Who is Fred Kavli?
Mr. Fred Kavli emigrated from Norway to the US in the 1950s. He formed the KavliCo in Moorpark, California in 1958. Upon selling the company in 2000, he formed the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, CA. At 80, Mr. Kavli is a very active person, who has a driving desire to change the world through basic science research (see the Kavli Foundation web site for a very nice interview of Fred Kavli by Alan Alda: www.kavlifoundation.org).

What is the Kavli Prize?
The Kavli Prizes are awarded annually in a joint effort by the Kavli Foundation, The Norwegian Ministry of Education & Research, and the Norwegian Academy for Science and Letters. The awards are given in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Why these areas? "The way he (Fred Kavli) sometimes puts it," says David Gross, a Nobel prizewinner in physics and director of the first Kavli Institute, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is that he's fascinated by the very biggest, the very smallest and the thing you need to understand both of them--the human brain." (Time Magazine, Aug. 2, 2007)

This year, the prizes were awarded to seven pioneering scientists who have transformed human knowledge in the fields of nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics. For Neuroscience, the recipients are: Professor Pasko Rakic, of Yale University School of Medicine, USA; Professor Thomas M. Jessell, of Columbia University, USA; and Professor Sten Grillner, of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. For Astrophysics the winners are: Professor Donald Lynden-Bell, of Cambridge University, UK; and Professor Maarten Schmidt, of California Institute of Technology, USA. Finally, for nanoscience, the prizes went to: Professor Sumio Iijima, of Meijo University, Japan; and to Louis E. Brus, of Columbia University, US.

The event was delivered with an array for top-shelf entertainment: Åse Kleveland (former artist and Norwegian Minister of Culture) was toast master, Kampen Janitsjar brass band played, Frode Thingnæs conducted (as well as wrote/directed most of the music) for the band Oslo Camerata, violin soloist and sisters Catharina and Sara Chen played, and Tine Thing Helseth played the trumpet beautifully.

Mr. Fred Kavli himself gave an awe-inspiring speech on the relevance of macro (astro), micro (nano) and complex (neuro) sciences in our lives. If it wasn’t for the latter we would not be able to comprehend the other two (according to Professor Jon Storm-Mathisen, the head of the Kavli Prize Committee in Neuroscience).

Mr. Kavli has managed to do what only Alfred Nobel before him has done: create a visible, substantial, and sustainable symbol of recognition that basic research pays off. The partnership between the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is ingenious and necessary for this prize to be meaningful in a global context. Norway has a long history of handing out the Nobel Peace prize and the Abel mathematics prize, and a position as a competitive yet socially responsible country.

It is now up to the Norwegian Government to allocate some of those incredible oil funds (NOK 2,300 billion, or approximately US$ 412 billion at the time of this article) to gamble on science as the new entrepreneurial driver for economic growth, and strengthen its research institutions by investing in science and international collaborations.

The Kavli event makes one really proud to be a Norwegian and a Californian at the same time, and demonstrates that basic research is undeniably a key to human welfare.

Read more about it:

http://www.kavliprize.no
http://www.kavlifoundation.org
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1649308,00.html

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erik Rolland, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Accounting & Information Systems at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Riverside. Erik grew up in Norway, and received his Ph.D. in the United States, like many other high-tech immigrants. He teaches technology and strategy to graduate, undergraduate and executive students, and lives in Santa Barbara, California. Erik can be reached at: erik.rolland@ucr.edu