In the wee hours of Monday morning, a few scientists will get a phone call from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden to let them know that they’ve just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Last year’s honors went to UCSF’s Elizabeth Blackburn, Johns Hopkins’ Carol Greider and Harvard’s Jack Szostak for describing how telomeres protect DNA.

Who’s likely to get the call this year? According to Thompson Reuters, the leading contenders fall into three groups:

• Douglas Coleman (Jackson Laboratory) and Jeffrey Friedman (Rockefeller University/Howard Hughes Medical Institute) for discovering the hormone leptin, which is involved in a host of metabolic functions, including regulation of appetite. (Coleman and Friedman also won this year’s Lasker awards and wrote commentaries about the discovery for Nature Medicine.)

• Ernest McCulloch (Ontario Cancer Institute) and James Till (Ontario Cancer Institute) for the initial discovery of stem cells, plus Shinya Yamanaka (Kyoto University) for figuring out how to induce pluripotent stem cells from adult mouse fibroblasts. (Yamanaka won last year’s Lasker and wrote about it for the journal, too.)

• Ralph Steinman (Rockefeller University) for discovering key immune regulators called dendritic cells. (Steinman — yes, you guessed it — won the 2007 Lasker. Read his commentary here.)

Our dark horse in this race is Craig Venter, for his work in creating a synthetic bacterium and sequencing the human genome. Back in 2005, Thomson Reuters touted Venter, along with Francis Collins and Eric Lander, as front runners for the prize, so Venter has been waiting a long time for another accolade to add wind to his sails.

Feel free to speculate on any other likely contenders in the comments!

Earlier this summer, the results of the TORPEDO trial were released. And while we are very interested in whether or not “percutaneous interventions to remove thrombi in the popliteal, femoral, or iliac veins, when performed in conjunction with anticoagulant therapy is [sic] better than anticoagulant therapy alone in preventing recurrent venous thromboembolism”, what we really want to know is: why is it called the TORPEDO study?

In this case, it stands for “Thrombus Obliteration by Rapid Percutaneous Endovenous Intervention (PEVI) in Deep Venous Occlusion”, and if you browse the database of clinical trials maintained by the US government, there’s plenty of other amusing acronyms to be had.

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We’ve already taken the steps towards growing hearts, livers, and ovaries in the lab, but that hasn’t stopped movie-makers from exploring the dark side of cloning. This month saw the release of “Never Let Me Go”, directed by Mark Romanek and based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The movie chronicles the lives of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightly), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), who grow up together at Hailsham, an English boarding school with a sinister secret.

* Spoiler Alert* Even if you haven’t read the book, you should be able to figure out that secret within the first five or ten minutes. It helps that Hailsham is an English boarding school, which has been synonymous with “creepy child farm” from Dickens to Pink Floyd. Anyway, all of the children are clones of people outside, and will ‘donate’ their organs (have them forcibly harvested) one at a time until they ‘complete’ (die).

It was hard as an audience member to be horrified at the premise, because the main characters seem much more concerned with their inevitable love triangle than, you know, the fact that they’re going to be killed for their organs. Perhaps they’ve had treatments to make them more tractable? We don’t really know. Why don’t they run away? We don’t really know. Does the subcutaneous wrist implant they use to swipe in and out of buildings explode if they don’t check in? I suppose providing answers to these very obvious questions would be too gauche for a serious art movie.

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