The 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Roger D. Kornberg from Stanford,
“for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”.
I don’t remember seeing that pick made in any of the recent blog entries on the subject.
And at least one blogger out there is upset about how “the shoe-horning of biology into the chemistry prize continues”.
UPDATE***
Thanks to Bethany at Chemical & Engineering News for letting me know about this story she wrote a couple of years ago about the fuzzy boundaries of the Chemistry Nobel.
Discuss…
Stuart
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
They should have a separate prize for biology and then could award the medicine prize for more clinical research, thus reserving the chemistry prize for core chemistry. Kornberg made fundamental headway, but it’s going to be hard for more traditional chemists if they have to increasingly compete with structural biologists and molecular biologists, who after all have the option of getting both the medicine or chemistry prize.