research
Geologists who want to learn about the planet’s ancient past often use fossiles to do so: leftovers of plants or animals that ‘survived’ the formation of rock after they were buried by sedimentation.
With his revolutionary ‘geochemical’ research, Jaap Sinninghe Damsté has expanded this art form towards unicellular organisms — bacteria, algea and ‘archae’ — from prehistoric times. These tiny organisms did not leave visible traces, but they did leave ‘chemical fossiles’: organic chemical compounds that show a particular organism lived there at a particular time.
Sinninghe Damsté searches ancient geological sediments and deep seabeds for biochemical evidence of certain protozoans or certain environmental conditions millions and millions of years ago.
He analysed, for example, cell membranes of archae that thrived in the oceans dozens of millions of years ago. The chemical composition of such membranes varies with the temperature of the surrounding water. That means that chemical analysis of deep, ancient layers of sediment can be used to measure sea water temperatures fifty million or more years ago.
Thanks to this and many other techniques, Sinninghe Damsté and his colleagues have repeatedly shaken up climate research — for example by concluding that 50 million years ago, the temperature of the surface water in the Arctic resembled that of a subtropical pool.
By more widely applying existing techniques (such as DNA identification) and by adding new indicators, Sinninghe Damsté has contributed greatly to our basic knowledge about the planet.
Established ideas about the nitrogen and carbon cycles, both crucial for the planet’s life and climate, were amended because of his work. We now know, for example, that the nitrogen cycle takes place primarily in the darkness of the deep sea. Deep down, bacteria and archae (unicellular organisms resembling both bacteria and algea) together determine how much nitrogen is available for life at the sea surface.
Thanks in great part to Sinninghe Damsté’s pioneering work, organic geochemistry has become an integral part of disciplines such as microbial ecology, earth sciences, oceanography and paleoclimatology worldwide. His ongoing development of new techniques and new geochemical indicators will no doubt continue to deepen our understanding about our planet and the microbial life it once harboured.

More information
— Personal webpage at website Utrecht University
— Personal webpage at website  NIOZ

Article
— Interview with Jaap Sinninghe Damsté in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2014 to professor James McClelland, Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation at the University of  Stanford (United States).
Professor McClelland received this award for his important and fundamental contributions to the use of neural networks to model cognitive processes of the brain.

Researcher
James (‘Jay’) McClelland was born in Cambridge (U.S.) on 1 December 1948. He studied at Columbia University in New York City and got his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1975.
The year before, McClelland had taken up a research position at the University of California at San Diego, while occasionally doing guest professorships at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (U.S.).
In 1984, McClelland transferred to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (U.S.). His seminal work Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, however, was published in 1986 together with David E. Rumelhart and other former colleagues from San Diego. Today, the book has been cited over 19,000 times.
McClelland became Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of  Stanford (U.S.) in 2006. He also leads Stanford’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation, which he has founded.
McClelland has received honorary doctorates from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. He is member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and President of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research
Up until the 80’s of the previous century, the human brain was often compared to a simple computer. Cognition scientists modelled the brain as a processor that retrieves information from a memory, performs calculations and saves the results to a memory once again.
By publishing a book that is now seen as seminal to the field, James McClelland and colleagues ended this era in 1986. More comprehensively than others before them, they presented a new, universal model for cognitive processing. They called it ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP). Right away they showed how such a model could be applied to a wide range of neuropsychological problems.
The PDP model, these days also known as ‘connectionism’, was not based on computer technology but rather on the complex biological structure of the brain. In the brain, countless nerve cells communicate continuously through constantly changing interconnections. This ‘neural network’ of nodes and changing connections carries out many calculations at the same time. It is able to ‘learn’ by strengthening or weakening particular connections. Information does not have to be stored at a particular location but may reside in the overall state of the network.
With their universal model, McClelland and his colleagues not just changed the way we visualize the brain. They also provided the field of cognitive science with a set of mathematical principles that could be applied to research. Using these principles, scientists could rephrase countless research questions as clear, testable hypotheses.
McClelland himself used his universal model to try and explain how our brains are capable of performing complex cognitive processes such as learning to understand words.
Today, McClelland is still an influential and effective advocate of the ‘parallel distributed processing’ concept. Thanks in part to his persistence and his persuasiveness, the once controversial model has become highly influential and has inspired a generation of scientists, not just in cognitive science but in psychology and other adjacent fields as well.

More information
— Personal page on website Stanford University
— James McClelland wins Heineken Prize (Stanford University)

Article
— Interview with James McClelland in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

Titia de Lange has been awarded the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2012 for her research on telomeres, the protective elements located at the tips of chromosomes, which play a crucial role in ageing and cancer.
The biochemical machinery of human cells is designed to see breaks in the DNA ribbon as “defects” and to glue the loose ends together again. Fortunately, that machinery ignores the chromosome ends. Thanks to Titia de Lange and her research group, we now understand why.
De Lange was the first to suggest that telomeres are shielded from the cell machinery by a protein complex. Her ideas turned out to be correct. She played a major role in identifying the protein complex that protects the telomeres – a shield that she has named the ‘shelterin complex’.
De Lange and her group identified the first two proteins within the complex, Telomeric Repeat binding Factor (TRF) 1 and 2. She showed that TRF2 suppresses the cell’s repair system at the chromosome ends; if this protein is absent, the cell will ‘repair’ the telomeres and glue together chromosomes by mistake. De Lange showed that other repair processes are blocked by additional shelterin components.
De Lange also showed how shelterin prevents the activation of a surveillance system that monitors chromosomes for damage. The purpose of this alarm system is to stop the cell division cycle when chromosomes are broken. When shelterin is not working properly, the telomeres set off a false alarm, resulting in cell cycle arrest or cell death.
Together with her collaborator Jack Griffith, De Lange found that telomeres are arranged into lasso-like loops that hide the chromosome end. The cell’s repair and alarm systems therefore ignore the ends. They showed that the shelterin protein TRF2 helps in forming these loops.
Telomeres play a major role in healthy and sick cells. De Lange’s important and original research will therefore have implications for health care.

Further reading
Loayza, D., and de Lange, T. (2003). POT1 as a terminal transducer of TRF1 telomere length control. Nature 424, 1013-1018.
van Steensel, B., Smogorzewska, A., and de Lange, T. (1998). TRF2 protects human telomeres from end-to-end fusions. Cell 92, 401-413.
Smogorzewska, A., van Steensel, B., Bianchi, A., Schnapp,,G., Schaefer, M. R., Oelmann, S., and de Lange, T. (2000) Control of human telomere length by TRF1 and TRF2. Mol. Cell Biol. 20: 1659-1668.
de Lange, T. (2005). Shelterin: the protein complex that shapes and safeguards human telomeres. Genes Dev 19, 2100-2110.
Lazzerini Denchi, E., and de Lange, T. (2007). Protection of telomeres through independent control of ATM and ATR by TRF2 and POT1. Nature 448, 1068-1071.

Biography
Titia de Lange was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1955. She studied at the University of Amsterdam and obtained her PhD at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, studying under Professor Piet Borst.
She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 1990 she went to the Rockefeller University in New York. She was appointed professor there in 1997 and since 2011 has been the director of the university’s Anderson Center for Cancer Research.
Titia de Lange has received many other prizes and distinctions during her career. She is the recipient of the 2011 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, the 2010 AACR Clowes Memorial Award, and the 2008 Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Prize. In 2003, the University of Utrecht awarded her an honorary doctorate.
She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Titia de Lange in Akademie Nieuws ( Dutch)

Video

Peter Struycken has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2012 for the methodical way in which he has used shapes, colours and processes in his innovative and appealing works of art for the past fifty years.
Everyone in the Netherlands is familiar with the work of the Dutch artist Peter Struycken, if only because his portrait of Queen Beatrix, which is made of digital shifted dots, still graces numerous Dutch postage stamps some thirty years after he created it.
Computer-generated images are common now, making it difficult to imagine how innovative and pioneering Struycken was when he first used computers to create works of art in the late 1960s, and when he chose in 1981 to use a computer to produce his portrait of the Dutch queen.
Struycken’s work, for which he often uses digital techniques, is based on a methodical, logical, consistent and verifiable investigation of colours, shapes and processes. In the late 1970s, for example, he used a simple computer program to design a series of sixteen pastel shades that he then used in his colour scheme for the auditorium of the Kröller-Müller Museum.
Struycken’s work is usually non-figurative or decorative. It takes on many different forms, ranging from sketches, paintings and videos to costumes, set designs, and lighting and visuals for dance or music concerts.
Struycken is best known among the general public for his interior and open-air spatial designs. He creates beautifully seductive works that give viewers a new sense of space, shape and colour, using the computer as one of the tools of his craft.
Struycken’s work takes people on a journey through a dynamic, three-dimensional colour space, for example his ten-metre-long screen in the Groningen Museum. However systematic and methodical the origins of the work may be, its viewers are caught up in a mystical experience.
Struycken created computer-controlled lighting for various buildings and interiors, for example for the underground passage of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, which is transformed into a rainbow arcade of coloured light at night. He also designed the ceiling of the Music Theatre in Amsterdam and the Concert Hall in Tilburg.
Another well-known work is Blue Waves, an undulating pattern of white and blue paving stones beneath a bridge crossing the Rhine in Arnhem.

Further reading
Struycken, P., ‘Colour mixtures according to Democritus ans Plato’, in: Mnemosyne, Vol. LVI, Fasc. 3, Leiden Brill 2003 ISSN 1568-525X (online version)
Struycken, P., ‘Enkele Oudgriekse denkbeelden over kleur’, in: Rein Ferwerda, P. Struycken, ‘Aristoteles’, Over kleuren, Budel: Damon 2002 ISBN 90 5573 129 3
Struycken, P., Trooping the colour / Kleur kleurt, Gorinchem: Gorkums Museum 2002 ISBN 90-804257

About the laureate
Peter Struycken was born in The Hague (Netherlands) in 1939. He entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 1957. In 1964, he became an instructor at the art academy in Arnhem. He was one of the founders there of the Monumental New Style Department, which encouraged students to interweave works of art into architecture and urban planning.
Struycken was made a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1984.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Peter Struycken in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Works of art

Video

Hans Clevers has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2012 for his unique understanding of how tissue growth is regulated, both in normal development and in cancer.
Hans Clevers commenced his career in science by studying cells in the human immune system and signalling proteins that influence the development of immune cells. His findings quickly turned out to have much wider implications, however.
It became clear that the cellular chain reactions he had unravelled together constitute a crucial mechanism determining the direction of cell division and growth, not only in human beings, but also in other mammals, amphibians, worms and even insects.
Will the cells that make up a tiny embryo gradually grow into an entire stomach or intestine? Or will they furnish a daily supply of fresh intestinal epithelium cells in the adult? Or will the same regulatory mechanism be disrupted, causing the stem cell to suddenly change into one that develops into intestinal cancer?
Clevers’ findings and his visionary in-depth investment in new research methods and animal models helped found a new and flourishing field of medical research. Its quest is to identify stem cells, which have the ability to grow into new tissues and organs, and work to harness that ability to replace damaged tissue or even organs. Clevers’ laboratory has already succeeded in isolating stem cells and causing them to grow into miniscule stomachs.
Equally important is how his work is helping us discover why healthy stem cells sometimes turn into intestinal cancer cells, which genetic factors increase the chance of that happening, and what we may be able to accomplish with medication in future.
At present, Clevers’ discoveries are most tangible in the world of science. He has published hundreds of articles in leading journals such as Science, Natureand Cell, sources of tens of thousands of citations by other researchers around the world. Each one of his discoveries, however, also has the potential to bring about monumental changes in the medical world.

Further reading
Constitutive transcriptional activation by a beta-catenin-Tcf complex in APC-/- colon carcinoma. Korinek V, Barker N, Morin PJ, van Wichen D, de Weger R, Kinzler KW, Vogelstein B, Clevers H. Science. 1997 Mar 21;275(5307):1784-7.
The beta-catenin/TCF-4 complex imposes a crypt progenitor phenotype on colorectal cancer cells. van de Wetering M, Sancho E, Verweij C, de Lau W, Oving I, Hurlstone A, van der Horn K, Batlle E, Coudreuse D, Haramis AP, Tjon-Pon-Fong M, Moerer P, van den Born M, Soete G, Pals S, Eilers M, Medema R, Clevers H. Cell. 2002 Oct 18;111(2):241-50.
Single Lgr5 stem cells build crypt-villus structures in vitro without a mesenchymal niche. Sato T, Vries RG, Snippert HJ, van de Wetering M, Barker N, Stange DE, van Es JH, Abo A, Kujala P, Peters PJ, Clevers H. Nature. 2009 May 14;459(7244):262-5.
Intestinal crypt homeostasis results from neutral competition between symmetrically dividing Lgr5 stem cells. Snippert HJ, van der Flier LG, Sato T, van Es JH, van den Born M, Kroon-Veenboer C, Barker N, Klein AM, van Rheenen J, Simons BD, Clevers H. Cell. 2010 Oct 1;143(1):134-44
Lgr5 homologues associate with Wnt receptors and mediate R-spondin signalling. de Lau W, Barker N, Low TY, Koo BK, Li VS, Teunissen H, Kujala P, Haegebarth A, Peters PJ, van de Wetering M, Stange DE, van Es J, Guardavaccaro D, Schasfoort RB, Mohri Y, Nishimori K, Mohammed S, Heck AJ, Clevers H. Nature. 2011 Jul 4. doi: 10.1038/nature10337.

Biography
Hans Clevers was born in 1957. He studied medicine and biology at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD there in 1985, studying under clinical immunologist Professor R.E. Ballieux. He then spent four years at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA.
Clevers returned to Utrecht in 1991 and was appointed Chairman of the Department of Immunology. When the focus of his worked shifted, he was appointed Professor of Molecular Genetics and Director of the Hubrecht Institute, both in 2002. In these positions, he has become one of the leading figures in Dutch science.
Clevers’ international reputation has brought him numerous grants and awards, for example the Dutch Spinoza Award, the Swiss Louis Jeantet Prize, the American Katharine Berkan Judd Award, the Israeli Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize, the German Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, and, very recently, the French Léopold Griffuel Prize for cancer research. Last year the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded him a grant of EUR 2 million to support his work on generating intestinal tissue from stem cells.
Professor Clevers is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for Cancer Research. In 2005 he was made a Chevalier in the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, one of the highest French distinctions.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Hans Clevers in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Geoffrey Parker has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2012 for his outstanding scholarship on the social, political and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650, in particular Spain, Philip II, and the Dutch Revolt; for his contribution to military history in general; and for his research on the role of climate in world history.
Geoffrey Parker practices a transnational type of history and began doing so long before it became fashionable. Based on his in-depth study of a wide range of archival records, often spanning many different countries and languages, he arrives at innovative historical analyses that transcend national borders.
This was already true of Parker’s very first publications, in which he studied the rise and fall of Spain’s global empire between 1550 and 1650. Viewed within a broader context, the Dutch Revolt took place at a time when Spain had joined forces with allies Italy, Switzerland and the Southern Netherlands to battle Britain, France, Germany, the northern Dutch provinces and Scandinavia for world dominance.
In Parker’s analyses, Spain ultimately lost that battle not because of a series of disparate rebellions by the Dutch, but because its government and economy were unable to continue supplying its enormous army with adequate transport, accommodation, uniforms, food and payment.
Parker’s best-known book, The Military Revolution, builds on the work of fellow historian Michael Roberts. Roberts had proposed that European methods of warfare (for example firearms, strategy and tactics) changed fundamentally at the end of the sixteenth century, creating the need for trained standing armies and nation states. According to Parker, that change explains the global expansion of the West in territory and power. Although this analysis remains controversial, Parker’s work has in any event ensured that this crucial period of European history can no longer be discussed without considering the military perspective.
It is characteristic of Parker that he studies military history from a European, transnational perspective and relates it to events elsewhere in the world.
Parker employs the same broad perspective in his study of another topic that has long intrigued him: the influence of climate change on world history. In 1979, long before the greenhouse effect became a popular concept, he described how the “Little Ice Age” in around 1600 not only resulted in splendid Dutch and Flemish paintings of winter scenes, but also in political, economic, intellectual and social change in many places.
It is a topic that Parker intends to continue exploring in the years ahead, spurred on by recent climate changes.

Further reading
The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659. The logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge, 1972).
The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988).
Felipe II: la biografía definitiva (Barcelona: Planeta, 2010), 1383 pp.
Success and failure during the first century of the Reformation, Past and Present 136 (1992), 43-82.
Crisis and catastrophe: the global crisis of the 17th-century reconsidered, American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1052-79

Biography
Noel Geoffrey Parker was born in the United Kingdom on 25 December 1943. He studied history at Christ’s College Cambridge. In 1968, he received a PhD from Cambridge, where he had studied under Sir John H. Elliott. Since that time, he has lived around the world, wherever his interests have taken him.
In 1972, he moved to Scotland after accepting a position at the University of St Andrews. After serving as a visiting professor in Canada and Japan, Parkermoved to the United States in 1986, where he has taught at the University of Illinois, Yale University and, since 1997, Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Parker enjoys world renown. He has received honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Brussels (Belgium) and the University of Burgos (Spain). He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
Parker’s books have a devoted readership beyond the world of historical research. His best-known works are Military Revolution, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, Felipe II (a classic work on King Philip II of Spain) and The Spanish Armada.
The author of 36 books, more than a hundred publications of historical research, and hundreds of lectures in different languages given on four continents, Parker has had an enormous impact on the study of history, both in Europe and beyond.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Geoffrey Parker in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

William Laurance has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences 2012 for his research on the effects of habitat fragmentation, logging, hunting, fires and other human activity on the vulnerable Amazon region, and for the way he has encouraged public debate on the protection of tropical ecosystems.
William Laurance’s work is driven by his desire to protect tropical ecosystems and to conduct painstaking, complex research into the factors that threaten such systems. This combination has made Laurance one of the world’s leading experts when it comes to man’s impact on vulnerable rainforests and tropical biodiversity.
What distinguishes Laurence’s scientific work is its breadth. He studies habitat fragmentation, climate change, soil biology and surface fires, but he has also turned his attention to contagious diseases, government environmental protection policy, the effects of road building, corruption, logging and hunting, nature reserve design, and publication bias in the sciences. His research has taken him to Australia, the Amazon, the Congo, Central America and Southeast Asia.
This broad vision has led Laurance to develop many new concepts and hypotheses. For example, he drew attention to the fact that many ecological threats are mutually reinforcing when they occur simultaneously.
Laurance is also highly prolific. He has published more than three hundred articles since receiving his doctorate in 1989, averaging more than one a month. Dozens of these have appeared in such prestigious journals as Scienceand Nature, and many more in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the most influential of all ecology journals. He has also been closely involved in writing a number of classic nature conservation and environmental science textbooks.
In addition to painstaking, Laurance’s research is of enormous social relevance. “If we biologists don’t strive to slow rampant forest destruction, who will?” he once wondered. In his lectures and op-ed articles, Laurance frequently draws on his scientific expertise and background to persuade the general public and governments of the need for nature conservation and environmental protection.
It is this combination of research and engagement that makes his work unique and influential.

Further reading
W.F. Laurance, et al. (1997) Biomass collapse in Amazonian forest fragments. Science278:117-118.
W.F. Laurance, et al. (2001) The future of the Brazilian Amazon. Science291:438-439.
W.F. Laurance, et al. (2004) Pervasive alteration of tree communities in undisturbed Amazonian forests. Nature428:171-175.
W.F. Laurance & C. Peres, editors (2006) Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests. University of Chicago Press, USA.
W.F. Laurance, et al. (2009) Impacts of roads and linear clearings on tropical forests. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24:659-669.

Biography
William Laurance was born in the United States. He studied at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, and the University of California in Berkeley. His passion for tropical animals and ecosystems was awakened when he spent several summers working at zoos, and in 1989 he was awarded his doctorate at Berkeley for studying the ecological impact of habitat fragmentation on tropical forests and their mammalian wildlife.
He then went to Australia, first to the CSIRO Tropical Forest Research Centre and then to the SFS Centre for Rainforest Studies in Queensland.
In 1996, Laurance joined the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute and was based in Brazil and Panama. Thirteen years later, he returned to Australia to accept an appointment at James Cook University in Townsville, where he still teaches.
Laurance has received various awards, including an Australian Laureate Fellowship. He is a research associate at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA and holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. He is also closely involved in the Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative, a partnership project set up by Yale University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which focuses on training environmental policymakers in South America and Southeast Asia.
He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the former president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, the world’s largest scientific organisation devoted to the study and preservation of tropical ecosystems.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with William Laurance in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

John Duncan has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2012 for his remarkable innovative, multidisciplinary research into the relationships between psychology, behaviour and intelligence on the one hand and neural processes on the other.
John Duncan is an all-round scientist whose work builds bridges between psychology and behavioural science on the one hand and neurobiology on the other.
Duncan’s multifaceted research encompasses everything from clinical observation to digital brain scans and electrophysiological measurements of individual nerve cells in animal brains. In essence, however, he concentrates on two crucial cognitive functions: our ability to focus our attention selectively on only the most important stimuli (selective attention), and our ability to adapt our thinking and actions to a changing environment (intelligence). At one time, only social scientists were interested in these phenomena. Thanks to multidisciplinary researchers like Duncan, however, they are now thriving areas of investigation in the neurosciences.
Duncan combines observations and theories drawn from a variety of different disciplines to produce innovative concepts that range from individual nerve cells to patterns of human behaviour, and that serve as a source of inspiration for many of his fellow scientists.
One such concept explains our ability to focus our attention selectively on specific visual stimuli and objects. In the 1980s, Duncan’s “biased competition” model united concepts taken from neurophysiology and psychology. In his view, stimuli compete for the brain’s attention, and those stimuli that best suit the task being carried out at that moment have an advantage over the rest. This concept is now regarded as one of the cornerstones of cognitive neuroscience and is used to study such phenomena as language, memory and emotion.
More recently, Duncan developed a new theory for how nerve cells in various multifunctional brain centres combine to produce intelligent behaviour. His theory is based in part on his observations of brain centres that are involved in a wide variety of different tasks. Together they form a “multiple-demand neural network” that gives one particular task precedence over another, depending on the situation. These networks may be capable of processing structured, abstract programs that lead to intelligent, goal-oriented behaviour.
Duncan has also designed a series of neurological tests capable of predicting a subject’s IQ under experimental conditions. The suggestion is that such tests may constitute a useful addition to traditional psychological intelligence testing. The tests also offer fascinating glimpses of potential new relationships between biological and artificial forms of intelligence.

Further reading
The Green Fluorescent Protein. Annual Review of Biochemistry 67 (1998) 507-544.
Griffin, B.A., Adams S.R. and Tsien R.Y., Specific Covalent labeling of Recombinant Protein Molecules Inside Live Cells. Science 281 (1998), 269.
Baird G.S., Zacharias D.A. and Tsien R.Y., Biochemistry, mutagenesis, and oligomerization of dsRed, a red fluorescent protein from coral. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci. 97 (2000) 11984-11989.
Zacharias D.A., Baird G.S. and Tsien R.Y., Recent advances in technology for measuring and manipulating cell signals. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 10 (2000) 416-421.
Honda A., Adams S.R., Sawyer C.L., Lev-Ram V., Dostmann W.R.G. and Tsien R.Y., Spatiotemporal dynamics of guanosine 3′,5′-cyclic monophosphate revealed by a genetically encoded, fluorescent indicator. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci.USA 98 (2001) 2437.

Biography
John Duncan studied psychology and physiology at Oxford University and obtained his DPhil from the same university in 1976. After a period as postdoc at the University of Oregon in Eugene (US), he returned to the UK in 1978 to become a researcher at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge. His position was with the Applied Psychology Unit, an institute to which he has remained faithful ever since. He is now the Assistant Director of the unit, today known as the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
Duncan is a highly respected scientist, as evidenced by the many articles he has published in such leading journals as Science, Nature and Nature Neuroscience. He is also well known for his ability to communicate the complexities of science to a wider audience. In 2010, he published How Intelligence Happens, in which he explains the implications for cognitive science of recent research in psychology, artificial intelligence, brain scanning and neurophysiology.
Among his many honours, John Duncan has been made a Fellow of the British Royal Society and the British Academy.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with John Duncan in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Professor Franz-Ulrich Hartl was awarded the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2010 for his contribution to the discovery of the role of ‘chaperones’ in protein folding.
Proteins can only guide cellular processes after they have become three-dimensional in shape. One of the key questions in biochemistry is how an amino acid chain folds itself into a three-dimensional shape, thereby becoming a protein, and how the resulting protein avoids becoming unfolded again and losing its function. It is because of Franz-Ulrich Hartl that we now understand the significance of chaperone molecules in this process. Chaperones are proteins that help other proteins fold themselves into the proper shape and remain that way. It was long assumed that proteins acquired their shape through a process of self-assembly, but Hartldiscovered that many of the thousands of different proteins in cellular fluid in fact depend on chaperones to guide them. He developed a series of ingenious experiments, both in vitro and in vivo, to explain in detail how chaperone-assisted protein folding works. In the first half of the 1990s, his publications in Nature led to a drastic overhaul of the basic principles of protein biogenesis, the fast-growing discipline that investigates protein formation.
Understanding the process of protein folding and unfolding has major implications. For example, a disruption in the folding mechanism leads to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. Hartl and his research group are attempting to decipher these mechanisms. Ultimately, they hope to use the power of chaperones to combat disease and to assemble proteins in biotechnology.

Key publications
Cheng M.Y., Hartl F.U., Martin J., et al. 1989. ‘Mitochondrial heat-shock protein HSP60 is essential for assembly of proteins imported into yeast mitochondria.’ In: Nature 337: 620-625
Hartl F.U. 1996. ‘Molecular chaperones in cellular protein folding.’ In: Nature 381: 571-580
Hartl F.U. & Hayer-Hartl M. 2002. ‘Molecular chaperones in the cytosol: from nascent chain to folded protein.’ In: Science 295: 1852-1858
Tang Y.C., Chang H.C., Roeben A., et al. 2006. ‘Structural features of the GroEL-GroES nano-cage required for rapid folding of encapsulated protein.’ In: Cell 125: 903-914
Liu C.M., Young A.L., Starling-Windhof A., et al. 2010. ‘Coupled chaperone action in folding and assembly of hexadecameric Rubisco.’ In: Nature 463: 197-202

Biography
Franz-Ulrich Hartl was born in 1957 in Essen, Germany. He studied medicine at Heidelberg University, graduating summa cum laude in 1985. He also received his doctoral degree there for his dissertation on the role of hormones in the rat liver. In 1990, Hartl obtained his Dr. Med. Habil. from the University of Munich for his dissertation on protein assembly processes. Hartl went to the United States in 1989 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California (UCLA). In 1991, he moved to the Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Cornell University, where he worked as an instructor and researcher. From 1994 to 1997, he also worked as an associate investigator at the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute for biomedical research. Hartl returned to Europe in 1997 after accepting an appointment as professor of physiological chemistry and managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.
Hartl has won many international awards and honours and is a member of the German Academy of Sciences, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary member of the Japanese Biochemical Society.

Laudatio:
— English
— Dutch

Article:
— Interview with Frans-Ulrich Hartl in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Video interview with Franz-Ulrich Hartl

Mark Manders was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2010 for his consistent use of imagery in creating an intriguing world of his own, one that leaves ample scope for free association and plants itself deep in the memory.
Mark Manders is best known for his installations, for which he uses a variety of different materials, including wood, iron, plastic, rope, sand, paper and even teabags. He places familiar elements ‘a human figure, a chair, a table, a cat’ together in mysterious compositions and leaves their interpretation to the viewer. Manders also produces drawings, sculptures, films, and writes poems. His works represent the flow of his own ideas and meditations. Manders regards his oeuvre as a single, cohesive project, which he refers to as his ‘self-portrait as building’. It is not an autobiographical self-portrait, however, but a portrait of the artist as a fictional and (in his own words) ‘over-concentrated, neurotic, poetic person’, a ‘character who lives in a logically designed and constructed world which consists of thoughts that are halted or congeal at their moment of greatest intensity’. The Dutch arts magazine Kunstbeeld suggested that Manders’ best work ‘becomes art the way nature turns in freezing cold: immaculate and isolated at the same time, tranquil and full of tension’.

About the laureate
Mark Manders was born in Volkel, the Netherlands, in 1968. He attended the School of Graphic Design in Arnhem and the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited extensively in the Netherlands and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (Netherlands), the Kunsthaus Zürich Museum for Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Sao Paolo, Berlin and Venice Biennales and at Dokumenta in Kassel. His work has also been acquired by an impressive number of museums in Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Arnhem, Antwerp, Ghent, Munich, Dublin, Zurich, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Manders is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (1992) and the Philip Morris Art Prize (2002).

Laudatio:
— English
— Dutch

Article:
— Interview with Mark Manders in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video