Friday, October 12, 2012

My little rant about the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was again awarded to what can be called biochemistry... but what, to me, is actually medicine. Lefkowitz and Kobilka won the award for "studies of G-protein-coupled receptors," which, while cool, isn't really (to me) Chemistry. This, of course, comes from my very strong view that the prize should be awarded to something more strictly Chemistry based... My sister, a doctoral candidate in Inorganic Chemistry, isn't nearly as dissatisfied as I am, and noted (in our g-chat exchange)

Sister: .... I think it will be a long time until something in chemistry is awarded, because right now nothing really that interesting is happening.

And then, later:

Sister I guess I have just come to accept that biology is more interesting to people then chemistry.
It makes the big headlines.
 
I think that is what is actually at the root of my irritation... that biology (and biochemical application) is really a sexy discipline at the moment -- full of keywords that will get attention and garner funding.  Ugh. This definitely isn't to say that Chemistry isn't doing cool things, but just that they are not as "sexy" at the moment. And, to me, awarding the prize in Chemistry to something that is not strictly chemistry is only skewing the bias even more against inorganic types of research. The two guys who won are not Chemists -- they are Medical. In fact, one of the guys who won the prize in medicine (Gurdon [and Shinya] - for the discovery that mature cells than be reprogrammed to become pluripotent) was a biologist and did a bunch of seminal research on tadpoles in the 1960s. I think that the Nobel Prize should be an encouragement for the, currently sidelined discipline, and act to help push funding back into that arena. 
 
But that's just my personal opinion. And I say this as a biologist who will definitely be utilizing all the sexy keywords possible in my grant proposals to try and get my paws on any of that available funding.

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