The Swedish Royal Family dressed in their regal regalia as they honored the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize winners in Stockholm on Wednesday. 
King Carl XVI Gustaf, Queen Silvia, Crown Princess Victoria, Prince Carl Philip and Princess Madeleine gathered at the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the awards are annually handed out. The King personally awarded the winners for the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and economics.
Five Europeans, four Americans and three Japanese were singled out by the Nobel committees when the prizes were announced in October.
The Swedish Academy continued a trend of honoring European writers by selecting Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio for the literature award. The author wrote more than 40 works including The Book of Flights and Desert.
The medicine prize jury cited French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983. They shared the award with Germany’s Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
Japan’s Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the chemistry prize for discovering and developing a fluorescent protein. Their work has helped researchers track such processes as the development of brain cells, the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer cells.
Japanese scientists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa split the physics award with American Yoichiro Nambu for 
theoretical advances that help explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter.
US economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect international trade patterns.
The prize is not one of the original Nobels, but was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel’s memory.
The prizes — including a diploma and a gold medal — are handed out December 10 to mark the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896. The winners also received 10 million kronor, or $1.2 million dollars from the King.
After the event, the Royal Family escorted the winners to the banquet at Stockholm’s City Hall. There, the royals were seen chatting with the N0bel Laureates through the night.
The next morning, there was another honorary dinner, this time at the Palace. Once again, the Swedish royal family dressed to the nines, and dined with the Laureates.
Also in attendance was the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Martti Ahtisaari, the former President of Finland. He just arrived from Oslo after receiving the prize for his global mediation efforts, and celebrating with the Norwegian King and Queen.
The 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel stipulates that the prizes, first awarded in 1901, should be given to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”
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