Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Handicapping the Nobel Prizes

This year's Nobel Prizes will be announced beginning next Monday. There is no way to know for certain who is in the running, but that doesn't stop the speculation. Derek Lowe points to plausible lists of potential winners at the Wall Street Journal, which bases its predictions partially on who has received other prestigious awards, and Thomson Reuters, which lists "Citation Laureates" based on its ISI Web of Knowledge data.

Who are the women who made the prediction list?

Physiology or Medicine

Both the WSJ and Thomson Reuters listed Elizabeth H. Blackburn, professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University for "their roles in the discovery and and pioneering research on telomeres and telomerases."

Chemistry

Thomson Reuters listed Jacqueline K. Barton, Professor of Chemistry at CalTech (along with Bernd Giese and Gary B Schuster) for "pioneering research of electron charge transfer in DNA"


Personally, I think a Nobel prize for telomeres will happen at some point, if not this year then in the near future.

Barton, on the other hand, seems to be a less likely winner. There's more discussion at In the Pipeline.

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