Dr. Roy's Thoughts
I particularly like the first and third the most.
They're from this collection", which just gathered them without evidently taking sides. But the consensus seems to be that the Nobel Peace Prize now means about as much as the prize you get in a box of Cracker Jack.
6 comments:
My favorite is the "peace dove" cartoon, but there were several great ones.
I have been a Nobel Prize watcher for a long time--I went to grad school where they had special parking places marked "NL" which only Nobel Laureates were allowed to use--no joke, it's true, only cripples and Nobelists could find a place to park in less than half an hour--and I've met or heard speak--just a minute--twelve of them (counting those who got it after I heard them like Steve Chu). And I can tell you the Peace Prize has been considered a joke for quite a long time. Literature, too.
The science-prizes are the meaningful ones. Almost no one gets one without doing something that changes the world in an important way. There are quirkinesses in it of course--there's way too many people who deserve it, people who would have gotten it sooner or later but didn't live long enough.
Want a name to watch, future Nobelist in chemistry? Peter G. Schultz. Or as he was affectionately known, Peter the Great. The Chipmonk from Hell. Also, of course, Craig Venter, but everyone knows about him. Eric Lander, too, currently Obama's "Genomics-Czar".
Yeah, you can watch a real live miracle in progress. How wondrous are Thy works, O Gott, and how much more wondrous we shall make them!
Go here:
http://schultz.scripps.edu/research.html
Read the first bit and then scroll down to the section entitled "Expanding the Genetic Code". Just to imagine doing this is a significant achievement. It could have been the germ of a sci-fi novel, this idea of redesigning ribosomes so you can genetically program them to incorporate NEW building-blocks into proteins, as well as the twenty natural ones--and he's actually done it. And it's only one of his projects. He's kind of the father of the field of "high-throughput" chemistry--learning to measure, or make, billions of related compounds at once, combining micromanipulation with robotic automation. The opposite of intelligent design--instead of designing a molecule and then figuring out how to make it, you design a way to test for the properties you want, and run a machine which runs that test on billions of RANDOM compounds until it finds a good one. That's what the immune system does, and Schultz has taken the strategy into the test-tube.
There, there's your free lesson for today. Hopefully Christina won't delete it. It is really a tribute to the alleged Creator, figuring out enough details of how His stuff works that we can improve it.
Haven't seen or heard from you here for over a week now, are things ok? Are you just taking a break?
Yeah. Had a nasty chest cold, mostly.
I was wondering if you were all right as well... but I wasn't sure whether I would be bothering you if I asked. I assume you're on the mend now; if so I'm glad you are feeling better, and if not I hope you recover soon.
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