The Nobel Prize and Fuzziness Between Chemistry and Biology
“When you get into University, you learn that Biology is really Chemistry, Chemistry is really Physics, Physics is really Math.”* Many years ago, a friend sent me a version of that quote among a whole host of other quotes that he’d collected over the years. When I first read it as a chemistry undergraduate, I [...]
MotW: Nobel Prizes all about the carbon
Carbon is the big star among the science Nobel Prizes this week. Sure, IVF is a big deal, too. But, today, I’m all about the element that ruled my life as an organic chemist. Carbon more than math is the universal common denominator of ‘O-chem. “As my undergraduate professor once quipped , “You just have [...]
Chemistry Nobel, women, and the "choice"
On Monday, I mentioned that it was a good week for women in science. Well, it got even better today with the announcement of the chemistry prize. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science becomes the fourth woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (sharing the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the [...]
Nobel Prize for telomeres: focusing on the ends of DNA
It’s Nobel Prize season again, and the science behind this particular award for Medicine feels like a familiar friend. I got my crash course in telomeres and telomerase from a group meeting talk that one of my lab colleagues gave almost exactly a decade ago. The science recognized was done a quarter century ago. DNA [...]
