Chemistry
The 2008 prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on green fluorescent protein or GFP. However, Douglas Prasher was the first to clone the GFP gene and suggested its use as a biological tracer. Martin Chalfie stated, "Douglas Prasher's work was critical and essential for the work we did in our lab. They could've easily given the prize to Douglas and the other two and left me out." Prasher's accomplishments were not recognized and he lost his job. When the Nobel was awarded in 2008, Prasher was working as a courtesy shuttle bus driver in Huntsville Alabama.
The 2000 prize "for the Discovery and Development of Conductive polymers", to Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa, cited the 1977 discovery of passive high-conductivity in oxidized iodine-doped polyacetylene black and related materials. However, there were several earlier reports of electrical conductivity in polymeric materials. 14 years earlier, Weiss and coworkers in Australia had reported equivalent high electrical conductivity in a similar compound—oxidized, iodine-doped polypyrrole black. Eventually, the Australian group achieved resistances as low as 0.03 ohm/cm. Slightly later, DeSurville and coworkers reported high conductivity in a polyaniline. Moreover, three years before, John McGinness and coworkers reported an active organic polymer electronic device in the journal Science. In the "ON" state it showed almost metallic conductivity. This device is now on the "Smithsonian chips" list of key discoveries in semiconductor technology.
Thus, Inzelts textbook states that the Nobel's "...'discovery of conducting polymers' is an exaggeration..". and it was one in a sequence of such discoveries. Nevertheless, Inzelt says that Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa played a key role in the "development" of such polymers and actually launched the modern field.
The 1993 prize credited Kary Mullis with the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method, a central technique in molecular biology which allowed for the amplification of specified DNA sequences. However, others claimed that Norwegian scientist Kjell Kleppe, together with 1968 Nobel Prize laureate H. Gobind Khorana, had an earlier and better claim to the discovery dating from 1969. Mullis' co-workers at that time denied that he was solely responsible for the idea of using Taq polymerase in the PCR process. Rabinow raised the issue of whether or not Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it. However, Khudyakov and Howard Fields claimed "the full potential was not realized" until Mullis' work in 1983.
The 1961 prize for carbon assimilation in plants awarded to Melvin Calvin was controversial because it ignored the contributions of Andrew Benson and James Bassham. While originally named the Calvin cycle, many biologists and botanists now refer to the Calvin-Benson, Benson-Calvin, or Calvin-Benson-Bassham (CBB) cycle. Three decades after winning the Nobel, Calvin published an autobiography titled "Following the trail of light" about his scientific journey which didn't mention Benson.
Henry Eyring (1901–1981) allegedly failed to receive the prize because of his Mormon faith. (It is also possible that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not understand Eyring's theory until it was too late to award him the Nobel; the academy awarded him the Berzelius Medal in 1977 as partial compensation.)
Dmitri Mendeleyev, who originated the periodic table of the elements, never received a Nobel Prize. He completed his first periodic table in 1869. However, a year earlier, another chemist, Julius Lothar Meyer, had reported a somewhat similar table. In 1866 John Alexander Reina Newlands, presented a paper that first proposed a periodic law. However, none of these tables were correct—the 19th century tables arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic weight (or atomic mass). It was left to Henry Moseley to base the periodic table on the atomic number (the number of protons). Mendeleyev died in 1907, six years after the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. He came within one vote of winning in 1906, but died the next year. Hargittai claimed that Mendeleyev's omission was due to behind-the-scenes machinations of one dissenter on the Nobel Committee who disagreed with his work.
Gilbert N. Lewis, the originator of the Lewis dot structure and discoverer of the Covalent bond, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 35 times and never won once. Lewis was found dead in his lab on the same day he had lunch with Irving Langmuir, 1932 recipient of the Chemistry prize. It is speculated that this was suicide.
Read more about this topic: Nobel Prize Controversies
Famous quotes containing the word chemistry:
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“...some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)