Saeed Al Khotani Saudi Gazette RIYADH – Under the aegis of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, the winners of the King Faisal International Prize will receive their awards at a grand function at Prince Sultan Grand Hall at Al-Faisaliyah Center here Saturday night. On January 28, five individual winners and one institution were named winners of the Prize for 2013. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, Emir of Makkah region and Chairman of the King Faisal International Prize Board, will be present at the event along with princes, ministers, senior government and private sector officials, dignitaries, intellectuals and media men. Prizes were awarded in four categories this year. The King Faisal Foundation awarded its Prize for Service to Islam to Sheikh Rai'd Salah Mahagna for his leadership and humanitarian work in the occupied Palestinian territories as chairman of the Islamic Movement in Palestine between 1996 and 2001. The Prize for Arabic Language and Literature, which focused this year on individual and institutional efforts in creating Arabic dictionaries, was awarded to the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo for its contributions over the past 80 years, including publication of a large collection of specialized dictionaries linking contemporary Arabic with its past. Jeffrey Michael Friedman of Rockefeller University in New York and Douglas Leonard Coleman of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, received the foundation's Prize in Medicine for their research into the genetics of obesity, specifically the identification and characterization of the leptin pathway. The Prize for Science, which this year was awarded in the field of physics, was awarded to Paul B. Corkum of the University of Ottawa and Ferenc Krausz of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich for their pioneering work on the motion of electrons. First awarded in 1979, the award includes a $200,000 cash prize. Up to now, 229 distinguished individuals and organizations from 40 different countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America have received the Prize in various categories.
