Interview: Bell Labs president eyes more Nobel Prize laureates

by Xinhua writer Ren Haijun

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 (Xinhua) -- With two former scientists winning this year's Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, eyes more Nobel Prize laureates coming from the famous research organization in the future.

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, was awarded the prize for their invention and development of the charge-coupled device (CCD)when they worked in Bell in 1969. They shared the prize with Chinese-American scientist Charles K. Kao, who made groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.

This is the seventh Nobel Prize for Bell Labs and brings the total number of Bell Labs researchers who have won the prize to thirteen.

"The innovation (in Bell Labs) continue. And the innovation will be recognized sometime in the future. So I expect many more (Nobel Prize winner coming from Bell) in the future," Kim told Xinhua in an exclusive telephone interview.

Kim referred the main reasons for his big ambition to the quality of people in Bell and the environment it creates.

"The most important thing is that we actually try to recruit the best and brightest people from universities around the world, people from China, Germany, Canada, the United States," Kim said. "And we also try to create an environment where these researchers mingle naturally with others, which means people who are experts in device physics mingle with somebody who might be interested in video, who might be interested in mathematics, etc."