It’s better than the Oscars! It’s more exciting than the Super Bowl! It’s the 2008 Nobel Prize announcement for Physiology or Medicine!!
Who will it be this year? Will it go to a paradigm-shifting discovery? Perhaps to the creators of a powerful technology? It’s anyone’s guess, but as always, I am running my Nobel Nostradamus pool here in the lab and my prediction envelope will be locked up at 5:00 today in anticipation of The Prize announcement this coming Monday, October 6th.
Last year I won my own pool (Yeah!) with my prediction that Martin Evans, Mario Capecchi, and Oliver Smithies would grab the gold for their work in mouse ES cells and homologous recombination. In a fun twist for me, I was introduced at a talk that I gave in Edinburgh last April by Sir Martin Evans himself and took the opportunity to invite him to join me in the bar afterwards to receive his share of my winnings in the form of a glass of Islay. Good times…
My list of possibles for 2008:
(1) Liz Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for Telomerase
(2) James Till and Ernest McCulloch for their proof of stem cells (though back to back stem cell prizes is a long-shot)
(3) Len Herzenberg, Lee Herzenberg, and Irv Weissman for flow cytometry and the prospective identification of blood stem cells (same caveat at #2)
What is YOUR prediction?
Re. the medicine/physiology prize, how about Roger Tsien? Apart from his work optimising and “coloring” GFP, he also merits a Nobel for his earlier work on small molecule fluorescent probes for “reading out” ion concentrations, most famously [Ca], in living cells – every bit as influential in research on cells and how they work as the patch-clamp electrophysiology technique which won Sakmann and Neher the 1991 prize, IMHO.
Good suggestion, Austin.
I think I’ve seen (1) and (3) on various “ideas” lists before, so I think it is a good bet their time will come one day. However, it is interesting that Roger Tsien is a singleton suggestion.
It is often said that the Lasker awards are a good predictor of this particular Nobel.
Yes, I heard that about the Lasker too.
Within physiology, there tends to be more consensus about what discoveries (as opposed to particular people) are “Nobel-worthy”. A lot of people have opined that IP3 “deserves a Nobel”, though precisely who it would go to is hotly debated. There is also a view that once the coupling between receptor stimulation and calcium entry is more-or-less worked out, that would be worth one too, though again it might be hard to define which people deserved the palm.
Whom should get a certain prize has certainly been the subject of debate (including HEATED debate, especially after the fact). Notable exclusions (i.e. snubs) in the call to Sweden have also happened now and again. The ones that I find to be particularly interesting are those “obvious” prizes that never were (Avery, Macleod, and McCarthy for DNA as the genetic material being a biggie… Britton Chance in cellular respiration… Bob Weinberg for tumor suppressor genes… others). I’ve got my own list of prizes that I’d like to see awarded but probably never will.
For instance, my ideal ES cell prize would have gone to Martin Evans, Gail Martin, and Leroy Stevens. Capecchi and Smithies would have shared another prize with Rudy Jaenisch for genetic modifications leading to knockouts and transgenics.
Thomas Kuhn wrote that being able to figure out exactly when a field started and by whom can be a real challenge. You’d think that it would be easier in our modern age, but so much new work is sufficiently complex and collaborative, that it can still be a very tough call. Even with great documentation, the snub can nevertheless occur (sorry Jocelyn Bell!).
InsP3 – Berridge, Irvine and Michell?
Wiliam- I read a book once by a science journalist (Natalie Angier?) in which she “shadowed” Bob Weinberg and wrote about him, his lab, work etc…I am sure in the expectation that he’d get the Nobel that year. But he didn’t, so the book ended rather flatly.
“InsP3 – Berridge, Irvine and Michell?”
Those are the three most often mentioned when this gets discussed in the conference bar, but I have also heard people make the case for Lowell and Mabel Hokin, who basically invented inositol phosphate research in the 50s and 60s. Mabel Hokin died in 2003 (obituary by Bob Michell here) but I believe Lowell Hokin is still alive. And one Calcium person I know always argues that Irene Schulz, who co-authored the famous 1983 Nature paper that established InsP3 as a Ca-releasing agent with Berridge and Irvine, deserves recognition (the paper used her pancreatic microsome prep to show Ca release directly).
As there gets to be more and more science, and more and more papers with four or more authors, I imagine it will keep getting increasingly difficult to “narrow” Prizes to three or less people. There also seems to be confusion over whether people are being honoured for “a body of key work” or for “a famous key discovery as described in this paper”, though this is a bit of an artificial distinction. The “body of work” idea perhaps makes it easier to decide on three or less people.
Roger Tsien sort of stands on his own, at least in my mind, in terms of the contribution he has made to “using optical methods to see what living cells are doing in real time”. I can’t think of anyone else who has had a comparable influence.
Rather seems to have died here, perhaps reflecting that we were all comprehensively wrong on the physiology/medicine prize! Though just saw that Roger Tsien shares this year’s Chemistry Nobel for Green Fluorescent Protein with Osamu Shimomura (who is also known for the Ca-sensing photoprotein aequorin) and Martin Chalfie.
One interesting aspect of this is that Roger Tsien has thus been honoured for his GFP work, but not yet for his small molecule indicator work which started many years earlier.
Austin, I think you still get kudos for your predictions with Tsien. You are this year’s Nobel Nostradamus!
I’m deeply flattered, William. Almost certainly the first time I have ever sort-of correctly foretold anything, even largely accidentally..!
Let’s hope I’m as accurate with the US election.
Actually, I think the best one can do with Nobel crystal-gazing is to identify the discoveries and people in one’s own patch that one thinks are worth a Nobel. But whether those people then actually get one is another matter. The only Nobel winner I have ever known personally was the late Paul Lauterbur, who was joint winner of the 2003 Medicine prize for magnetic resonance imaging. It was always widely agreed that the significance of MR imaging as a discovery warranted the prize, but he and his co-winner Peter Mansfield had to wait a good long time.
It is interesting how the age of Laureates varies. I sort of have the impression that young ones have got rarer in the modern era – I’m thinking back to people like A.V. Hill, who got the 1922 Physiology Nobel when he was only in his mid 30s, and went on publishing experimental papers for another 40+ years. And of course Jim Watson was only 34. Although Fire and Mello were still pretty young (for Nobel winners) when they got the Physiol/Med Prize last year.
Unfortunately, A F Huxley never got a prize for the sliding filament mechanism of muscle contraction (would have been shared with H E Huxley and R Niedergerke, as Jean Hanson sadly died many years ago). But he won it with A Hodgkin for conduction of nerve impluses. His groundbreaking muscle work was done subsequently. Another example of multi-talent. (Not to mention his invention of the interference microscope.)
For reasons you will understand, Maxine, I usually make it a policy never to comment on anything to do with muscle contraction!! Making an exception, though, I reckon everyone would agree that the sliding filament theory, as set out in the back-to-back 1954 Nature papers, was worth a Nobel.
Funnily enough I will be describing this to the students next week, complete with “4-author montage” derived from the front page of the commemorative special issue.
I still have a few copies of that left, so do let me know (with a mailing address) if you want any more, Austin. There is also a free web focus associated with that supplement, in the Nature web focus archive (go to www.nature.com/nature and web focuses are listed on the left-hand vertical column).