The Dark Side of Nobel Prizewinning Research(france24.com)
france24.com
The Dark Side of Nobel Prizewinning Research
http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-prizewinning-research
4 comments
I can't figure out what they're implying about Norman Borlaug's award at the end... that it was a mistake too? Either way, the NYT had a much better critique of why big scientific prizes are bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opinion/the-folly-of-big-s...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opinion/the-folly-of-big-s...
Seeing that the French are one of the biggest opponents of GM technology and this a French article, I assume that "genetic crossbreeding" (what does "genetic" mean here? It's just "old" cross-breeding) is implied to be a bad thing. It rather reflects badly on the author.
If you haven't heard of Borlaug, he's one of my scientific heroes - it's due to his work that Mexico's food production turned completely around, from wheat importing to wheat exporting. He did this by essentially reversing natural selection: each wheat plant in a field competes with the other for light, so while humans plant them close to each other each generation will grow higher and higher. This removes resources normally used for the generation of seeds, so you get less grain. He crossed dwarf-varieties with high-yielding varieties, so you got smaller plants which had more resources left over to make grains, thereby greatly raising the amount of grains you get out of each plant. No modern GM needed for this one.
He's estimated to have saved roughly a billion people form starvation and IMO fully deserved his Nobel Prize.
(As an addendum, DDT isn't as bad as initially thought - if you use it indiscriminately in the outside like they did initially, then it's a huge health concern as it accumulates in the food chain. But if you use it targeted inside homes it's highly effective, and it's still used for that today)
Edit:
>Yet in November 1945, just three months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel chemistry prize honoured the discovery of nuclear fission.
This is an error that makes the article's point here moot - Hahn's Nobel Prize is the Nobel Prize of 1944 (so before the a-bombs were dropped), it was just awarded in 1945.
If you haven't heard of Borlaug, he's one of my scientific heroes - it's due to his work that Mexico's food production turned completely around, from wheat importing to wheat exporting. He did this by essentially reversing natural selection: each wheat plant in a field competes with the other for light, so while humans plant them close to each other each generation will grow higher and higher. This removes resources normally used for the generation of seeds, so you get less grain. He crossed dwarf-varieties with high-yielding varieties, so you got smaller plants which had more resources left over to make grains, thereby greatly raising the amount of grains you get out of each plant. No modern GM needed for this one.
He's estimated to have saved roughly a billion people form starvation and IMO fully deserved his Nobel Prize.
(As an addendum, DDT isn't as bad as initially thought - if you use it indiscriminately in the outside like they did initially, then it's a huge health concern as it accumulates in the food chain. But if you use it targeted inside homes it's highly effective, and it's still used for that today)
Edit:
>Yet in November 1945, just three months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel chemistry prize honoured the discovery of nuclear fission.
This is an error that makes the article's point here moot - Hahn's Nobel Prize is the Nobel Prize of 1944 (so before the a-bombs were dropped), it was just awarded in 1945.
Why should we care how the science was applied?
'"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down That's not my department," - says Wernher von Braun' - Tom Lehrer
'"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down That's not my department," - says Wernher von Braun' - Tom Lehrer
If it can't be applied for anything useful, was it really a scientific breakthrough?
We changed the URL from http://phys.org/news/2015-10-dark-side-nobel-prizewinning.ht... to something more readable that appears more legit. If there's a canonical URL for the article, please let us know.
I think
http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-prizewin...
may be the original.
http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-prizewin...
may be the original.
Ok, we changed to that from http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-dark-side-of-nobel-prizew....
People are very quick to delegate the responsibility to decide whether things are worth our while to somebody, anybody, lest we actually have to do the evaluating ourselves. Has it won an Oscar? What is the most popular SQL database? Which University has the highest ranking? Has his work been published in a respectable journal? All of these questions are a sub-optimal proxy for "is it the best?" or even a more modest "is it any good?"
But with the reverence to the Nobel Prize, it's maybe even something else. It's the human longing for an ultimate authority, for some priest who would tell us what is good, and what is evil. In that case, I'm glad the author feels frustrated.