The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024(nobelprize.org)
nobelprize.org
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2024/summary/
86 comments
If this was politics, "impressive" wouldn't be the adjective used.
Especially 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.
umm Svante Paabo?
Paabo’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).
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).
I'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.
Referring to an ancient genomics prize which is mostly about high-quality sample prep that Svaante Paabo no doubt pioneered as DNA seq + evol bio is quite the stretch when a prize wasn’t awarded for the human genome project, GWAS, 454/Solexa, microarrays etc.
Science uses an apprenticeship model so it's not surprising that you would see a sort of lineage or connected network of outstanding work.
Anyone who's had a great mentor knows how impactful they can be on the trajectory of your career just in terms of how much more effective you can be.
Anyone who's had a great mentor knows how impactful they can be on the trajectory of your career just in terms of how much more effective you can be.
In many fields, but not all, essentially only a few small number of people can win. You must have trained with someone who won or was part of a group who won. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-04936-1
This isn't impressive. It's a sign of concentration of power, of nepotism, and of exclusionary policies. It's the usual dirty politics we see all over the place.
This isn't impressive. It's a sign of concentration of power, of nepotism, and of exclusionary policies. It's the usual dirty politics we see all over the place.
It's not power when it's a voluntary prize. My kids' school only awards raffle tickets to kids that go to the school. What an awful concentration of power, because power is the only lens through which to view anything.
This would be a valid analogy if there was a secret group at your school only handing out tickets to kids from the same extended families and no one else.
How you don't see that as an abuse of power is beyond me. Sometimes HN feels eerily like talking to Trump supporters that rationalize any abuse.
How you don't see that as an abuse of power is beyond me. Sometimes HN feels eerily like talking to Trump supporters that rationalize any abuse.
I think your concern might apply when there's a question about whether the discovery actually has significant merit. Context is important.
In this case, the discovery of microRNAs ushered in a whole new area of biology and medicine, and led to techniques (easy methods to selectively target and suppress gene expression) that facilitated discoveries in many other areas.
In this case, the discovery of microRNAs ushered in a whole new area of biology and medicine, and led to techniques (easy methods to selectively target and suppress gene expression) that facilitated discoveries in many other areas.
No. It has nothing to do with the discovery being of significant merit. There are countless discoveries of significant merit that aren't rewarded by the Committee.
They have many choices at their disposal. And they intentionally choose from only a small narrow pool of potential winners to keep it in the family. That's corruption.
They have many choices at their disposal. And they intentionally choose from only a small narrow pool of potential winners to keep it in the family. That's corruption.
I think you may have missed the point. By "significant merit" I meant "significant enough merit to be very deserving of a Nobel prize". The Karolinksa crew can award and have awarded the prize for nonsense in the past, but this wasn't one of those instances.
Of course, if your point was "it doesn't matter how deserving the winners are, they're all corrupt" then that's the sort of argument that facts can't counter.
Of course, if your point was "it doesn't matter how deserving the winners are, they're all corrupt" then that's the sort of argument that facts can't counter.
I 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!
Kudos to him now!
Analog to 22byte messages, instead of direct coding ops in this VM.
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Congrats to the winners. Btw when I saw the first picture of the winner I thought it’s Jeremy Howard from fastai/answerai
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retskrad(5)
compsciphd(3)
Second 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.
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.
microRNA 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.
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.
Why not μRNA, damn it!
oh 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)
Don’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.
Is 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?
mRNA = messenger RNA;
miRNA = microRNA, which is the subject of 2024's Nobel
mRNA = messenger RNA
miRNA = microRNA
tRNA = transfer RNA
rRNA = ribosomal RNA
siRNA = small interfering RNA
miRNA = microRNA
tRNA = transfer RNA
rRNA = ribosomal RNA
siRNA = small interfering RNA
Interesting… 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
In this case, the phrase micro does mean the metric prefix 10^-6, but just "smaller than mRNA". The important unit in biology is nucleotides [1], which are the elements specifying the composition of proteins (loosely speaking, the "atoms of biology"). mRNA typically has on the order of thousands of nucleotides, whereas miRNAs have about 20 nucleotides. The physical size of miRNAs is actually ~3nm. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/
Yes, but it’s quite common to use “micro” to mean “small” in some technical fields. Example: Microprocessor
Typically 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”
The only exception i can think of off hand is "uP" as a very rare abbreviation for "microprocessor": https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/microprocessor
micro-operation in a CPU is uop.
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was thinking the same. it could be mi instead of u because the other one are not size related
These probably this joke is about, Every Scientific Field:
https://xkcd.com/2986/
https://xkcd.com/2986/
Good one, but not really applicable here. Everyone in the greater domains of biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, and medicine (and maybe more) should know all of these types of RNA
mtRNA = mitochondrial RNA
In 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.
They famously botched the Bell’s inequality summary two years ago.
Who 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/priz...
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/priz...
That’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.c...
Check out Sean Carroll on the subject:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230224123835/https://twitter.c...
mRNA ≠ microRNA
Nobel 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.
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.
>(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.
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.
Why 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.
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.
How does this conflict with the Central Dogma?
It doesn't; the central dogma was always intended as a jokey simplification of real biology. It was never proscriptive.
Some people took it to heart
The direction of information flow
No? The Central Dogma is about the flow of sequence information: from nucleic acid to protein, and never back again.
It's not about regulatory information.
It's not about regulatory information.
The direction of genetic information flow. And yes, multiple cases of the Dogma not working that way. That's why it is, literally, "dogma"
You're being downvoted, but I think that you bring up an important point that I've seen debated a lot elsewhere: science is much more of a large, collaborative effort these days than it has been in the past, often involving huge teams and billions in government funding. The fact that Nobels are limited to I believe 4 recipients in a year gives the broader public the idea that it's "a couple of geniuses" that move science forward these days, and that's just not how it works.
"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.)