Three Americans have won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for a discovery that has been likened to the tip of a shoelace.

Good heavens, Paul R. Krugman has a day job.

It’s the sort of windfall that not-for-profits don’t receive every day.

A little more than a year old, the Alliance for Climate Protection gained $750,000 when former Vice President Al Gore was named co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

Gore announced that he would give his share of the prize to the alliance, a Palo Alto, Calif., organization he formed last year.

The group’s goal is to increase awareness about threats to the environment from global warming.
It helped put on this July’s Live Earth concerts in seven cities around the world.

Sure, he’s won every award known to man except the Olympic gold. (Unless he gets into wrestling or weight lifting, that honor seems beyond even his reach.)

But the main achievement of Al Gore is not his comeback from having the White House snatched away, not his Oscar or even his sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize, announced today.

The real phenomenon of Al Gore is how connected he has become despite (and because of) his losing the presidency.

Gore has forged strong bonds not only in politics, science and the international environmental movement, but in finance, high-tech and Hollywood.