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Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
This is my sig.
Nobel prices in the sciences are usually very conservative. I don't think we will not see a Nobel price for dark matter until the responsible particle(s) has been discovered.
"And the Band Played On" was the title of a movie about the CDC tracking the first breakouts of AIDS in San Francisco and then all around the world. Alan Alda played one of the virologists that just got this nod. He played the American who was out to screw the French lab that was onto the same discovery that this was a hantavirus. Very interesting story with TONS of stars including a "young" Ian McKellen.
put the what in the where?
What about knocking that gigantic garbage ball out of the sky?
Doesn't matter to me. The whole award means a lot less since even Gore was able to secure one with little but political rhetoric.
Moderators: I've got karma to burn, but consider that Gore is still a politician who hardly practices what he is preaching. I'm all for preserving Earth, but come on...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
The guy who discovered HIV and the guy who discovered HPV shared the award....
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Dark matter may be a cheap cop-out, but "Cowboy Neal's Excited State", that's just plain scary.
The whole award means a lot less since even Gore was able to secure one with little but political rhetoric.
The award meant less when Henry Kissinger won it. Gore's actually more deserving than some of the winners in the past few decades; at least he never actively worked against peace.
I'm betting on Fidel Castro for the first peaceful transition in power in Cuba in 40 years.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Gore? Really? I think that when Arafat got it in '94, it should have been written off all together. Sure the Gore thing was BS, but at least he didn't have such a long-standing history of organizing terrorist attacks against civilians before receiving his Peace Prize.
Of course, there are a number of legitimate gripes.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
In the 80's Robert Gallo was celebrated as the discoverer of HIV and that, oh yeah, maybe
some French scientists helped too. Turns out Mr. Gallo either intentionally or mistakenly
(through cross-contamination in a sloppy lab) cultivated a sample of the French-discovered
strain of the virus. Even after he should have realized a mistake, he misled people and
caused the United States blood supply to use a much poorer HIV test (than the French one)
and as a result people needlessly died. His claims of original discovery ultimately fell
apart because HIV mutates with amazing rapidity, and so his HIV strains were traceable to
the French one his so closely matched.
The book "Science Fictions" by John Crewdson is worth your time to read. It's a long read,
not an easy read, but I got hooked.
Have you wondered why some less technically talented coworkers are able to influence
management and, even worse, make you the fall guy when things go wrong? I think this book
gave me insight into that.
If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've
been a great scientist indeed.
Anyone but...Sau Lan Wu. I'm sure even now she's ensconced in her office, hovering over a small shrine decorated with J/psi and gluon Phys Rev articles, praying to the gods of physics that she'll win this year. /Former Wuon
Gore got one for peace. He did not receive one for any of the hard sciences. The peace prize has always been subjective and controversial. I'm not real sure why you are upset he used political rhetoric to get one either. Whether or not he met your subjective standards for promoting peace enough to earn a Nobel, rhetoric is an acceptable means to peace, probably the most preferable.
The ones for physics and such, however are still very much prestigious. You can be sure that it takes a lot of hard scientific work to get one. So beat up on Gore all you want, but leave the scientists alone. (disclaimer: I am not a supporter of Mr. Gore.)
I got a catholic block.
The peace prize is not really affiliated with the natural science prizes. Different committee, different time of year, different style for different reasons.
The science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up. The peace prize is a current thing and often focus on drawing attention to something.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
The 1996 Nobel prize was already given for the discovery of Buckyballs. Graphene is the same field (so the general area is already covered), and not really a surprize. It is just a monolayer of graphite. Preparing it and measuring its properties is (highly interesting) engineering, but not groundbreaking science.
Gallo! Thanks for the name - I did a whole paper on that ass in 1990 and couldn't remember the name.
"If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've been a great scientist indeed."
Don't worry too much about Gallo's fate - the NIH built him a whole new building to house his little empire.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Come on, they've discovered hugely dangerous things through their "scientific" discoveries. HIV and HCV kill millions of people every year and these people are being praised for discovering them. Much like the lauded Newton who discovered gravity which has led to millions of deaths through falling and having heavy things land on people it is typical of the scientific community to reward these people who discover things that only give harm to people. These claims of "evolving" viruses are really just more proof that scientists are waging a war against normal people.
Only the other day I was hearing that scientists were poisoning our children by suggesting that di-Hydrogen Monoxide should be drunk instead of Sunny Delight, its appalling what we let these scientists get away with.
Brought to you by the people who think that Evolution is a scientific conspiracy.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I got your responsible particle(s) right here (makes a crude, vulgar gesture).... Oh wait, this isn't digg, is it
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
I'm just jumping in here, sorry to crash the party. And I'm only being civil because you're a basketball fan (not really, but nice username anyway).
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
By that reasoning, you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well. Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
There are many scientists who happen to be religious, and it causes many a brilliant scientist degrees of consternation in attempting to reconcile his religion's creation story with his own science. Penrose's attempts seem no different than Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice with the universe".
While I agree with your analysis of why the null state for any hypothesis should be rejected rather than accepted, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban Penrose or anyone else from consideration for the Prize. Indeed, I would say that all creeping politicization of the Prize should cease, as it has been all too prevalent lately (assuming it ever was otherwise). In this case, while I personally believe in maintaining a barrier between religion and science, I think the pendulum has swung too far against religion in general - indeed, the anti-religious sentiment is so common in the sciences to pretty much amount to bigotry. I've seen it firsthand, and it's disgusting coming from people who claim to be open-minded. So long as your opinion matches theirs, presumably.
In other words, let's accept Penrose's religious choices and not hold it against him with regard to his scientific contributions. Anything else would smack of extreme religious intolerance that is not in keeping with the overall ideals of Prize in advancing humanity.
I do respect your opinion and the civil way in which you've presented it, but I'd strongly urge you to reconsider what you're advocating.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
I thought it was because Nobel himself regarded the Peace Prize as his most important legacy.
please announce the nobel for economics this year, so we can tar and feather him, and set him afire as he protests that its like blaming the weatherman for a bad hurricane
maybe then the gods will be happy and we can get free houses and credit cards again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most HPV infections do not lead to cervical cancer.
Most cervical cancers are caused by HPV.
These two statements are logically consistent.
The mechanism of action is even known: HPV blocks the action of tumor-suppressing gene p53.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
1. You're not supposed to take the vaccine if you've already been exposed to HPV. That's why they only prescribe it to young girls - not older people.
2. There is a genetic component to the risk from HPV.
3. Yes, the HPV virus itself causes the cancer. It messes with apoptosis gene expression, causing the cells to proliferate without the normal cell death mechanism kicking in.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Nobel prize, at least for peace, has no credibility to almost all Indians, as Mahatma Gandhi the absolute paragon of peace and non-violence in modern history, was never awarded the prize. In all sincerity, it would have honored the prize and not the person, in this case. Indians are generally highly divided about most issues, but, on Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to peace and non-violence, there is almost unanimous agreement. Please note that, there were dissenters who thought non-violence wasnt the best way to attain freedom, but nobody doubted Mahatma's non-violent credentials.
Nobel prize, like most western institutions, has an enormous western bias and is unable to see beyond the borders of western civilization, for most parts. This is not a complaint, it is just a fact!!
a) Persistent infection with HPV can cause cancer. Gardasil is designed to prevent infection with the 2 of the high risk strains associated with 50% of cervical cancer. Saying that HPV doesn't cause cervical cancer is like saying viruses don't cause colds: not all viruses cause colds, but infection with certain rhinoviruses combined with not clearing them leads to the disease. It's true that most HPV infections are cleared spontaneously, usually withing 2 years. However, almost all cases of cervical cancer require infection with HPV.
b) The evidence that the vaccine increases the risk of lesions is equivocal. One group of the several groups examined had an increase in lesions in the women who already had HPV infections. The treatment group, in that case, was also found to be higher in risk factors for lesions with comparison to the placebo group. Several of the other groups showed no significant increase in lesions. Not saying that it's not possible, but the evidence is weak due to the study being confounded by other risk factor differences and a lack of repeatability. More investigation is required.
c) Cervical cancer is NOT one of the more treatable forms of cancer. It's very PREVENTABLE in many cases with safer sex protocols (though condoms are not as effective in prevention of HPV transmission versus, say, HIV), regular checkups, and treatment of precancerous lesions. Unfortunately it's quite a serious disease to try to treat: even early stages are addressed with a radical hysterectomy in most cases.
Honestly, I'm not sure that Gardasil is the hot thing that everybody thinks, but exaggerating the risks of the vaccine while minimizing the potential danger of the disease scares me. Educating yourself is important. This is the number 2 cancer in women and it's due to an STI. People should know a lot more about it.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
That's rich, considering the peace prize was stipulated in Nobel's will, and the "the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" (which "some critics" might find more politically agreeable) was designed half a century later to ride on the Nobel coattails.
science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up
Except for the frontal lobotomy
Giving out prizes contemporaneously is always risky, it's much easier when history has been written; that's why it took so long to give Luc Montagnier the award.
The problem with the Economics prize (and to a lesser extent with the Peace prize) is that they're too contemporary.
For Peace, it's probably inevitable that selection will be driven by current events.
For Economics, they've just ran out of worthwhile awardees. Perhaps this year they should give it to the EU bank regulators for managing to avoid the destruction of their economy thus far.