The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2002 is being shared between scientists in two important fields: mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The Laureates, John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka (for MS) and Kurt Wüthrich (for NMR), have contributed in different ways to the further development of these methods to embrace biological macromolecules. This has meant a revolutionary breakt...

October 2006 | Volume 4 | Issue 10 | e333 Based on the title—The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize—one might expect Peter Doherty’s new book to be a handbook targeted to the emerging group of anxious parents whose expectations for their youngsters’ achievements have reached the stratospheric level. In truth, this is a delightful history and series of essays by an affable Australian ve...

Numerous metaphors have been employed to describe the achievements of the 2013 Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine, James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman, and Thomas C. Südhof, who were honored for "their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells." Most of these metaphors referred to the mundane issue of business logistics, and there is proba...

In 1974 the Nobel laureate Sir Robert Robinson OM PRS (1886–1975) was gathering information for memoirs he writing. As part of his research, recorded a conversation with former student, fellow Professor Dorothy Hodgkin FRS (1910–1994), during which she outlined key stages her career. She explained principles underlying crystallography and described work on structure biological molecules includi...