Are You On it?

The University of Leicester's Alec Jeffrey, who developed DNA fingerprinting, is one of the finalists for the Millennium Technology prize, as is MIT's Robert Langer, who made biomaterials for controlled drug release and tissue regeneration. The BBC calls the prize "a kind of unofficial Noble Prize for technology." They are joined on that list by David Payne and his colleagues, Emmanual Desurvire and Randy Giles, who invented and developed an amplifier underlying the global optical fiber network and Andrew Viterbi, who created an algorithm used in wireless and digital communication.