Do you know what happens at midnight on Oct 5?
That is the time (9AM in Stockholm) when the Nobel Committee will announce the 2014 awards for Medicine.
More than one person in Seattle will be waiting for the phone call but the candidate I am most excited about is Mary Claire King of the UW. She is the discoverer of the breast cancer gene, BRCA1. While that itself ought to be enough for the Nobel, Dr. King is one of the few scientists whose life work can be described as heroic ranging from efforts to use DNA to bring together families torn a part by fascism in Argentina, to opposition to corporate misuse of gene patents, to her current campaign to see that women have the right to know about the risk they have for cancer form their own genomes.
I for one will be staying up!