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Very humble guy who invented a lot of modern drugs, but who didn't like to go conference circus road which is required to get the prize (paraphrasing his words). He worked in the lab till his dead, lived in cheap house and commuted to work by public transport even after earning hundreds of millions, or more, in fees for his discoveries.
Rosalind Franklin - X-ray crystallographer who helped decipher the structure of DNA. Carl Woese - Discoverer of the 3rd domain of life archaebacteria among other scientific accomplishments.
Rosalind Franklin definitely belongs on the list. However her not getting the prize has a simple reason. She died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded for DNA, so couldn't have been considered. Ironically her cancer could well have been caused by the research that she was not publicly recognized for.
Tesla is one of the most overrated persons in history. Edison is better in every regard, except for killing an elephant
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland
"Birkeland organized several expeditions to Norway's high-latitude regions where he established a network of observatories under the auroral regions to collect magnetic field data. The results of the Norwegian Polar Expedition conducted from 1899 to 1900 contained the first determination of the global pattern of electric currents in the polar region from ground magnetic field measurements. The discovery of X-rays inspired Birkeland to develop vacuum chambers to study the influence of magnets on cathode rays. Birkeland noticed that an electron beam directed toward a magnetised terrella was guided toward the magnetic poles and produced rings of light around the poles and concluded that the aurora could be produced in a similar way. He developed a theory in which energetic electrons were ejected from sunspots on the solar surface, directed to the Earth, and guided to the Earth's polar regions by the geomagnetic field where they produced the visible aurora. This is essentially the theory of the aurora today."
"In 1913, Birkeland may have been the first to predict that plasma was ubiquitous in space. He wrote: "It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in 'empty' space."[7]"
"In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that the solar wind behaves as do all charged particles in an electric field: "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds".[12][13] In other words, the Solar Wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.""
Without him, the modern study of cosmology and planetary science would be a mess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rosalind Franklin definitely belongs on the list. However her not getting the prize has a simple reason. She died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded for DNA, so couldn't have been considered. Ironically her cancer could well have been caused by the research that she was not publicly recognized for.
Yes. That is true. She passed away before the Nobel. Anyone interested in this topic should read "The Double Helix" by Watson. It is a real page turner and discusses how Watson and Crick kind of stole Franklin's research.
Now there is an interesting question. How could Watson and Crick have figured out Franklin's data faster than she did? The answer turns out to be coincidence. There are 230 crystallographic groups. As a crystallographer, Franklin knew them all, and had to rule them all out. However Watson had done his PhD research on a protein that happened to have the same crystallographic group as DNA. So he knew one group really, really well and it turned out to be the right one.
Sometimes luck is more important than skill.
It is easy to look at this list and say gender and ethnicity played a role (which wouldn't be surprising particularly in that era). But five people on the list are white men. Physicists were more likely to be white men (at least in those times). So no matter what list you make of physicists, they will end up on that list. My point is, it is not possible to deduce any bias from such a list. For any coveted prize there…
That it is only half white and male suggests that top quality research by non-whites and non-males was systemically not rewarded.
Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.
Personally, I think the Nobel in Chemistry should have gone to Harry Noller (UCSC), who established that the core function of the ribosome is implemented by RNA, not proteins. After 20+ years of making his case and generally not being believed (even though he had excellent data), a competitor did a crystal structure proving him right and won the prize. https://reports.news.ucsc.edu/breakthrough/ https://www.mercuryne…
+1 for Noller. In a previous life, I worked as an undergrad in an RNA lab (remains the best job I have ever had) and we studied Noller's work closely.
He did say that if I wanted to be a successful scientist, I should never have a girlfriend or get married, or have kids, because those all eat into your ability to spend 18 hours in the lab every day (I married my college girlfriend, was a modest scientist, and transitioned to software engineering, and then had kids; there's no way I could handle being a successful scientist while having a family).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley
his death sparked the government to change its policy of enlisting scientists