Comments on: Did Harry Noller deserve the Nobel Prize?

By: truti

truti — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:49:05 +0000

If Noller is the Rosalind Franklin of our time, then Rosalind Franklin is the GN Ramachandran of her time. GNR’s paper on collagen structure was held up for quite some time by Nature while they waited for Watson-Crick to jury rig up some cockamamie explanation The graceless Watson continues to claim he determined the structure of collagen despite being nowhere in the picture

By: Denis

Denis — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:01:26 +0000

In 2004, Murfy and Ramakrishnan reported an experimental confirmation, on the atomic-molecular level, of the existence of the inosine-adenine pair within the ribosome-tRNA-mRNA complex; moreover, the conformation of the pair was exactly the same as predicted by Crick.
From his paper (Murfy and Ramakrishnan 2004): “The modification of adenine to inosine has been found for all the four-codon boxes except tRNAGly—eight tRNAs in higher eukaryotes and seven in yeast, but only tRNA Arg in prokaryotes. In Escherichia coli inosine is present only in tRNA Arg ICG, which is the only tRNA to decode the codons CGU/C/A”
That is, E. coli and many other prokaryotes disprove the wobble hypothesis in direct experiment: they have no inosine in isoleucine tRNA, but isoleucine is encoded by three codons
I’m afraid that Ramacrishnans result was only a mistake or bluff.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:30:56 +0000

The results were posted here and a tribute here.

By: Boldy

Boldy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Interesting, did you plan to continue this article? Thanks Boldy

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:03:02 +0000

Hi Ribo,

Welcome and thanks for the comment.

Haha, the sidebar is only so big, but note taken

By: Ribo

Ribo — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:58:19 +0000

As someone else said “If Noller alone had received the prize, it would not have been as controversial as leaving him out”. Where is that option in the poll?

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:51:09 +0000

Good point, I tried to include technical information in the post by linking to Hubmed (via published extensively), which is a list of 33 publications, all of which are related to the ribosome.

I will try to do better.

By: Abhishek Tiwari

Abhishek Tiwari — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:43:27 +0000

Ya sure I will wait for your review, see any cross section of Nobel Prize should be on technical grounds, just because some one feel that Harry Noller was most suitable does not make sense. What you should be really doing is to dig more as crystallographer and come up with a technical comparison of their contributions. I read a lot of articles about this but no one gave me a sound reason for their statement, just gossip.

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:38:18 +0000

@Abhishek: Oh yes, I try to read as many blogs as possible and engage. I am planning on doing a results post about the poll (as usual) and will discuss the results. I will make an extra effort to put in my 2 cents then – can you wait? will you still be around?

—
Hi David, thanks for taking the time to comment.

I hoped some Harry fans would drop by – thanks for the rant/sharing.

By: David

David — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:28:18 +0000

Nevermind the number 3, collaboration, the meaning of science prizes, etc. If a small group of scientists are to be recognized for work on the structure and function of the ribosome today, Harry must be included. You put Harry in first, and then divvy up who else gets it. He really got screwed on this one. Now the burden lies on Tom, Venki, and Ada to make clear the importance of Harry’s contribution in their acceptance speeches in December.