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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

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Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#31

Post by FeistyOtter »

tuxxy wrote: post #27
est31 wrote: post #20

The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2…

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for t…

Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#32

Post by jray »

pessimist wrote: post #28

Poor Virginijus Šikšnys, left out because the journal he sent it to rejected without review his paper which was sent before Doudna and Charpentier's. https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/31/crispr-scientists-kavli-... "But bad luck with a journal made Šikšnys the forgotten man of CRISPR: Cell rejected his paper in April 2012 without sending it out for peer review. In contrast, when Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagu…

Poor Francisco Mojica

Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica (Elche, October 5, 1963), usually known as Francisco JM Mojica, is a Spanish scientist, molecular biologist, and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, known for his discovering research on the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-CRISPR gene editing technique.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Mojica

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#33

Post by orbifold »

FeistyOtter wrote: post #31
tuxxy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for t…

Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.

Exactly, it encourages mafia like structures. It matters a ton who you know and who your PI was as a Postdoc and PhD.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#34

Post by rerx »

pseudolus wrote: post #3

There's a documentary on Netflix "Human Nature" that discusses the history of CRISPR and features interviews with both Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. [0][1][2] [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/81220944 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1UkCfDnn6c [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(2019_film)

It's not on Netflix Germany.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#35

Post by madars »

est31 wrote: post #20

The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2…

Reading "Heroes of CRISPR" [1] it sounds like that, after Cell rejected the paper, they shortened the claim but it was still very much known to them:

> Finally, Siksnys showed that the system could also be reconstituted in a second way—by combining purified His-tagged Cas9, in-vitro-transcribed tracrRNA and crRNA, and RNase III—and that both RNAs were essential for Cas9 to cut DNA. (They would ultimately drop the second reconstitution from their revised paper, but they reported all of the work in their published U.S. patent application filed in March 2012 [Siksnys et al., 2012]).

> Siksnys submitted his paper to Cell on April 6, 2012. Six days later, the journal rejected the paper without external review. (In hindsight, Cell’s editor agrees the paper turned out to be very important.) Siksnys condensed the manuscript and sent it on May 21 to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published it online on September 4. Charpentier and Doudna’s paper fared better. Submitted to Science 2 months after Siksnys’s on June 8, it sailed through review and appeared online on June 28.

[1] -- https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#36

Post by oceliker »

est31 wrote: post #20

The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2…

Things are a bit better these days thanks to bioRxiv. I wonder which Nobel summary (if any) will cite a preprint for the first time...

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#37

Post by detaro »

FeistyOtter wrote: post #31
tuxxy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for t…

Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.

Not just funding, also jobs for the members of your lab etc

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#38

Post by sampo »

I got interested in how often the chemistry prize goes to biology/biochemistry.

     2011: quasicrystals
    →2012: G protein-coupled receptors
     2013: modelling complex chemical systems
     2014: super-resolved fluorescence microscopy
    →2015: studies of DNA repair
     2016: molecular machines
     2017: cryo-electron microscopy for biomolecules
    →2018: directed evolution of proteins
     2019: lithium ion batteries
    →2020: genome editing
So let's say 4 out of 10 (2012, 2015, 2018, 2020). My initial assumption that biology would dominate was wrong, and the chemistry prize seems to have been going to very diverse topics in chemistry.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#39

Post by legulere »

tuxxy wrote: post #27
est31 wrote: post #20

The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2…

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for t…

Because you can’t loose much but gain much with such behavior.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020

#40

Post by Upvoter33 »

tuxxy wrote: post #27
est31 wrote: post #20

The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2…

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for t…

It actually relates to many things, but mostly it's because all the matters is getting credit for an idea. Realize that the process is basically to create something and then write about it to advance knowledge, thus sharing it with all. What's left at the end of that process is to recognize those who have done a lot of positive sharing. Those who are so recognized get the best jobs, the most funding, the best students, etc. As such, if an idea slips out of your lab and into some other lab, you might not get credit, and hence, all the craziness. It's one of those cases where it's not a great system, but it's also hard to figure out a better one.
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