Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to 3 Evolutionary Scientists | Hacker News Reader

Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to 3 Evolutionary Scientists

nytimes.com

103 pointspg_bot33 comments

Very excited about this Nobel - it recognizes a practical but extremely useful set of tools that are the backbone of modern therapeutic development, on one hand (phage display) and have proven immensely useful to improving protein design and engineering, on the other.

It's also great to see improved representation from the Nobels this year: female winners in both chemistry and physics (where there have been respectively, 5 and 4 previous winners, TOTAL, since the prize began) and for both cases, (some) winners without "glamorous" science careers at rich private universities with massive labs, high profiles, TED talks, etc.. Just great scientists, doing their jobs. Hopefully more to come like these in the coming years.

FWIW, it seems to me that Nobel prize winners are not typically on the TED circuit. Though most do have large labs. That is usually indicative of the fruitful research that leads to the Nobel prize later.

Could've just linked to the actual source.

https://www.nobelprize.org

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/press-relea...

This has not been a good Nobel year for Wikipedia.

First, yesterday, we find that Physics winner Donna Strickland did not have a page. She had one four years ago briefly, but it had been quickly deleted on notability grounds.

And now today we get a Chemistry winner, George P. Smith, who also did not have a page--not even an old deleted page. His first page was created this morning after the Prize was announced.

This also happened last year, also in Chemistry, with Jacques Dubochet.

I don't see what the problem is. Should every published scientist have a wikipedia page? It's not obvious that they should, not every scientist is notable to the general public. The fact that they received a Nobel doesn't mean they were notable before they received the Nobel.

> "The fact that they received a Nobel doesn't mean they were notable before they received the Nobel."

It does, pretty much by definition of a Nobel prize.

What I can see happening sometimes is that the author doesn't have a page, but the page on the science clearly cites the person that ended up winning the Nobel.

In this case, the Wikipedia article on chirped pulse amplification has cited Donna Strickland as a co-inventor since 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chirped_pulse_amp...).

For phage displays, George P. Smith is not mentioned but at least cited as far back as 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_display&old...). By 2012, George P. Smith is directly mentioned. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_display&old...)

Notable in this context meaning notable to the general public. But wikipedia isn't for original research, and so it needs some external institution to validate notability to the general public. A Nobel prize is one such mechanism.

Wikipedia is not just for the general public, many pages go into a lot of detail, and to people who understand the details of certain subfields of chemistry, these people might be well-known. I'm not a chemist, so I wouldn't know in this case.

The novel prise isn’t given to people already considered notable by the general public. Of the 200 and some physicists who are Nobel laureates most dedicated physics students would struggle to name more than a dozen, let alone arbitrary members of public.

They become notable to the public when they receive the award because if it’s public recognition, but they are awarded it based on their research contributions being notable.

I don't disagree, but it does seem like if someone discovers something Nobel worthy that the discovery itself or the paper should have been cited within Wikipedia somewhere.

That said, Prof. Arnold definitely deserved a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel: she had trained multiple students that had Wikipedia pages, won numerous awards, been elected to all three National Academies, did seminal work using DE, and has had many other research accomplishments.

> Should every published scientist have a wikipedia page? It's not obvious that they should, not every scientist is notable to the general public.

To me it rather shows what a bad judgement the Wikipedia moderators have on notability.

I really don’t think that is fair. Wikipedia mods aren’t expected to be experts on research chemistry or theoretical physics. As had already been noted before you commented, in many cases, including the ones cited above, the researchers in question were credited in the pages on the research. I think that’s reasonable for a resource intended for a general rather than specialist audience.

> Wikipedia mods aren’t expected to be experts on research chemistry or theoretical physics.

I agree. That is why they should not make a judgement to delete a Wikipedia page because of irrelevance before people who are knowledgeable on the respective topic have been consulted/given their opinion.

Wikipedia is fundamentally maintained by a pseudononymous swarm of editors who communicate asynchronously. This necessitates that all editors be more or less fungible. The average editor is not equipped to judge the statement "This work is scientifically important". The average editor is much better equipped to judge the statement pair "The Nobel committee holds this work to be scientifically important", "The Nobel committee constitutes a reliable third-party source".

No, you've got that all backwards. The Nobel recognizes the well-established notability of seminal work. It is not somehow an announcement of freshly discovered notability.

In fact there are nearly always a series of prizes one typically sees before the Nobel, e.g. the Wolf Prize, Boltzmann medal, etc. It would be odd that someone comes out of left field and takes the Nobel.

It is possible that they didn't meet the notability criteria before winning the prize. Not everyone who wins was already famous, even in their field.

Wikipedia is volunteer-edited. You can write articles for scientists too!

Right, and then immediately have some editor come along and delete them for not being notable enough. No thanks.

It would be worthwhile to go back for the last 5 years of chemistry/physics nobels and see how many winners had a Wikipedia page. Maybe this has been done, but I haven’t seen it.

If had to guess, I bet it’s not uncommon to not be in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not as much of interest to most in the academic research environment and as noted by others, these folks are often not well known outside their specialized disciplines.

Frances Arnold received Millennium Technology Prize in 2016 (€1 million) and Draper Prize in 2011 ($500,000). Both can be considered as "Nobel's for Engineering".

They're never going to give it to John Goodenough. :(

Reuters publishes an annual list of its picks for the Nobel prize. Goodenough was listed way back in 2015. I just hope his solid state battery turns out to be viable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarivate_Citation_Laureates, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13916255

I also hope that his design will be good enough.

Unlike my laptop battery, he has a long lifespan and I'm sure he'll stick around for the next few years. Just enough time to finally award the man.

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