Fish falls

appropriateness of the honour for Levi-Montalcini, who shared the prize for her 1950s work on nerve growth factor. The newspaper simply wanted to raise the question of whether the committee was potentially open to corruption. Sometimes, an aggrieved party goes to the media to stir up public and professional support. When Americans Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus received the 1989 physiology or medicine prize for their studies on oncogenes, French scientist Dominique Stehelin issued an open letter insisting that he should have taken a share. Part of his complaint rested on the fact that " the prize carries an unparalleled authority in scientific quarters and the eyes of the public ". The prize carries an unparalleled authority in scientific quarters and the eyes of the public In 2003 US physician Raymond Damadian felt he ought to have been included alongside that year's physiology or medicine recipients, magnetic resonance imaging. He used the media rather differently, booking whole-page advertisements in The Washington Post, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Readers were asked to cut out a coupon and send it to the Nobel committee calling for Damadian's name to be included. Although he had undoubtedly contributed to the subject (in a paper published in Science in 1971), expert commentators quizzed by journalists in response to the advertisements largely agreed that the committee had made the correct judgement. Biologists may care to reflect that unseemly rows over Nobel prizes are if anything commoner among physical scientists. When Anthony Hewish and Martin Ryle of Cambridge were honoured in 1974 as radio astronomy pioneers, Sir Fred Hoyle provoked a huge public row by claiming that Hewish's former research student Jocelyn Bell should have received a share for her role in the discovery of pulsars. This year, as The Independent reported, Italy's National Institute for Physics protested vigorously against the award to two Japanese and a Japanese American for discoveries on " spontaneous broken symmetry " in subatomic physics. Institute president Roberto Petronzio said he was " filled with bitterness " because the man " universally recognized " as responsible for the breakthrough was Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo. An awful lot of bitterness seems to emanate from Stockholm around this time of the year. Severe overfishing is the biggest threat to many fish populations around the British Isles, once one of the world's most productive fisheries. The International Council for the Exploration of …