The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." I know just about enough to recognize this as something biochemical, but I'm sure there will be plenty of commentary about this around science blogdom.
"Curious Wavefunction" is the name left by the commenter who predicted Yonath would win in this year's betting pool, and thus wins the right to author a guest post here. Congratulations, Curious. Send me email from the address you left in the comment form, and we can set this up.
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Yea, there will be plenty of commentary about this. After this year's Physics selection, they do this in Chemistry. From the looks of it, Foundation is selecting on the bases of "International Involvement" in the project in lieu of the citations. Yea, I am proud of the fact that an Indian from Tamil Nadu won it but I got to admit there were much better candidates and even better citations.
Interesting Tom Steitz's longtime friend and collaborator on the ribosome structure, Peter Moore was left out, so was Harry Noller.
Did read some of the info they have on the Nobel site, amusing to see they linked this award with the Physics one (CCD cameras are very important for X-Ray crystallography).
They also mention this as a trilogy of structures (DNA, polymerase to transcribe the DNA to mRNA, and the ribosome to translate the mRNA to the amino acid sequence of protein, Crick's sequence hypothesis). Each has one a nobel in chemistry. The actual linking of nucleotide sequence to amino acid sequence also won a Nobel though in Physiology/Medicine.
I predicted Thomas Steitz for Chemietry, too, in addition to Blackburn & Greider for Physiology/Medicine. And I'm the same guy who predicted Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa for physics last year. Not that it means much.
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The previous comment was disemvowelled for being creepy, hostile, and possibly threatening. Future attempts to post this sort of crap will be summarily deleted; persistent attempts will lead to banning.
This will not be tolerated.
anybody knows where is jyothi ballabh now?