Gore, Stoppard to receive Dan David prize

TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, British playwright Tom Stoppard and Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan are among this year's Dan David Prize honorees in Israel.

The Dan David Prize annually awards people for achievements that make an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on the world.

The 2008 winners are Gore, Stoppard and Egoyan; Israeli author Amos Oz; Geoffrey Eglinton, a British professor of Earth Sciences, and Ellen Moseley-Thompson and Lonnie G. Thompson, professors of geography and geological sciences respectively at Ohio State University.

Oz, Stoppard and Egoyan will share a $1 million award, while Gore will get another and Eglinton, Mosely-Thompson and Thompson will share a third.

"The constellation of laureates is particularly meaningful," Dan David, the businessman and philanthropist who founded the prize, said in a statement. "On the one hand, great creators depicting historical events in literature, theater and film; on the other, eminent scientists whose research predicts environmental disaster if we do not act; and in between, a man promoting awareness of this prediction and its remedies so that human history will continue to be told for generations to come."

The awards are to be presented at a ceremony May 19 at Tel Aviv University.