Here. The winners:
Bioscience: Raymond Damadian, president and chairman of FONAR. Dr Damadian first proposed the idea of using the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as an external probe for the detection of internal cancer.
Computing: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium. In 1989, Mr Berners-Lee proposed a scheme to enable electronic documents to link to other documents stored on other computers. This idea later grew into the world wide web
Telecoms: Paul Baran, co-founder, the Institute for the Future. In 1959, Dr Baran began to think about ways to make America’s communications infrastructure resistant to a nuclear attack. He proposed using a system called distributed adaptive message block switching, known today as packet switching.
Energy: Geoffrey Ballard, chairman, General Hydrogen. In the late 1970s, Dr Ballard began research into fuel cells as a means of addressing the problem of smog in large cities. Fuel cells combine stored hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate electricity, water vapour and no harmful emissions.
No Boundaries: Ronald Coase, professor emeritus of economics, University of Chicago Law School. In papers published in 1959 and 1960, Dr Coase asked why valuable radio spectrum was going to waste. He suggested that the problem was the lack of private property rights over spectrum, which prevented the formation of a market to allocate spectrum efficiently. The answer, he proposed, was to open the allocation of radio spectrum to market forces.
