Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Nobel in medicine


This year, 1000 Women have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Uma informs us that 92 of them are from India.

Here is an Outlook story from July 2003 that asked leading lights of Indian science about which Indians (broadly interpreted to include researchers of Indian origin) are in the reckoning for a Nobel. The story is old, but still interesting. Do read it (free registration is required).

The Outlook story is only about the science Nobels; not surprisingly, it misses Jagdish Bhagwati for the economics Prize.

The Nobel season has begun. This year's Prize for medicine is shared by "Dr. Barry J. Marshall, 54, a gastroenterologist from the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, and Dr. J. Robin Warren, 68, a retired pathologist from the Royal Perth Hospital.", according to this NYTimes report.

The Times story says:

Two Australian scientists who upset medical dogma by discovering a bacterium that causes stomach inflammation, ulcers and cancer won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine yesterday.
[...]
The findings by the Australians in the early 1980's went so against medical thinking, which held that psychological stress caused stomach and duodenal ulcers, that it took many more years for an entrenched medical profession to accept it.

In its citation, the Nobel committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said that Dr. Marshall and Dr. Warren "made an irrefutable case that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori" causes ulcers and other diseases.

Congratulations! Since the prize-winners are from Australia, I guess the celebrations would already have begun there.

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