A disappointing award. There are many more exciting discoveries in biology.
This year’s Nobel in Medicine went to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan. Professor Ohsumi won the award for his work on how cells destroyer their one parts, a process that is central to development and to aging.
I was very disappointed. In part because the award did not go to one of the people I know or to faculty here at the UW, but more so because I see this as a politically, diplomatically and scientifically correct award rather than a Nobel given for what the public expects …recognition of a seminal discovery comparable to great awards of the past.
I am not demeaning Professor Ohsumi’s work. The process he worked on is called autophagy. Autopahfy is a beautiful process that allows the cell to surround pieces of itself with a membrane so that these piece , like old parts in an engine, can be taken a apart and discarded. , is However autophagy is only part of this process. Nobel winning work before this included awards for discovery of the organelles .. the “lysosomes” that do the eating of parts of cells. for the process of tagging proteins for destruction called “ubiquitinization” and for the disvcoery of the machine that does the digestion, the “proteosome.”. There is even Nobel already given for how these processes lead to cell death…a process critical to many ofrms of cancer.
The sad truth may be that the Nobel Prize itself is flawed. In an era where a lot of science is done by teams, the terms of the Nobel Prize require it go to no more than three individuals. Moreover, the prize is given to the individuals not for their own brilliance but for the importance of a discovery. In other words, a major achievement like the human genome project, the discovery that we are descended form Neanderthals, the eradication of small pox, or the cause of diabetes can not be recognized even though that work included some of the most brilliant scientists ever to live.
I agree with Steve that the Nobel Prize selections are often flawed and politically motivated. The same sort of thing happened in 1987 when Susumu Tonegawa was awarded the Prize for his work on antibody gene shuffling. In fact, other investigators, most notably Leroy Hood, now at ISB, and Phil Leder, had contributed significantly to the discoveries leading to a deep understanding about how immunoglobulin genes rearrange and antibody diversity is generated. Instead, the Nobel Committee chose one person to award evidence of a process in mammals that had been investigated in corn and yeast for a long time. I was in Japan at the time on sabbatical, and naturally the Japanese were elated. But major contributors especially Hood, were left out.
Hood is a problem. By any criteria his thinking did lead to this discovery but the way the prize is given the discovery itself, not the thinking, gets the prize. As a sad result the public extols Watson while knowing nothing of who discovered DNA.
Similarly, Sidney Bremnner finally did geta Nobel even though he had been seminal in biology for a long time while Rosalind Yallow got the prize because her husband had died and I suspect Eric lander and Maynard Olsen, who really made the genome project possible, will never get a Nobel.
I’ve copied a paragraph in the NY Times below about the award today. I know all of these ‘overlooked’ people and their work well. Why? Because the whole area of costimulation upon which the PD-1 blockade is based on started after Linsley, me and Jeff Ledbetter discovered that CD80 bound to CD28 (PNAS, 1990). Since I discovered the first costimulator, CD80 (Yokochi et al. J Immunol, 1982), maybe I should get the Nobel Prize, or at least Peter Linsley. The point is this stuff is really BS.
Who was overlooked for the prize this year?
Speculation had it that the Nobel would go to researchers whose work was instrumental in developing new treatments that unleash the immune system to attack cancer cells. The list is long. Front-runners had included James P. Allison at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Gordon J. Freeman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. Another scientist often mentioned as a Nobel contender is Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco, who works on the immune system in disorders in which it attacks normal cells.
Steve, perhaps you are not familiar with the seminal discoveries Hood et al. made on how immunoglobulin genes rearrange, the V J and D segments, the 12 23 rule, major findings that showed how the genes rearranged. This was not conceptual stuff; it was ground breaking experimental biology that is now in every immunology textbook. Hood without a doubt deserved a Nobel Prize for this contribution and got the Lasker for it.
I am confused, I thought we learned that from the sequening?
There are other examples. Keith Porter and Siekevits discovered the ER and the pulse chase method for protein synthesis. But Palade got the prize for the ribosome. Samew happened for NO2. Furchgott was the sole discoverer but two other folks were given the prize for what seem to be poltical reaons. Meanwhile Salvador Moncada who proved thgat Furchgott was right, was not honored.
So am I wrong about Lee?
You need to take an immunology history course. No one can know everything.
So how did rearrangement get proved before protein sequencing?