As a Network full of scientists, it’s small wonder that we regularly get excited by the research behind the Nobel prizes. M. William Lensch, on The Red Pill blog, even devised a Nobel Nostradamus Pool in an attempt to predict the winners. In 2007, he correctly guessed that Oliver Smithies, Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans would scoop the 2007 Physiology or Medicine prize for work leading to mouse knockouts, and was bang on the money two years later in predicting that Szostak, Greider and Blackburn would get the same prize for their work on telomerase and telomeres.

Picking up on the telemorase announcement, Anna Vilborg enthused about the way Nobel prizes bring science to the wider population:

What I like best about this Nobel Prize week is that it’s actually a week when science is trendy. Science on the fist page of the morning paper, science on the ever present lab radio…Everyone wants to have a clue (or at least seem like they do – on the radio we got to learn that “chromosomes are parts of cells that give you eternal life”. I guess it is true in a very philosophical sense, but that was perhaps not what they intended). And to remedy the fact that school children don’t know the names of any contemporary scientists the papers have special issues on “cool” scientists. It’s kind of fun, for a week.

But not everything runs so positively for Nobel Prize winners. On the Neuroscience Forum, Noah Gray noted a rare example of a paper retraction by a laureate, in this case Linda Buck.

Now, a retraction always turns a few heads, especially when it involves a high-profile publication, and ESPECIALLY when it involves the work of a Nobel prize-winning scientist. But what makes this particular retraction even more interesting is the fact that an “Author Contributions” abstract was included by the authors with the retraction. It makes it pretty clear that the other authors place most of the blame for the irreproducibility on the first author.

You can read (and contribute to) the ensuing discussion over on the Neuroscience Forum.

More positively, Joseph Zhou used the 2008 announcement awarding the chemistry prize to the developers of green flourescent protein to reflect on future directions of this field of research.

Looking back to the work of a much earlier laureate, Paul Wicks described the research of Charles Sherrington (coiner of the words ‘neuron’,‘proprioception’ and ‘synapse’) who shared the 1932 prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the electrical activity of nerves. Anna Winterbottom, meanwhile, uncovered the history of Patrick Blackett, 1948 physics winner who pioneered studies of cosmic rays (and got a laboratory named after him at Imperial College, London).

Finally, Nature Network members have attended several talks by laureates. Here’s Stephen Curry’s account of a lecture by 1997 Physiology and Medicine winner Stanley Prusiner describing his work on prions. And Matt Brown had the pleasure of hearing Oliver Smithies speak about his work on gel electrophoresis and mouse knockouts (and also took Smithies out to dinner with co-laureate Mario Capecchi).

Smithies (left, distance) and Capecchi (right) with Berlin scientists at a Nature Network dinner. Image by Matt Brown

You can find out much more about the science behind every Nobel Prize over on Nobelprize.org.

Part of a series to coincide with the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting 2010, celebrating the values of the Nobel Prize, as covered on Nature Network.