The Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was announced today. It’s for work on circadian rhythm, research that seems to have been completed in 1984. One of the three recipients is an emeritus professor. www.nytimes.com/…
As it happen just last night I watched most of the movie Splash, starring Darryl Hannah who looked young and beautiful, and Tom Hanks who looked so shockingly young I wasn’t sure it was him. That was 33 years ago — a third of a century.
The very delayed Nobel Prize reminds me of something that happened when I was in college. I was doing research on my undergraduate thesis in 1969 when the professor who shared an office suite with my thesis advisor, Salvador Luria, was awarded that years Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, for work he’d done in 1948. Somebody in the lab said congratulating him was, of course, appropriate but perhaps it would have been more appropriate to congratulate him when he did the work. I said I had an excuse — I wasn’t born until 1949.
As I understand, the instructions on picking the Nobel Prize winners say it should be for work done in the last year. They probably gave up on that long ago, because it can be hard to know that quickly what’s really important scientific progress. Sometimes they give the prize for a long career’s worth of work, and pick out one representative part of it to cite for the prize. Perhaps that’s what happened this year, and they had to go way back to work the three prize recipients did together, before they went off to separate research teams.