Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow 135
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
I'd vote for Penrose (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy has done so much for physics, that at some point, he deserves it just from such an enormous body of work. He inspires Hawking, does all sorts of work with theories of everything, he then writes it all up in a simple book that explains how everything works without skimping too much on the math, what more do you need a man to do?
Re:Other Fields of Endeavour (Score:3, Insightful)
Moderators: I've got karma to burn, but consider that Gore is still a politician who hardly practices what he is preaching. I'm all for preserving Earth, but come on...
Re:Other Fields of Endeavour (Score:5, Insightful)
The award meant less when Henry Kissinger won it. Gore's actually more deserving than some of the winners in the past few decades; at least he never actively worked against peace.
Re:Other Fields of Endeavour (Score:5, Insightful)
Gore? Really? I think that when Arafat [wikipedia.org] got it in '94, it should have been written off all together. Sure the Gore thing was BS, but at least he didn't have such a long-standing history of organizing terrorist attacks against civilians before receiving his Peace Prize.
Of course, there are a number of legitimate gripes. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Other Fields of Endeavour (Score:5, Insightful)
The ones for physics and such, however are still very much prestigious. You can be sure that it takes a lot of hard scientific work to get one. So beat up on Gore all you want, but leave the scientists alone. (disclaimer: I am not a supporter of Mr. Gore.)
Re:Other Fields of Endeavour (Score:5, Insightful)
The peace prize is not really affiliated with the natural science prizes. Different committee, different time of year, different style for different reasons.
The science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up. The peace prize is a current thing and often focus on drawing attention to something.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
Graphene? Unlikely... (Score:2, Insightful)
The 1996 Nobel prize was already given for the discovery of Buckyballs. Graphene is the same field (so the general area is already covered), and not really a surprize. It is just a monolayer of graphite. Preparing it and measuring its properties is (highly interesting) engineering, but not groundbreaking science.
Re:Why isn't Robert Gallo credited for HIV discove (Score:2, Insightful)
Gallo! Thanks for the name - I did a whole paper on that ass in 1990 and couldn't remember the name.
"If Mr. Gallo had only half the talent for science as he did for obfuscation, he would've been a great scientist indeed."
Don't worry too much about Gallo's fate - the NIH built him a whole new building to house his little empire.
Re:I'd vote for Penrose (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever the greatness of Penrose's discovery, he threw it all away when he started advocating the quantum gravity theory of uncomputable physics as the basis for creativity.
Bah to that. Nobel prizes are for specific discoveries, not for a person's reputation since then. You might as well say Einstein should be discredited because he changed his mind about the cosmological constant.
The ignorant leading the blind (Score:5, Insightful)
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?
Atheism isn't a prerequisite (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
I'm just jumping in here, sorry to crash the party. And I'm only being civil because you're a basketball fan (not really, but nice username anyway).
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
By that reasoning, you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well. Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
There are many scientists who happen to be religious, and it causes many a brilliant scientist degrees of consternation in attempting to reconcile his religion's creation story with his own science. Penrose's attempts seem no different than Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice with the universe".
While I agree with your analysis of why the null state for any hypothesis should be rejected rather than accepted, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban Penrose or anyone else from consideration for the Prize. Indeed, I would say that all creeping politicization of the Prize should cease, as it has been all too prevalent lately (assuming it ever was otherwise). In this case, while I personally believe in maintaining a barrier between religion and science, I think the pendulum has swung too far against religion in general - indeed, the anti-religious sentiment is so common in the sciences to pretty much amount to bigotry. I've seen it firsthand, and it's disgusting coming from people who claim to be open-minded. So long as your opinion matches theirs, presumably.
In other words, let's accept Penrose's religious choices and not hold it against him with regard to his scientific contributions. Anything else would smack of extreme religious intolerance that is not in keeping with the overall ideals of Prize in advancing humanity.
I do respect your opinion and the civil way in which you've presented it, but I'd strongly urge you to reconsider what you're advocating.
Re:I'd vote for Penrose (Score:2, Insightful)
Bah to that. Nobel prizes are for specific discoveries, not for a person's reputation since then.
However, in the context of GGP's point being that a Prize is due for total body of work, GP's point that various controversial acts of subject's career are enough to disqualify him seems valid.
Re:Atheism isn't a prerequisite (Score:2, Insightful)
By that reasoning
A sure sign of an incoming "reductio ad absurdum"
you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well
Einstein wasn't vocal about religion until after he won his prize.
Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
Absurd... he was born in the 17th century during a time when religion was still playing an important role in education.
Taking our modern standards and applying them to cases in previous centeruies and going "AH HA! SEE IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!" is just retarded. Before the sequencing of DNA, it was still possible to be religious, honest and learned. These days you have to pick only two.
What are you talking about? (Score:1, Insightful)
As the reclassification petition reveals, HPV infections are naturally self-limiting -- meaning that they are controlled naturally, without requiring intervention with drugs or vaccines.
Where did you see that? It says most acute infections are self-limiting, not all.
It is not the HPV virus itself that causes cervical cancer but rather a persistent state of ill-health on the part of the patient that makes her vulnerable to persistent infections.
It's not the vulnerability to persistent infection that causes cervical cancer, ti's the persistent infection to certain high-risk strains of HPV. Regardless, the vaccine removes the vulnerability and helps prevent roughly 70% of cervical cancers. In addition, it also prevents infection of many strains that don't cause cancer, but still cause genital warts...it's a win all around.
Taking Gardasil can actually make you 44.6% more likely to get pre-cancerous lesions if you already have HPV (many sexually active people do).
So start vaccination earlier, before they're sexually active. Actually, this is the biggest problem with the vaccine, and I suspect it plays a big role in why some people are against it. The virus is sexually transmitted, so idiots start thinking, "My daughter isn't sexually active! She's not going to be sexually active until she marries! Only sluts need this so-called vaccine!"
Not only that, but cervical cancer is one of the most treatable forms of cancer out there.
Prevention is always better than the cure, even if the cure is available.
If you are healthy and get regular testings you should have no problem.
Says you. Regular testing helps catch the problem early on. Vaccines help you never get the problem in the first place.
There is no need for this vaccine.
There's a clear benefit to taking the vaccine, and no disadvantages as long as it's started early enough so that you can be assured to not already have HPV. Why the hell would you avoid it?