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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded
An anonymous reader writes "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2005 has been jointly awarded to Robert H. Grubbs (California Institute of Technology), Richard R. Schrock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Yves Chauvin (Institut Français du Pétrole) for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis." Advanced [PDF] and supplementary [PDF] information is also available from the Nobel Prize site.
Well, we can already make diesel out of nearly any kind of oil extracted from nearly any biological material...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Synthetic Oil has been around for a long time. The Germans made oil from coal in WWII as did the South Africans under the Aparthaid Sanctions. (The Chinese are now starting to use this techlonogy as well.) I don't if this new method will help with this, but if it could be done at a large scale I imagine it would.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
this new method
Remember this is the nobel prize we are talking about. These are not necessarily new methods, which is something people have repeatedly forgotten over the last few days of science award posts. Many of these discoveries have been done over time, and in fact started work in the '70s or earlier and may have been finalized in the late 80s or early 90s. Nobel Prizes do not have to be given to you the year you create some new and wonderful thing, and most often this is not the case. Think of the Nobel Prize more as a lifetime achievement award (I mean most the recipients are typically of advanced age) in your scientific field.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Not only is this a new method, but it isn't really all that practical for the synthesis of fuels. You can't run this reaction with just substrates and the Grubb's catalyst; you have to have solvents, which cost money. The catalysts have a finite lifetime and turnover, so you also have to replace those. That's not really very cost effective, in the end, compared to simply adapting technologies to use the substrates as fuel directly.
Such irE
I don't know about the rules, but according to the nobel foundation, they will indeed receive one third of the prize.
Well, that's OK. 2004 Peace prize went to the an environmentalist who thinks AIDS is a bio-weapon created by bad western white scientists.
Je ne parle pas francais.
An example of that is here. Notice that one guy got half the prize, while two others split the remaining half. It was like half a prize was awarded for the soft-ionization MS work, which one person received, and half a prize for the NMR work, which was split between two people. No more than three persons total may split a prize though- you can't have a prize split 4x25% or 1x50%+3x16.7%. As science has become more of a team effort and an international enterprise, virtually every science Nobel given out recently has honored the maximum of three. The Nobel Foundation statute for shared prizes may be found here.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Nope. Carbon can only form 4 bonds at a time. During the course of a reaction, there may be short-lived meta-stable carbon species with only 3 bonds, or reactive intermediates (i.e. unstable things that are a transition state between two more stable forms) that have 3 bonds plus one bond that's half made and one bond that's half broken, but there aren't any forms with a full 5 bonds. Undergraduates taking their first Organic test, though, are apt to draw such quintuply bonded carbons and thus get answers wrong on their tests.
Prof. Grubbs always warns his students not to make that mistake before their first test, and even goes into a mini-rant on the topic much like the one in the article. I wouldn't be surprised if the "This reaction doesn't have a chance in hell of happening" were a direct quote. The rant is very memorable, and I'm sure that everyone who took Organic from him would remember it. Despite this, many students will go on to make exactly the mistake that he warned them against, which I assume is the reason that he's so vehement about it.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ironic, isn't it, that so many Nobel winners are Americans?
Surely you're joking?
The USA has about 200 (give or take) laureates (counted as ones at US universities). And a population of 295 million. 0.67 per million.
Switzerland: 28 and 7.5 million population : 3.7 per million.
Sweden: 29 and 9 million. 3.2 per million.
Norway: 11 and 4.5 million. 2.4 per million.
Austria: 21 and 8 million. 2.6 per million.
Denmark: 13 and 5.5 million. 2.3 per million.
Germany: 89 and 82 million 1.1 per million.
Netherlands: 16 and 16. One in a million.
France: 49 and 60 million. 0.8 per million.
Belgium: 8 and 10.5 million. 0.76 per million.
Italy: 19 and 58 million. 0.3 per million.
Japan: 12 and 127 million. 0.1 per million.
Call it bias or whatever you want. But the US certainly isn't overrepresented.
All figures from doing a simple laureate-search, so they're all approximate, and refer to country of residence, not birth.