As Bora noted, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger D. Kornberg for a piece of research (the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription) that strikes lots of folks as being within the bounds of biology rather than chemistry.
I can’t do an elaborate discourse on this (as I have sprog-related errands I must do this afternoon), but I want to get some initial responses to this on the table:
- There is no Nobel Prize in Biology, although there is one in Medicine or Physiology. Do the biologists think Kornberg’s research would be a better fit for the Medicine or Physiology category than the Chemistry category? (If so, was this a sneaky way of awarding an extra prize this year in Medicine or Physiology?)
- Chemists, apparently, may be inclined to view this use of the Chemistry prize as inappropriate. For example, Derek Lowe writes:
[H]e wasn’t on anyone’s short list to win the Chemistry prize, and I doubt if Kornberg considers himself a chemist. For some time now, the Nobel people have been using the prize as an overflow from the Medicine/Physiology area
Forgive me, biopeople…I just can’t get excited about this one. I think it’s about time that chemistry is allowed to encroach on the physics prize to balance the encroachment of medicine and physiology into the chemistry prize.
As I’m not a working chemist, I’m a little less tetchy about this, I guess.
- I am, however, pig-biting mad about one of the comments at Derek’s blog:
Chemistry proper, as a science, is dead. There are no more important discoveries being made, only new way to make things, or improve efficiencies…. booorrring.
This one is only a little better:
Chemistry is a science of a lesser public impact. Done at the edges of important matters, it’s physics, done at the edges of interesting issues, it becomes biology. You ask for the final explanation of matter and energy and you are a physicist, you are interested in the beauty and complexity of life, you are a biologist. Sorry, chemistry is a practical science, but today its mostly a set of tools.
I’m the first to point out that boundaries between scientific fields are often fluid and contested, and that much progress can me made on particular problems by borrowing the tools of your neighbor on the other side of the disciplinary fence. However, just because chemistry has provided a nice toolshed from which physicists and biologists can mooch does not mean that chemistry is only good for its tools.
There may be more on this later (depending on how the pig-biting goes).
(Thanks to qetzal for the catch on the Laureate’s actual first name!)
I was reminded of Frank Westheimer’s fascinating retrospective he wrote a few years ago for JBC (you can find it here) on the difficulties he had trying to bridge the gap between chemistry and biochemistry. The events he recounts are all from four decades ago, if not longer.
Efforts to understand the structure and function of biological (macro)molecules at an atomic level have been rewarded with a chemistry Nobel before, in fact, since the 1960s – notably Perutz & Kendrew (1962), Hodgkin (1964), Klug (1982), and Deisenhofer/Huber/Michel (1988). Perhaps the issue is that recognizing worthy biophysical chemistry/structural biology research with a chemistry Nobel Prize is fine, but since biophysical/structural biology research has expanded so much in the meantime, there are enough contenders to earn a fair number of the Prizes as of late.
Its good to see I wasn’t the only one annoyed by those comments.
It’s weird that there’s no Nobel prize for Biology. I hadn’t really thought much about it one way or another. Is there a reason for this, or is it simply ‘the way it’s always been?’ I’ll have to do some more research on it.
The antipathy toward Chemistry as a discipline is also strange to me. Yes, Chemistry does nestle quite thickly between Biology and Physics, but that doesn’t make it a ‘set of tools.’ If anything, the tools that Chemistry provides are the least unique things about it. Biologists can titrate, physicists get to play with the ideal gas law, and mathematicians can spend scads of time looking at … whatever it is mathematicians look at. (I apologize for being highly unfamiliar with higher math theory; my education in that area has been relentlessly applied) That goes for any discipline – I’ve known philosophers to use fMRIs, English majors to run regressions, and everyone has had to do a serious literature review at least once in their academic career.
What makes Chemistry unique, what makes Chemistry Chemistry, and not some silly adjunct of Biology or Physics, is the way it makes you think. What parts of a problem are important? What tools do you use to get at that? How do you conceptualize the world, and how do you communicate that to others? That’s what you learn in a discipline, and that’s what you practice when you get to do it in your daily life.
“Well, we cover that in other disciplines” ignores this entirely, and leads to the sort of redudctionist thinking that drives me (and most of the other social scientists I know) absolutely crazy.
An extreme example (but one I’ve heard before, sadly) says something like: a person committed a crime. Why? We can see that this person had a mental disorder (a given of the hypothetical situation, not an inference based on the stated behavior); this means that their neurochemistry is unbalanced, interfering, somehow, with the electrical functioning of a part of their brain; looking closer, it seems that something fired when it shouldn’t have, because something else was pushing on it, which had something to do with the way the molecules were charged, which had something to do with quantum phyics. Ergo, everything is quantum physics (which may or may not be just math anyway).
Life -> Economics/Sociology/Anthropology (group level science) -> Psychology/(Macro)Biology (individual level science) -> Neurology/Epidemiology (phenomenon level science) -> Chemistry/(Micro)Biology/Physics (component level science) -> Math/Quantum/Philosophy (‘the ultimate meaning/explanation’ step)
[You may not agree with the placement of certain disciplines on this list, and I certainly left off huge chunks of everything, but this is just giving a general overview of what this type of argument tends to look like.]
Just because something can be explained using another set of tools or another lens doesn’t mean that it should be explained that way (however valid the alternate methodology may be); similarly, shared subject matter and tools in no way mean that one discipline (or profession, or behavior) is subsumed by another.
Psst – Roger D. Kornberg.
Not sure if my post sheds any further light on the discussion, but I am slanted in that I come from one of the early interdisciplinary disciplines. Hell, the JBC was founded by my nymsake, the father of American pharmacology. In fact, pharmacology is the original ‘chemical biology’ and is, in some places, the medical school basic science department most likely to be inhabited by MDs.
What constitutes pure chemistry these days, or any other “pure” discipline?
One could argue actually that active physics is turning into chemistry, since all the interesting experiments and action are happening at the atomic scale, with solid state physics, all the kind of stuff Chad Orzel does, quantum computation, etc. Subatomic physics is active but lesser so right now.
I guess that as the various sciences grow, they’re just bumping into each other more.
Well, in the press conf. Dr. Kornberg stated he absolutely and first and formost views himself as a chemist, and his training (Ph.D.) was under a world famous chemist. He considers himself a physical scientist whose goal is to understand the mechanism at the molecular level of a protein machine. Now, perhaps this is somewhat simple chemistry as many of the steps boil down to hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions. You will also note in the history of the Chemistry prize, many nucleic acid-transaction relating research programs have been awarded in addition to post-translation modification of proteins, essentially what many would consider biochemistry. He was on many people’s shortlist for the Chemistry prize, perhaps just not those you consider themselves primarily chemists. Dr. Korberg referred to Chemistry as the “Queen of the Sciences” and the fundamental basis for molecular understanding.
I find it a little strange that chemists would protest a prize like this. The award is effectively stating that biochemistry is also chemistry.
The alternative is after all to define the subject negatively – as that which is not physics and is not biology. It’s what happened to philosophy in relation to science, relegating the discipline to a frankly unwarranted sideline in the natural sciences.
As for why there is no Nobel Prize for Biology, I think it’s fair to say that Alfred Nobel, when drawing up his will at the end of the 19th century, was already quite open-minded. First, by leaving his bequest to prizes like this at all, rather than to his kin, who were expecting to become very rich. Second, by making the prizes expressly global in nature (a lot of his fellow Swedes thought he was being very unpatriotic by doing this). Third, by including prizes for Literature and Peace along with the three in science.
When someone argues that there should be a prize for this or that discipline of science, my counter is: “Well, why wouldn’t the next one considered by Nobel have been one for Art or Architecture?”
Dumping on chemistry as a discipline is gauche and incredibly short-sighted. If anything, couldn’t one make an even better argument that biology is just a specialized application of chemistry? I feel that Roger spoke quite eloquently about chemistry and the relevance of his work in the context of being a chemist.
To the partial list posted above of Nobels in Chemistry awarded for discoveries of a biological nature, the following more recent and well-deserved prizes should be added:
1989 – Altman and Cech – ribozymes
2003 – Agre and MacKinnon – structures of membrane channels
2004 – Ciechanover and Hershko – ubiquitin-dependent protein degradation
Clearly, there is considerable overlap in disciplines among the science prizes. The Chemistry and Medicine Prizes are both open to discoveries of a biological nature, whether they are made by chemists, biologists or physicists. For those chemists and phsyicists who feel shortchanged, it is worth noting that the Medicine prize was given in 2003 to Lauterbur and Mansfield, a chemist and a physicist, respectively, for their application of NMR technology to medical diagnosis (a.k.a MRI).