8 Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize | Hacker News Reader

8 Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize

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71 pointsjmnicholson12 comments

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1. Paul Boyer, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1997, Identifying mechanism for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthesis

2. Richard Ernst, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1991, High resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy

3. Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969, classification of elementary particles and their interactions

4. Hans Krebs, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1953, discovery of the citric acid cycle (aka the Krebs cycle)

5. Herbert Kroemer, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2000, semiconductor heterostructures in high-speed and opto-electronics

6. John Polanyi, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986, elucidating the dynamics of chemical elementary processes

7. Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993, invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method

8. Rosalind Yalow, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1977, invention of the radioimmunoassay (RIA)

Half were in Chemistry; anybody know what the Chemists are doing wrong? Or right???

What kind of person goes into Chemistry? The really serious sciencey people I knew would go into physics, math or maybe something like AI.

And the softer sciencey people would more likely tend towards engineering or biology.

Maybe chemists are just not open to taking big risks. And hence they reject papers which violate "known" laws.

Chemistry as a field seems stuck in the last century. I did an undergrad in Chemistry with some part time lab work. I ultimately left for a few reasons.

1. Research is largely based on guess and check. Computational chemistry (modeling) is not very reliable. It seems stuck between two layers. Its above modeling particles in physics, but below modeling materials in engineering.

2. Ridiculous work hours/times. 80 hours / 6 days a week is barely scratching the surface. I had a few grad students that I worked with that had 0 time outside the lab that was not spent eating or sleeping (which they also did in the breakroom).

3. Confirmation bias plagues the industry. This does affect the larger community, but seems stronger in Chemistry due to how finicky old spectroscopy machines can be. Run a sample 10 times and get 10 results. Good luck when all your samples in the microgram range.

Thanks, that's really a valuable insight into the field. The closest thing I know about is the physics field and I'm not into it enough to be confident about my observations.

But I do suspect it has different problems, yet just as serious and of a similar nature.

Sciencey people going into AI????? Maybe during the AI winter. Today, we are living in a hype bubble of epic proportions.

Not at the same level, but my paper about stealing RSA private keys via the use of cache collisions as a side channel -- the first such paper, which has since spawned hundreds of others -- was rejected by the Journal of Cryptology on the basis that it was about CPU architecture and did not involve a cryptanalytic attack.

For reference: http://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf

It's a bit embarrassing that Nature accepted Kary Mullis' letter [1] which he later described by saying:

> I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos. [2]

but didn't accept the one where he discovered PCR.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v218/n5142/abs/218663b0...

[2] Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis

Really an unbeatable headline. I enjoy that many of the authors proudly touted their rejection letters around for a long time after, suggesting that they were probably "too far ahead in their field" for a no-brainer acceptance from the traditional outlets, and still knew the magnitude of their discovery.

Um, I agree with your explanation, but why is the headline unbearable?

Unbeatable.

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