The Nobel committee rotates the prize around different specialties and immunology comes up only once every 7 or 8 years. I guess they are hoping he won’t last long enough for the next time.
For those who don’t know, Nobel prizes aren’t [usually] awarded posthumously.
But they did for Ralph Steinman for NK cells.
Most BBers may never have heard of these, but Steinman was a US East coast scientist so was a monty to get the Nobel.
But wait, let’s look at the importance to science. According to the US National Library of Medicine:
NK cells: 87, 621 papers
thymus: 90,887 papers
T cells/lymphocytes: 904,040 papers
So by this crude measure, Jacques Millers’ impact was 10x bigger than Steinman’s.
By any other measure, it was even bigger than that.
Anatomy: Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for finding that scalp hair whorls are more likely to spiral in a counter-clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere compared to the Northern Hemisphere.[325]
Biology: Fordyce Ely and William Petersen, posthumously awarded for repeatedly exploding paper bags next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow and finding that it caused the cow to produce less milk.[325][326]
Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen, for their use of chromatography to separate drunk worms from sober worms.[325][327]
Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding that certain plants imitate the leaf shape of nearby plastic plants and concluding that “plant vision” is plausible.[325][328]
Demography: Saul Justin Newman, for finding that supercentenarians and extreme age records tend to come from areas with no birth certificates, rampant clerical errors, pension fraud, and short life spans.[325][329]
Medicine: Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel, for finding that fake medicine that induces painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.[325][330]
Peace:B. F. Skinner, posthumously awarded for his study on housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide them to their targets.[325]
Physics: James Liao, for his long-running study on how dead trout can swim.[325]
Physiology: Takanori Takebe, for finding that several mammals can breathe through their ■■■■.[331][325]
Probability: A team of 50 researchers, for performing 350,757 experiments to show that when a coin is flipped, it is slightly more likely land on the same side as it started.[325][332]
Here is a quote from one of the greatest physicists/cosmologists we have.
It’s very well worth pondering over:
I would add that he downplayed biology as just a “complex system”, although it was necessary to give rise to the brains who could formulate mathematics and physics laws.
Yeah, the race to AGI is of no concern at all because I’m sure that whichever country gets there first will use it in good faith for the betterment of mankind and not for their own interests.
