Morning Edition

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

In 1949, a teacher at Eton, a British boarding school, belittled John Gurdon's dreams of becoming a scientist as "quite ridiculous." This week, Gurdon's breakthrough in reprogramming cells received the Nobel Prize for medicine.

In Pakistan, a 15-year-old girl is in the hospital with a bullet wound in her head. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting. Malala Yousefzai has spent several years criticizing violent Islamist militants who do not want girls to have an education.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee want to hear why the State Department repeatedly denied requests for tighter security for U.S. diplomats in Libya before the deadly September 11th attack on the consulate in Benghazi. The State Department has been tight lipped on the issue.

Penske Media bought the 107-year-old magazine for $25 million. Unlike its longtime competitor, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety has had trouble making the switch to digital media.

Americans Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the two researchers Wednesday "for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors."

For the past decade, scientists have been toying with the notion of encapsulating medicine in microscopic balls.

These so-called nanospheres could travel inside the body to hard-to-reach places, like the brain or the inside of a tumor. One problem researchers face is how to build these nanospheres, because you'd have to make them out of even smaller nanoparticles.