Gaze into the crystal ball - Nobel Prize Gossip

I would rule out the Ribosome. If it is given as you list it a lot of people would be pissed. Rightfully po'd would be Harry Noller, Peter Moore and Joachim Frank. Still, I think a simple 'structure of the the small subunit and its detailed function' would be a good prize and then it would obviously be Ramakrishnan.

Ribosome: I think Harry Noller should definitely be included. I think it should be for the large subunit and showing that "The ribosome is a ribozyme." I would say Noller, Steitz and Moore.

MHC: There are many names, but two (Doherty and Zinkernagel) have already won. How about Strominger and Bjorkman (Wiley's student) for the MHC structure (with a peptide in the pocket!) and Unanue for antigen presentation?

Signaling: How about Michael Berridge (IP3, calcium)?

I think membrane traffic, telomerase, and hematopoietic stem cells are very deserving. RNAi will get eventually, but it's a little early. How about eukaryotic transcription (Roeder etc.)? How about Benzer for behavioral genetics? His research had impacts on many fields including circadian rhythm and memory.

I hear they're giving a new prize this year for web snark. I'm top of the list.

How about some neuroscience: Tom Jessell for homeodomain proteins and motor development. I can think of some others that might be deserving but I think his work really stands out.

One argument against Tsien is that he's developed techniques (albeit very good ones), rather than any great biological principle. While they awarded Lauterbur and Mansfield Med and Phys for MRI, Kary Mullis got Chemistry for PCR and I reckon Tsien would be in with a better shout for Chemistry.

Ian Wilmut's unlikely to win for Dolly, given
all the controversy at the moment.

What fun...

As a membrane dude I'd have to say it would be difficult to make the right choice. Schekman and Rothman are obvious choices (though perhaps JR been wrong about too many things?) Gallwitz, Scheller and Jahn certainly have done their share, and Sudhof has made critical contributions. There have been Nobel-caliber contributions on the Sec61 complex that have not yet been honored with the prize (hint, hint), but unfortunately are unlikely to be since Blobel has effectively been awarded that prize. How about Peter Walter for UPR? Walter Neupert for mitochondrial assembly?

Other topics: what about eukaryotic gene regulation? Still waiting. Roeder and Kornberg are obvious choices, possibly Chambon as well. There's never been a Nobel for the cytoskeleton. How about Inouye's early work with polarization microscopy on the spindle, and his proposal that MT polymerization is driven by solvent entropy? Or molecular motors? Here's a flyer: Arthur Ashkin (who invented the optical trap and certainly should be in the running for the Chem and Physics prizes as well), Carlos Bustamente and Steve Block for single-molecule force studies... And of course the ribosome: would be sweet to see Noller get it, particularly for his then-heretical discovery that the ribosome is a ribozyme - long before the structures by him and others confirmed it. Or for innate immunity - though sadly that one can't go to Janeway. Berridge and Irvine (and Snyder?) for IP3 signaling is a good one, if perhaps unlikely so soon after the K+ channel prize.

George Smiley,

Interesting options. Sec61 ... (someone here would like that!)

Cytoskeleton. The realm of my graduate studies. Well the motors is the most likely prize for cytoskeletonistas. The field is so diverse. Inouye is a good one. Mitchison & Kirschner for the search and capture model? Tom Pollard for actin (and deriving every Km to the 12th decimal place)? Marie-France Carlier for explaining dynamic instability? Then there is Arp2/3 and now formins. Allan Hall would fit here too. The whole thing is too diffuse. Maybe one for MTs and a second prize for actin! My-oh-my!

The more I think about it the more I like Inouye. He was, after all, the father of live cell microscopy. The GFP stuff was really built on the advances of over half a century of work by him and people he trained & inspired. He probably won't get it, but he unquestionably deserves it.

Ni Hao! Kannichi Wa!What about Joseph Schlessinger, whose astounding "name-dropping" in a recent prominent patent dispute (ImClone, Erbitux and mimic agents) included the fact that he was a nominee for a Nobel Prize, among the 20 most cited scientists in the USA and was Chair of an Ivy League department (Yale)?This indicates the sorry state of the scientific industry with the implication that such a record gives one a blank check for taking the innovative ideas of others and technically developing them on the sly.Fortunately, although individuals can fool the entire scientific culture, its so called peer reviewers, publication industry, and prize committees (Nobel, National Academy, etc.) over a career, there is hope in that one cannot fool the court (good summary here):By contrast, she [Judge Buchwald] repeatedly assailed the testimony of Schlessinger, who testified that he'd been nominated for a Nobel Prize and is now the chair of pharmacology at Yale University's School Of Medicine. "Schlessinger's explanation... can most generously be described as strained," Judge Buchwald wrote in her opinion.Elsewhere, she commented that "This exchange represents one of many instances in which Schlessinger exhibited great reluctance to acknowledge a fact that he perceived to be injurious to the defendants' case." In various places, her opinion dismissed his testimony as "not credible," "contorted," "incredible" and "wholly unsubstantiated by any contemporaneous records."Source: CNNMoney.comBottom line: It's time to end this individual cult worship called The Nobel Prize, a farce, ultimate in hypocrisy, rigged politically behind closed doors, and antiquated. There are thousands of discoveries that deserve the Nobel Prize. Any one individual nowadays got there on the backs of others.This whole scientific personality cult on which the Nobel Prize is the ultimate needs reformation.In particular the current disastrous state of the so-called peer review system, both for dissemination of information and for funding carried out by so-called secret panels of experts who are largely experts in their own minds picked by non-scientist administrators. This mentality is sending our basic science culture down the road to disaster and mindless documentation of illusory and useless trivia.It is time for a more open process, possibly an unbiased jury system involving voir dire, particularly concerning the Nobel Prize with a jury, debate and vote of the scientific "people" around the world. Perhaps a similar process with at least 6 to 12 jurors (reviewers) per manuscript or proposal with equal vote and a judge (editor or study section chair) picked very carefully and fairly (possibly elected) similar to patent and intellectual property disputes would improve this corrupt and wasteful mess.MOTYR

Are there betting odds anywhere? I found a German site that gave odds for 2004, but nothing for this year.

My prediction: At least a third of the winners will be products of the U.S. public school system; more likely, two-thirds will be public school alumni.

What I'd want, but almost certainly won't get, is that the Nobel committe decides to widen the definition again. Give Jane Goodall the prize! Frisch, Lorenz and Tinbergen got it.

If a Steitz does get the Nobel, shouldn't it be Joan?

Regarding awarding the Nobel for the human genome, that was kind of covered in 2002 when the prize was awarded to Brenner, Horvitz and Sulston for C. elegans. The idea of sequencing the entire genome of a living organism was (I think) first proposed by John Sulston, who wanted to sequence the C. elegans genome, and he went on to head up the British side of the Human Genome Consortium as a result of his work with C. elegans. This prize also kind of covered a Nobel for apoptosis as the predictable pattern of programmed cell death during development was also first observed by Brenner and Sulston in C. elegans and Bob Horvitz found most of the genes involved in nematode cell death, which are evolutionarily conserved.

Sulston won with Brenner and Horvitz not for the genome of worms or humans but for the worm cell lineage's contributions to understanding cell death & organ development. He could well win again with Waterston and Lander for the Human Genome.

For the human genome, as is the problem with many Nobels, it is possible to agree that a discovery is worthy of the prize, but arriving at the decision of exactly who is worthy of the award is much more difficult (e.g. the controversy about the omission of Moncada for the prize for NO in '98). I don't particularly like the guy, but I just can't see how a prize can be given for the human genome that completely ignores Craig Venter. But then again, if he is included, that would also be controversial, and I think the Med/Phys Nobel committee would probably prefer a quiet life. And as C. elegans was the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced as a direct consequence of Sulston and co's work on deciphering cell lineage in the nematode, the 2002 prize was, I think, the Nobel committee's nod, in a round about way, to the human genome project.

Sulston and Waterston were really equal partners in both the C. elegans genome and the human genome. Since Sulston won without Waterston, I think it's clear that the human genome prize is still out there.

Two of the underlying techniques for the human genome project already won Nobel Prizes (PCR and DNA sequencing), though both in chemistry. The shotgun method while speeding up the process, Venter's group did use the public effort. If there was no public sequencing effort and no radiation hybrid maps & the like, would the shotgun method really have worked that well? For the most part, the human genome effort was sure effort more than anything else. Throw enough resources at it and it was going to get done. The automated sequencing efforts really deserve the credit.

Wouldn't the ribosome go under chemistry? While there are medical implications in terms of antibiotics which was the reason RibX started, the "ribosome is a ribozyme" is the major "discovery". In that case, shouldn't Strobel and others be included for showing it isn't just the ribosome but that the tRNA itself is involved in the catalysis?

There's also the occasional tendency of the Nobel to go to discoveries associated with stuff that gets a lot of news coverage, e.g. the 1998 award for NO at around the same time that Viagra came on the market, and the award to Stanley Prusiner for prions when BSE was a big scare story. Drugs like herceptin and glivec have had a lot of news coverage so tyrosine kinases (and therefore potentially Tony Hunter/Janet Rowley/Peter Nowell) could get it.

kstrna, shotgun is a critical contribution and was the first, and still is the main method for sequencing microbial genomes. Venter certainly appears to be an egomaniacal jerk but that has hardly been a disqualifier for the Nobel (see e.g. S. Tonegawa), and his contribution is fundamental: shotgun yielded the first genome of a free-living organism. Of course, if we want to see the prize go to the field's founders, it's Robert Sinsheimer, responsible for the very first genome sequence (phage phiX174) and one of the very first (if not the first) to propose the HGP as a worthy goal. With respect to to the "medicine" prize, remember that it's officially "Physiology or Medicine."

Back to transcription, ISI predicts Elwood Jensen/Ron Evans/Pierre Chambon for nuclear hormone receptors, definitely an interesting choice and one that overlaps with my comments about eukaryotic gene reg. ideas above. I think the transcription prize is a better bet because by giving it to Chambon and 2 others they could kill the general transcription and nuclear hormone birds with a single stone, albeit at the cost of denying Jensen the prize.

kstrna, shotgun is a critical contribution and was the first, and still is the main method for sequencing microbial genomes. Venter certainly appears to be an egomaniacal jerk but that has hardly been a disqualifier for the Nobel (see e.g. S. Tonegawa), and his contribution is fundamental: shotgun yielded the first genome of a free-living organism.
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The proposal put forth was that he (and the others) would get it for the human genome project. The shotgun method to me does not raise to the level of the techniques for PCR and DNA sequencing and thus doesn't deserve Nobel recognition. It is very useful as you say and does it at a cheaper cost. It did speed up the process and force the public effort to do the same which is great but to me that is not Nobel worthy. PCR and DNA sequencing were the biggest factors in enabling the human genome project to succeed. After that was automation in my opinion. To me, large scale sequencing is a natural progression from knowing how to do PCR and DNA sequencing and were taken into account when those achievements were rewarded.

I was mentioning Chemistry for the ribosome because Altman & Cech won the Nobel In Chemistry for catalytic RNA. Agre and MacKinnon won for membrane channels also in Chemistry. Other macromolecules winning the Noble also went for Chemistry. Precedence would suggest that is where the ribosome would go.

To me if they go for genomics, I say go for the sequence analysis programs (BLAST for example) that make all the data actually useable.

Quick question, which I should be able to Google the answer to, but can't be arsed - the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations many times (Red Cross, UN, Medecins sans Frontieres, off the top of my head). Is there anything to stop a science Nobel being awarded to an organization? The Med/Phys to the Human Genome Project, for example.

Is there anything to stop a science Nobel being awarded to an organization?

Nobel's will. The science Nobels can only be given to individuals, max 3.

How about HIV? Montagnier and Gallo must be due to get one sometime, even though the nasty claim for credit was a mess.

My prediction is that neither Steitz will get it. Ribosome, that has been in a sense done along with the genetic code, tRNA etc. ('68). See ya later Tom. RNA? They already gave it to splicing ('93) and to catalytic RNA ('89). Too bad Joan.

My wish (a bit off the wall), give it to Lynn Margulis for the endosymbiotic theory. Mitos deserve a Nobel - after all they have their own genome! And with the new data on centrosomal RNA, her theory of SET may have been right after all. Plus it would highlight evolution and the Nobels can increase their tally of female recipients. You could also throw in Walter Neupert and Jeff Schatz.

Are you SURE that Nobel's will makes any distinctions between the number of people who can receive Peace and those who can receive Science? I'm not sure that the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation do either. I can't see anything which would prevent a Science prize being treated in the same way as a Peace prize and being awarded to an organization. But I may well be wrong and would be happy to stand corrected...

Although he didn't get it this year, I would correct the butchering of Judah Folkman's name (antiangiogenic therapy) in your future predictions.

Hi Alex,

One question requiring three separate answers:

Why do you think that Folkman's contribution to the research of angiogenesis and McCulloch and Till's discovery of stem cells are controversial ?

Regards,

Dusan

Any guesses for Nobel Prizes this year?