Chemistry Agonistes
October 15th, 2006 by WaltThe 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger Kornberg for eukaryotic transcription, something that most people would regard as biology. This touched off some agonizing about the Meaning of it All at Uncertain Principles, In the Pipeline, and Adventures in Ethics and Science. Paul Bracher even went so far as to suggest that chemists move in on the physics prize.
Hey, at least they have a prize.
October 17th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
And this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, is an economist!
Since the prize in Economics is strictly not a Nobel Prize, but is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, it could be argued that Yunus is the first academic economist to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
October 17th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
That’s funny. I’d heard that he’d won it, but that it might make him the first economist to really win the Prize never occurred to me.