Some chemists in the blogosphere, it seems, are scratching their heads with this morning’s announcement of the Nobel prize winner in chemistry: Roger Kornberg, a structural biologist from Stanford, for working out the structure of RNA polymerase. (see what Paul Bracher, Harvard chemistry student, has to say on his blog). Some would argue that this was more of an achievement in biology rather than chemistry. As Bracher says on his blog: “The shoe-horning of biology into the chemistry prize continues.”

This tepid reaction may be a sign of a larger issue of identity in chemistry circles. What is chemistry and what kind of problems should a person who calls her/himself a “chemist” work on? This may just be semantics or an irrelevant issue now that it’s becoming increasingly difficult these days to classify scientific problems into neat categories. (Take a look at some of the past Nobel chemistry winners. In the last 10 years, 4 of the chemistry prizes were awarded for work in biological systems, such as cell membrane channels in 2003 and ATP in 1997)

But when something as big as the Nobel prizes, with millions of dollars at stake, are still being awarded on the basis of categories outlined more than a hundred years ago by a rich Swedish guy, it’s certainly an issue that can’t easily be dismissed. Science has changed a lot since Alfred Nobel wrote up his will, but the Nobel Foundation said that after it created the economics prize in 1968, it won’t create any new prize categories, even though there’s a good argument for creating a “biology” category. So it looks like for now, a very prestigious and lucrative 100+ year old prize system in science won’t be adapting to the changing times in science. Is this good or bad? What do you think?