A farewell to arms
In a move that caught many in the media off guard, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) today. An international consortium of 189 nations based in The Hague, the OPCW acts as the enforcement arm for the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention and oversees the inspection and collection of chemical weapons, as well their destruction, in countries that have agreed to abide by the convention treaty. To better understand OPCW and what the organization does, Harvard staff writer Christina Pazzanese spoke with Matthew Meselson, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences. Meselson has studied and taught biology in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 1961. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons and serves on the board of...