Balzan Prizes honor work in humanities, science

MILAN (AP) — Three Americans are among winners of this year’s Balzan Prize. Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and scholar at the University of Chicago, won the prize for moral philosophy, for what the Balzan Foundation called  “her transformative reconception of the goals of social justice, both globally and locally.” Another University of Chicago faculty member, ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, was recognized for his work focusing primarily on European and Jewish music. Robert Langer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the biotechnology prize for what the Milan-based Balzan Foundation called pioneering research and advances in mRNA vaccines and tissue engineering. The final prize was shared by Danish and Dutch researchers for their work on glaciation and ice-sheet dynamics.