The coming of the new year always heralds a new group of Wolf Laureates. The Wolf Prizes were established in 1976 to “promote science and art for the benefit of mankind.” Since their establishment, the Wolf Prizes have become an important award recognizing significant contributions to various fields of scientific endeavor. In the physics world, the Wolf Prize is often a stepping-stone on the way to an eventual Nobel.

This year’s Wolf Prize in Physics was split between Juan Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller for their work in quantum optics and quantum information theory. Particularly cited was their joint work in 1995 on a practical model of a quantum computer implemented with trapped ions. This model has been the basis for much of the current experimental work in quantum computation.

It’s hard not to see the significance of this. Much in the same way Peter Higgs’ proposal of a supermassive boson led eventually to the recent successes at CERN, Zoller and Cirac’s work paved the way for not only quantum computation – a field that is both intellectually exciting and perhaps eventually of great practical use – but laid the path to a much deeper understanding in one of wildest frontiers in the field of physics.

The Wolf Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Robert Langer for his work on biodegradable polymeric materials for drug delivery. I have to admit I did a double take when I read this because, after all, drug delivery has been a ubiquitous rationale in materials science for the past 15 years. Everyone is doing drug delivery! Whole academic departments have reorganized themselves around biomaterials, with drug delivery being a major focus. But when you consider that Langer’s work pioneered the area, it is unsurprising that he is being recognized with this award.

I particularly appreciate that the Wolf Foundation awards a prize in Agriculture. I think that we underestimate the importance of agricultural science to world at large, even with the attention being paid to it these days. What I found very interesting is that Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, shared the prize for his research into the relationship between human society and agriculture. Diamond, a 1990 MacArthur Fellow, also received the National Medal of Science for his work in this area. The gentleman with whom he shared the prize is Joachim Messing, who has made great strides in crop plant genomics, including establishing the Rutgers Plant Genome Initiative.

While I’m not going to dig too deeply into them, there was also a joint prize awarded in Mathematics to two American mathematicians, Michael Artin and George Mostow, for their contributions to geometry and Lie group theory as well as a prize awarded in Architecture to Eduoardo de Mouro, a Portuguese architect.