The Mortification of James Watson

Not very long after James Watson finished his Nobel Prize–winning work on the structure of DNA in 1953, he started firing off some eyebrow-raising comments about his fellow man: that fat people don’t get hired because they lack ambition; how sunlight is the source of the “Latin lover” libido; what he found distasteful in the appearance of his female research collaborator, Rosalind Franklin. But as the great geneticist slunk back to the U.S.

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Medicine: Paprika Prize

In Stockholm last week a committee of Swedish doctors was deciding whether to give the 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine to: 1> Biochemist Ibert Szent-Gyrgyi of the Hungarian University of Szeged who discovered that a certain acid in the adrenal glands of healthy men and animals had the same beneficial effect as Vitamin C contained in oranges and lemons; 2> Biochemist Walter Norman Haworth of Birmingham University, who analyzed the chemical structures of Vitamin C and the ascorbic acid which Professor Szent-Gyrgyi isolated; or 3> Biochemist Paul Karrer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who made Vitamin C artificially. While the world of scholars waited, the Nobel Prize committee took a quick last look at the accomplishments of Albert Szent-Gyrgyi.

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Will the Nobel Prize Help Obama Make Peace?

President Barack Obama made time for a brief statement about his Nobel Peace Prize award on Friday, before heading in to a more pressing engagement — a high-powered White House strategy session on the next phase of his war in Afghanistan. That was just one indication that this year’s peace prize was, as Obama himself put it, honoring aspiration rather than achievement

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