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For those that know more than I do, out of curiosity, why would this Nobel go to these two and not also Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin? The four of them shared ear
by mtalantikite 3y ago
For those that know more than I do, out of curiosity, why would this Nobel go to these two and not also Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin? The four of them shared earlier awards, and it was Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin's BioNTech that got the vaccine to market (after their decades of research).
The couple are billionaires, so I'm sure they're doing just fine, but that's gotta hurt to be overlooked for such a major prize when they did so much for that discovery and technology.
- dekhn 3y agoNobel Prizes in Medicine don't award people getting medicines to the market. They exist to reward fundamental discoveries that have high impact.
- mtalantikite 3y agoAbsolutely, and this is more along what I was asking. What about their discovery was deemed the most important part out of this long chain of work that led up to mRNA vaccination and this Nobel? Nature's news section had a history of discoveries a while back [1], and it seems like there is a lot of disagreement about who deserves what credit. Personally, it seems like everyone's contribution is important, but we as humans irrationally want to point to a single thing/event/team and say "this was the cause" rather than stand back and notice how interdependent the whole thing is. In the end I think things like Nobels are pretty silly. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
- dekhn 3y agoHumans are even more irrational! For CRISPR most people expecfted the prize to go to 3 people- Doudna, Charpentier, and Zhang. But Zhang was ommitted and many people think it was because the head of his institution wrote this: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2815%2901705-5 https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2815%2901705-5 (the establishment hates Eric Lander, and this was a particularly egregious example of his behavior). But the original discoverer of CRISPR, Francis Mojica, was not awarded the prize. That's because, in my opinion (as well as the Nobel Committee), Doudna and Charpentier played the greatest individual roles in the process of turning the original discovery of CRISPR into a powerful tool (CRISPR/cas9), that is much more general than CRISPR the process that occurs in bacteria. I still think Mojica should have been given the prize, and if 4 recipients were possible, also Zhang.
- selimthegrim 3y agoNathaniel Comfort has a good take [1], which Lior Pachter likes to cite, on exactly why Lander’s intervention was so egregious. [1] -https://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/ https://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-cris...
- heyoni 3y agoThe discovery being rewarded was made before biontech.
- mtalantikite 3y agoWell yes, clearly -- 2005 is before 2008. But it's interesting to see who gets selected when so many other researchers end up being involved with these major technologies before and after a single paper.
- heyoni 3y agolol what a stupid response. Don’t blame me for answering a simple question simply
- mtalantikite 3y agoNo disrespect meant. However, I don't think it's a simple question.
- heyoni 3y agoSorry I just think this is actually one of the simpler Nobel prizes and I’m fairly certain they weren’t even in the picture when the discovery was made. I worked in a lab with “Nobel winning lineage” and the ego fights always come up so I get kind of tired of it coming up lol. Sorry I responded so harshly.