Someone yesterday asked whether there were online odds for the upcoming Nobels? Well Thomson Scientific (producers of ISI and other citation indices) have their own predictions and a poll too (although they only give 3 choices???)
Medicine & Physiology predictions (by Thomson Sci):
For more speculation on the Nobels (including my pics and the pics of many others, click here).
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It's funny, your choices and Thomson's picks are non-overlapping.
It's Thomas sci vs me. Bring it on!
Capecchi, Evans and Smithies are in the race for years. Being in the Knock Out buisiness I received a phone call from a Stockholm based journalist in 2002 who was sure that they or somebody from the conditional mutagenesis field (K. Rajewsky) would get the award.
To a degree I would appreciate if they were honored because there is some competition with the random mutagensis (ENU mutagensis, sleeping beauty and frog prince transposomics, gene trapping) guys for funding. I may be biased because of my job but I think that while random mutagenesis did a tremendous job in bacteria and flies it did not pay off in mice (yet?). My concern is that big random mutagenesis approaches are to expensive compared to the outcome. In addition, there is another kind of thinking behind these approaches. Rather then being hypothesis driven they are more of the "let's see what happens" type. To a degree the latter is of course true for targeted mutations but at least those researchers that take this waya have some idea why they kock out a certain gene.