The Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to Australian scientists Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren for their discovery of the bacterium that causes more than 80% of stomach ulcers.

The two men made their discovery in the early 1980s, but it took a long time to convince the medical community, who viewed them as eccentric.

The prize for chemistry will be announced tomorrow.

It is now firmly established that the bacterium causes more than 90% of duodenal (intestinal) ulcers and up to 80% of gastric (stomach) ulcers.

Thanks to the their work, stomach and intestinal ulcers are often no longer a long-term, frequently disabling problem. They can now be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics.

Roy J. Glauber, John L. Hall and Theodor W. Haensch have won the Nobel Prize in physics for using optics to make devices and measurements more precise.

Glauber, 80, of Harvard University won "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.'' Hall, 71, working at the University of Colorado and Haensch, 63, of the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universitaet in Munich won "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique,'' the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation said in a statement.

Annual awards for achievements in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation, whose investments were valued at 3 billion kronor on Dec. 31, was founded in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.

The economics prize was created in 1969 in memory of Nobel by the Swedish central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

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