I was skimming through the October 7th issue of The Economist this morning, and after my jaunt through the letters page and the leaders, I skipped to the science and technology section as I usually do. There’s an article in there about the recent Nobel Prizes and I’d like to share this quote with you:<\/p>\n
The chemistry prize is for a piece of X-ray crystallography, a favourite subject of the academy’s prize committees over the decades, and a way of awarding an extra physiology prize (since x-ray crystallography is used mainly to examine large biological molecules) without confessing that much of the intellectual oomph has gone out of chemistry in the century since Alfred Nobel, himself a chemist, drew up his will.<\/em><\/p>\n The piece doesn’t have a name to it, but it was obviously written by someone who has little or no background in chemistry. If you ask me, the parenthetical statement about what x-ray crystallography is mainly used for is utter nonsense. Not only that, but later in the article we are told that the chemical difference between DNA<\/span> and RNA<\/span> is that one of the bases is different… now, remind me, why does one have a ‘D’ at the front and the other an ‘R’ – hmm, I wonder?<\/p>\n If someone is going to tell me that chemistry is losing its intellectual oomph, they should know a little bit about it first…<\/p>\n Stuart<\/p>\n Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was skimming through the October 7th issue of The Economist this morning, and after my jaunt through the letters page and the leaders, I skipped to the science and technology section as I usually do. There\u2019s an article in there about the recent Nobel Prizes and I\u2019d like to share this quote with you: … Read more<\/a> Continue reading