14 ms·
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
- yu3zhou4 2y agoCongrats to the winners. Btw when I saw the first picture of the winner I thought it’s Jeremy Howard from fastai/answerai
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- matsemann 2y agoSecond year in a row for mRNA, interesting. What I love about these announcements is how good they are at explaining the concept. Click the "Press release" or "Advanced information" and get something easily digestible. Also fun to watch the talks the winners hold, they're often good at explaining.
- maxboone 2y agomRNA ≠ microRNA
- tambourine_man 2y agoThey famously botched the Bell’s inequality summary two years ago.
- mhandley 2y agoWho is "they" here? There are completely separate committees for each subject's Nobel prize. Edit: the individual committees are even not all run by the same institution [0]. The medicine prize committee is run from the Karolinska institute, whereas the physics committee, for example, is run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. [0] https://www.nobelprize.org/the-nobel-prize-organisation/prize-awarding-institutions/ https://www.nobelprize.org/the-nobel-prize-organisation/priz...
- tambourine_man 2y agoThat’s too much inside-baseball for my taste. All committees are under the Nobel prize umbrella. Check out Sean Carroll on the subject: https://web.archive.org/web/20230224123835/https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1577254806208798722 https://web.archive.org/web/20230224123835/https://twitter.c...
- passwordoops 2y agomRNA = messenger RNA; miRNA = microRNA, which is the subject of 2024's Nobel
- aquafox 2y agomRNA = messenger RNA miRNA = microRNA tRNA = transfer RNA rRNA = ribosomal RNA siRNA = small interfering RNA
- georgeburdell 2y agoInteresting… at least in my field, the prefix “micro” gets abbreviated with a “u” since it looks very close to the lowercase Greek letter μ (mu), as “micro” itself is Greek in origin
- LordKeren 2y agoTypically I see “u” used in instances where it is the actual SI Unit prefix for 10^-6, and leaving it as “mirco” is used when in its more common form for “very small”
- bratwurst3000 2y agowas thinking the same. it could be mi instead of u because the other one are not size related
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Tepix 2y agomicroRNA is abbreviated miRNA. mRNA provides the blueprint for constructing proteins based on the genetic information stored in DNA. miRNAs are small regulatory RNAs that control gene expression by interacting with mRNA, influencing whether certain proteins are produced or not.
- matsemann 2y agooh well, can't edit my message now, but then: interesting that RNA is twice in a row. (Not sure I deserved the amount of downvotes, though, mRNA is mentioned twelve times in the press release as well, easy to confuse for a layman)
- gklitz 2y agoDon’t take it personal. By mistake you created a comment that is stating a blatant falsehood. And people are downvoting that blatant falsehood. That’s a statement it the fact that the comment is false. It’s not an attack on your person, it doesn’t matter if it was a small or big mistake that lead to that comment existing, because the comment is there and is false, people will downvote it, as they should.
- SkyBelow 2y agoIs there really a need for an abbreviation that cuts off 3 characters of an 8 character word? Feels like the risk of getting it mixed up with mRNA outweighs in. Then again, that mixup might happen even if microRNA wasn't abbreviated. Or maybe I shouldn't count the abbreviation under the assumption that RNA is already abbreviated?
- robertlagrant 2y agoWhy not μRNA, damn it!
- rswail 2y agoIn Web framework terms, DNA is a message schema that generates messages (mRNA) which can have microDNA applying direct injection to disable certain fields so that the receiving micro service produces a different result.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoThis is not a good analogy.
- dkural 2y agoI thought it was ok actually, what part is bad?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- retskrad 2y ago[flagged]
- __turbobrew__ 2y agoWhen Obama got the Peace Prize it was obvious that it is a popularity contest.
- Vagantem 2y agoNobel Peace Prize is handed out by Norway (not Sweden) with a different committee than the other Nobel prizes
- wer90joigsre 2y agoThe peace price is given by the Norwegian committee, which is completely different from the Swedish that gives out all the science prices.
- OKRainbowKid 2y agoCan you list some recent scientific publications authored by Elon Musk that you seem worthy of a Nobel Prize?
- retskrad 2y agoWithout Musk, there would be no SpaceX, no reusable rockets, and no focused effort toward becoming an interplanetary species. Without his leadership, the talented people at SpaceX would be elsewhere—likely at NASA—buried in bureaucracy and achieving far less. Just look at Jony Ive. A talented person who has hired most of the talented designers who worked at Apple during the Steve Jobs tenure. What have these talented people done without the Steve Jobs leadership?
- dotnet00 2y agoThe nobel prizes tend to focus on scientific discoveries, often primarily from smaller groups, not engineering or entrepreneurial success. SpaceX or Musk just don't really fit into the cateogires that well, and the committee is probably not all that desperate for Musk's attention to give him a throwaway Peace prize.
- compsciphd 2y ago[flagged]
- 29athrowaway 2y agoIf only the same level of Nobel-winning intellect was applied to researching the history and origin of sacred texts, perhaps we would live in a more rational world.
- krustyburger 2y agoWhat sort of new information do you think that research would uncover? Or are you simply suggesting that you don’t think these people have thought hard enough about the matter because they don’t share your worldview? That’s a popular take among the adolescent atheist set.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoMany key events happened in the Oral tradition era and the divine revelation mostly stops after writing is invented.
- krustyburger 2y agoSo you were suggesting that these brilliant scientists simply need to consider very obvious objections and then their faith will vanish. You imagine yourself as being more of an intellectual than anyone who disagrees with you, even those who are among the most brilliant people on the planet. This sort of posturing is something most people outgrow.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoI haven't said any of that actually. In most organized religions, people join as children, and at that age you have developed the necessary cognitive maturity to analyze the complexity of a belief system (see Piaget stages of development). Even a person that will grow up to be rational and brilliant can be persuaded to believe pretty much anything as a kid. A bearded man delivering gifts in a flying sled pulled by flying raindeer? A fairy that exchanges teeth for money? All good.
- gwerbret 2y agoFrom the release: "In the late 1980s, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002." So a single MIT lab produced 3 Nobel laureates; I'd say that's impressive. (Noting that the 2 current laureates had moved on to Harvard and Mass Gen when they did the relevant work.)
- goethes_kind 2y agoIf this was politics, "impressive" wouldn't be the adjective used.
- benrapscallion 2y agoEspecially when one factors in how Nobels are nominated and voted - previous laureates have a strong say. This is why the same themes keep getting rewarded over and over again: GPCRs, sensory systems, Drosophila, microscopy, regulation of gene expression - while others go repeatedly unrecognized: sequencing, evolutionary biology, etc.
- dahinds 2y agoumm Svante Paabo?
- benrapscallion 2y agoPaabo’s dad was a Nobel laureate. He was born through an extramarital affair of his father, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström (1916–2004), who, like his son, became a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (in 1982). Pääbo is his mother's only child; he has via his father's marriage a half-brother (also born in 1955).
- dahinds 2y agoI'm not sure where you're going with that, but Svante is an outstanding scientist and won the prize for his work in DNA sequencing + evolutionary biology.
- photochemsyn 2y agoNobel Prizes in the modern era are pretty misleading when it comes to the public's understanding of how scientific research and discovery is done in practice. In this specific case, which revolves around a fundamental revision of the old central dogma of DNA replication, mRNA transcription and protein expression, billions of dollars of funding through over a dozen major government funding agencies in the US, Europe and Asia were required, involving hundreds of research groups scattered around the world over a few decades. Ask the following questions for more details: (1) How much governmental funding in the United States and abroad has been directed to the study of this new model of complex and dynamic miRNA-based regulation of gene expression and function over the past few decades, and what are the main agencies supplying such funding, and to which research universities has most of the funding been directed? (2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding? Abolishing the scientific Nobel Prizes entirely makes a lot of sense from this viewpoint.
- TetOn 2y ago>(2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding? Because these two were directly responsible for the discovery and the initial understanding of the mechanism of what was going on. The depth and quantity of the resulting research, funding, and all the other streams of new jobs or additional lines of research are follow-on results from the finding, which to me is a metric that highlights the enormity of their achievement and the richly deserved nature of this award.
- photochemsyn 2y agoWhy not give it to this team instead? Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA - AE Pasquinelli, BJ Reinhart, F Slack, MQ Martindale, MI Kuroda, B Maller, DC Hayward (Nature, 2000) Limiting it to three people really doesn't make much sense, and the selection of winning candidates has far more to do with political maneuvering then it does with how scientific discovery works. Similar issues arise in many other Nobel Prize awards, eg the discovery of the mechanism of ribosomal protein synthesis.
- LarsDu88 2y agoI remember seeing a talk by Gary Ruvkun years ago at UC San Diego. He was complaining about how he got rejected from UCSD med school and just about every other med school he applied to. Kudos to him now!
- rurban 2y agoAnalog to 22byte messages, instead of direct coding ops in this VM.