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Absolutely, 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 t

Absolutely, 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 ago
Humans 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 ago
  Nathaniel 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...

dekhn 3y ago

Humans 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 ago
Nathaniel 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...