Hacker News Reader

Comment by CrazyStat | Hacker News Reader

A general-purpose DNA editing tool is still basic research by most standards.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded for conferring the greatest benefit to humankind. Showing how to use CRISPR as a genome editing tool (Doudna and Charpentier) confers much more benefit to humankind than "just" characterizing CRISPR (Mojica). I don't mean to trivialize Mojica's work, but at the end of the day if not for the later work of Doudna and Charpentier, Mojica's work on CRISPR would be unknown and irrelevant to 99.9999% of the world population.

View on HN

> I don't mean to trivialize Mojica's work, but at the end of the day if not for the later work of Doudna and Charpentier, Mojica's work on CRISPR would be unknown and irrelevant to 99.9999% of the world population.

And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR...

Anyways. Here's an article if you are interested:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nobel-crispr

The point here is that if Mojica (or Šikšnys) instead of professors in a random European university, were supported by University of California, MIT, or any of the big names, they would not be in the predicament they are today.

> And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR...

And if Janssen had not invented the microscope... clearly all Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology should go to a Dutch guy who died 400 years ago.

Mojica made a contribution. Doudna and Charpentier made a contribution which clearly conferred greater benefit on humankind. Šikšnys made a contribution but got scooped, which sucks but that's how science goes sometimes.

It has nothing to do with university support and it's not a predicament. The prize as awarded accurately reflects the relative impact of each step forward.

The Nobel prize is 120 years old and I don’t think it can be awarded posthumously.

> but got scooped, which sucks buts that’s how science works sometimes

I work in science. It hasn’t been always like this and it is getting worse. Nobody does basic or risky research anymore.

> I don’t think it can be awarded posthumously.

Correct.

> I work in science. It hasn’t been always like this and it is getting worse. Nobody does basic or risky research anymore.

Getting scooped has always been a risk. Crick and Watson fretted about it when they were working on the structure of DNA. Newton and Leibniz bickered over priority for calculus hundreds of years ago. My wife fretted about it when she was isolating and studying the function of a 450kDa protein for her PhD a decade ago. I don't think it has really changed that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com