STOCKHOLM - Scientists must break through the boundaries between disciplines and nations to find solutions to some of the great unanswered questions, some of 2007's Nobel prize winners said Friday.
"I think this will be the great challenge for science. Science will merge. The borders between physics and chemistry and biology will disappear more and more," Gerhard Ertl, this year's Nobel laureate for chemistry, said during a news conference.
He said research also transcends national borders.
"Science is international. So there is no Chinese science, no German science, no American science. That means that all the free exchange of results between the different countries is necessary," Ertl said.
The scientists were in Sweden's capital for Nobel Week celebrations ahead of today's solemn ceremony where they will receive their medals from the Swedish king.
Leonid Hurwicz, co-winner of the economics prize and the oldest person to take a Nobel, will not attend.
Eric Maskin of Princeton University, who won the economy prize with the University of Chicago's Roger Myerson and Hurwicz, of the University of Minnesota, said the study of economics was touching on everything from psychology to ecology.
"I think this is the wave of the future," Maskin said.
"Too often we see our enterprises as divided very much into narrow disciplines - economics, anthropology, evolotionary biology or ecology - but these boundaries are artificial. There's no reason to maintain them and I am hopeful that with time they will start disappearing."
Myerson said major policy choices such as how to address global warming should also draw on many disciplines. "It's a good example of where physical science and social science go together, and we need to be thinking about both."
