LIFE, death and the Universe figured strongly in this year鈥檚 Nobel prizes. This time, the winners owed their $1 million bounties variously to nematode worms, enormous proteins and neutrino particles.
The prizes in chemistry and medicine could be the first of many to reap the rewards of the massive global programmes now under way to unravel the gene and protein secrets of entire organisms. Future prizes may be awarded for sequencing the human genome, but this year it was the humble nematode鈥檚 chance to shine. By painstakingly studying it through a microscope in the 1970s, John Sulston of Britain鈥檚 Sanger Institute in Cambridge worked out how all its organs form, and how its cells die along the way.
Sydney Brenner, another British citizen now based at the Salk Institute in California, began his worm project in the 1960s at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, while Robert Horvitz, an American based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the third 鈥渨orm winner鈥�, finding 鈥渄eath genes鈥� which make cells die off in an orderly way.
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The trio鈥檚 discoveries have thrown light on how cancers develop, as well as inspiring the hugely ambitious plan to sequence the DNA of human beings. 鈥淲hen results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the human genome projects, specialist scientists can move more rapidly,鈥� says Sulston.
Biology underscored this year鈥檚 chemistry prize too. All three winners refined routine methods for analysing simple chemicals to study much larger biological molecules such as DNA, proteins and carbohydrates.
Now their techniques are at the forefront of attempts to catalogue the 鈥減roteomes鈥� of living things, the vast suites of proteins which make up entire living organisms. One half of the prize went to John Fenn of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and Koichi Tanaka of Shimadzu in Japan for independent work on mass spectrometry, a means of identifying compounds by establishing their molecular weight. The second half went to Kurt W眉thrich, a Swiss national based at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, for his pioneering alterations to another form of spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, enabling it to map the structure of large proteins such as enzymes.
Meanwhile nature鈥檚 slipperiest particles 鈥� neutrinos 鈥� have rewarded physicists with the Nobel prize for a second time. Ray Davis, formerly of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York state, and Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo share half the prize for pioneering the detection of neutrinos from space.
Neutrinos are very light elementary particles first predicted in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli. But they barely interact with matter, so they鈥檙e very difficult to detect. Fredrick Reines of the University of California finally pinpointed neutrinos from a nuclear reactor about 25 years later, winning a Nobel in 1995.
Davis won his share of this year鈥檚 prize for building a giant underground tank containing 600 tonnes of dry-cleaning fluid in a South Dakota gold mine, and using it to detect neutrinos from the Sun. His results hinted that there are far fewer neutrinos streaming out of the Sun than thought. Koshiba later confirmed this with a water detector, Kamiokande, in a mine in Japan.
These awards are richly deserved, according to Lawrence Sulak of Boston University, who was a student at BNL when Davis built his cleaning fluid detector. 鈥淚t鈥檚 wonderful,鈥� he says. 鈥淓veryone thought Davis鈥檚 neutrino results were outlandish, but the results came up year after year and he really stuck to his guns.鈥� Sadly, he adds, the award has come late for Davis, who has advanced Alzheimer鈥檚.
Riccardo Giacconi of Associated Universities in Washington DC won the other half of the physics prize for using detectors on rockets to find cosmic X-ray sources. He discovered the first X-ray source beyond the Sun 鈥� the star Scorpius X-1 鈥� and his team built the first orbiting X-ray telescope, Uhuru, which was launched in 1970.