Scientists and economists from the United States, Israel and Norway received their Nobel prizes on Friday at a ceremony marked by the conspicuous absence of literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek of Austria. Kenyan Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel peace laureate, received her prize in Oslo, becoming the seventh African and the first African woman to win that award.

Jelinek, a feminist author who suffers from a social phobia, declined to receive her prize from Sweden?s King Carl XVI Gustaf saying the public spotlight was ?like a physical violation? for her. She will receive the prize at the Swedish embassy instead.

Israeli chemistry laureate Aaron Ciechanover said earlier in the week in Stockholm that his world had been turned upside down from the moment he was told he had won the prize in October.

?I answered the phone and my plain, orderly life was turned into chaos in 10 seconds,? he told reporters. Five of the prizes ? medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace ? were founded in the will of Swedish 19th century industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. ?Nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel was with his fortune,? said one of the three physics laureates, David Gross, in a speech at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm city hall.

?The most important product of knowledge is ignorance,? said Gross, joking that ?there is no evidence that we are running out of our most important resource: ignorance.? Americans like Gross have won most of the science prizes in recent years and 2004 was no exception, with US scientists sweeping both the physics and medicine awards.

Gross and colleagues David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won in physics for showing how tiny quark particles interact inside atoms. Linda Buck and Richard Axel earned the medicine prize for discovering how the human sense of smell works. When the pair were asked in Stockholm what was their favourite smell, Buck pointed to a flower and Axel said: ?My favourite smell is the scent of a woman.?

With the literature laureate absent, that was the only touch of poetry in a year of Nobels dominated by science, which Axel warned had ?the potential for good and evil. It is our shared responsibility to assure that this change is for the better?. Israel got its first Nobel science laureates, Avram Hershko and Ciechanover sharing the honours with American Irwin Rose for research into how the body defends against disease by marking undesirable proteins for destruction.

The economics prize established by Sweden?s central bank has been awarded since 1969 despite recurring criticism that economics is not an exact science in the same league as physics, chemistry or medicine. American Edward Prescott and Norwegian Finn Kydland picked up the economics prize for studies that laid the groundwork for more independent central banks.

Peter STARCK