2018 nobel prize predictions

September 20, 2018 at 2:01 pm | | nobel

It’s approaching Nobel season again, and here are my predictions:

Chemistry: Cytoskeletal motor proteins (Ron Vale, Mike Sheetz, Jim Spudich)

Medicine: T-cell and cancer immunotherapy (Jim Allison, Stephen Rosenberg, Philippa Marrack)

Physics: Dark matter (Sandra Faber, Margaret Geller, Jerry Ostriker, Helen Quinn)

I know I’ve made this prediction before, but I think it’s high time that the discovery of kinesin and early observations of single myosin activity is recognized by the Nobel committee. UPDATE: Darn. Wrong again. Phage display and protein engineering by directed evolution. Cool!

In 2016, I predicted T-cell receptor, but in the meantime cancer immunotherapy has continued to grow, so I’m tweaking the predicted winners a little. I’m not naive enough to think that we’re on the cusp of curing cancer, but it’s the first time that I thought it might be possible to—someday—conquer the disease. UPDATE: I got 1/2 of the prize correct.

Unfortunately, Vera Rubin was never awarded a Nobel Prize, but the committee could honor her memory by awarding some other deserving astrophysicists with the prize this year. UPDATE: Nope. It went to laser tweezers and ultrafast laser pulses. Interesting: these are reminiscent of some late-90s awards to Zewail and Chu.

OTHER PREDICTIONS:

My past predictions: I’ve made (partially) correct predictions in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2017. Other predictions ended up coming to fruition in subsequent years, such as gravitational waves, super-resolution and single-molecule microscopy,

Citation Laureates

C&E News

ChemistryWorld

ChemistryViews voting

PhysicsWorld

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