The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2013/press.html

by subsystem • 13 years ago

72 18 13 years ago

X42• 13 years ago

Leaves a dull taste to hear that a once prestigious prices has lost all of it's meaning. When people like Obama [1] win a Nobel Prize and Putin [1] get's suggested for another.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize

[2] http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.550147

maguay• 13 years ago

The science prizes still hold their prestige even if the peace prize has often been controversial. The peace prize has always been the most controversial of the set (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize#Criticism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peace for starts).

glormph2• 13 years ago

Anyone can 'suggest' people for a peace prize. The peace prize != the medicine prize.

Also, it's just a (prestigious) prize. Keep doing science, don't think about it. And for god's sake, don't come up with science policies that 'will make our country win more Nobel prizes'.

X42• 13 years ago

You don't say it, but I guess you mean it. The time politics and policies come into play things start going the wrong way. See "TED" [1] for example.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-02-29/why-im-fed-up...

xanth• 13 years ago

The controversy of Nobel prize is proportional ambiguity inherent to the prizes subject.

tptacek• 13 years ago

I guess if you don't know anything about vesicle mechanics, sure, contribute a totally irrelevant political argument instead.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

For me Nobel Price in peace is worthless long before Obama won it.

Don't let me get started with the "Nobel memorial price" that banksters created.

But Nobel prices in science had always been and continue being prestigious.

sp332• 13 years ago

It's a completely different committee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Physiology_or_M...

kunai• 13 years ago

You're decades late. The Peace prize lost its meaning and prestige long before Obama got it.

The committees presiding over the other awards are completely different from the Peace committee, and the other awards still carry an enormous amount of merit, and if you're a biologist you'll know how important vesicle transport is. However, you probably aren't.

Don't pick at strawmen and use your arguments somewhere else.

aortega• 13 years ago

"once prestigious prices"? Tell me of a more prestigious price in science, there is none. Maybe the field medal in mathematics comes close.

Peace and Economics Nobels are non-scientific and only share the name with the original prices.

blueblob• 13 years ago

Turing award in computing?

zhaphod• 13 years ago

I hope you are consistent and feel the same about the peace prize to Kissinger

apl• 13 years ago

Worthy choice, especially Suedhof. His work is a seminal contribution to our understanding of one of the most basic principles governing information processing in virtually all nervous systems: the chemical transmission of a signal from one neurone to the other.

His review "The Synaptic Vesicle Cycle"[1] in Annual Reviews offers a somewhat accessible look at the critical bits.

[1] Use scholar.google.com if you want to find "liberated" PDFs.

jermaink• 13 years ago

More: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/october/sudhof-nobel-priz...

sandipc• 13 years ago

The prize for Schekman and Rothman has been a long time coming - well deserved! For anyone unfamiliar, worth reading their groundbreaking Cell papers from the early 1980s. (or look at any cell biology textbook!)

timr• 13 years ago

Note the dates that all of these US scientists started their careers -- all began their first non-training jobs in the mid-to-late 1970s. This batch of winners is amongst the last generation of US scientists to have stable scientific funding.

Starting in the early 1980s, the US began to play political games with research budgets, and since then it's been feast or famine. Whole generations of trainees have been doomed to underemployment, faculty positions have disappeared, and a career in academic science has gone from a feasible choice for smart college students, to a long-shot on par with becoming a professional athlete.

This batch of winners is a reminder that in a decade or two, we'll be wondering why the US doesn't win Nobel prizes anymore.

GuiA• 13 years ago

Who do you think will be winning them?

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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