Dhondy Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 Do you have your favourite Nobel laureates? I'd love to read somebody's account of Amartya Sen, for example. Here's mine. Barbara McClintock. I have always been a huge admirer of this lady because her work was so ahead of her times. In the early 1940s, working on heritability in maize on Long Island Sound (between Connecticut & Long Island), she found that colours of maize kernels changed rapidly, with variegation is single grains of maize, indicating rapid transitions in genetic material. This mottling effect defied Mendel's basic principles of genetics because individual grains were multicoloured rather than a single colour. From this simple discovery, McClintock thought of the concept of transposons, which are genes that move from one location to the other on the chromosome, and either inhibit or stimulate an active gene. In the case of maize, the position of transposons might inhibit or block pigment production in some cells. For example, if the transposon moved to a position adjacent to a pigment-producing gene, the cells were unable to produce the purple pigment. This resulted in white streaks or mottling rather than a solid purple grain. Now consider that this discovery was made before the genetic code & the structure of the DNA double helix was known, and you begin to realize the enormity of her genius. The importance of her discovery was not realized till the advent of the concept of onco-genes (cancer causing genes) & genetic engineering in the late 70s and early 80s. Oncogenes may be activated by the random reshuffling of transposons to a position adjacent to the oncogene. Similarly, transposons may be useful in genetic engineering with eukaryotic cells, by positioning transposons to activate certain genes. The most common example of this is found in genetically modified crops. So it was that in 1983, fully 40 years after Barbara McClintock first described "jumping genes", she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology & Medicine in recognition of her genius. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Predator_05 Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 Henry Kissinger. I'd love to write out my reasons why, but i'm afraid that the entire thread will be hijacked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gator Posted June 5, 2007 Share Posted June 5, 2007 as long as u dont copy/paste from google search results, it wont be... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Holysmoke Posted June 6, 2007 Share Posted June 6, 2007 John Bardeen.. Only person to have won the physics award twice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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