Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize

An anonymous reader writes This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres, and in an enzyme that forms them."

Comments

Re:Bio 101

[TheRaven64]

Nobel prizes are never awarded for new work, they are awarded for work you did sufficiently far in the past that it has been extensively peer reviewed and tested and is now accepted as being one of the bits of scientific knowledge that everyone in the field knows. This one is being awarded for work originally published around 1980 (as it says in TFA). Others have now tested this the published results in sufficient detail that it is now something that almost everyone with any awareness of biology knows.

A Nobel Prize is not like a 'best paper in conference' award. You don't get it for new and exciting theories, you get it for theories that have withstood careful examination and testing. If the LHC finds a Higgs Boson then Peter Higgs will almost certainly get a Nobel, for the work that he did predicting it back in 1964.