This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced yesterday, was the source of a fascinating philosophical discussion about how we define chemists and their work, a discussion far more evident in science blogosphere than the main stream media.
The award went to two American medical researchers, Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz, 69, a professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher, and Dr. Brian K. Kobilka, 57, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, for their work illuminating the way that a certain class of receptors in cell membranes – G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) – faciliate chemical communication at the cellular level.
These receptors bind to an array of hormones – such as adrenaline – and other neurotransmitters, helping transfer information from outside the cell to inside where it can be processed. In the case of adrenaline, for instance, the receptors serve as a kind of relay systems for the so-called fight-or-flight response in which release of the stress hormone leads to an accelerating heart rate. But as, Philip Broadworth explains in Chemistry World, they do much more:
"This family of receptors is important for numerous reasons. There are around 800 known human GPCRs, of which about half are the olfactory receptors that allow us to distinguish thousands of different aromas. The other half regulate a vast number of biological processes, each one interacting with multiple different signalling molecules to transmit different messages into the cell, based on where they are in the body and what has bound to them."
Lefkowitz pioneered the new understanding of these receptors starting in the 1970s by tracking a hormone with the use of radioactive tracers and observing its interaction with GCPRs. After he identified them as protein-based receptors, Kobilka, who had been a post-doc Lefkowitz's lab, went on to find the gene that produced one of these proteins. Other researchers built upon those findings to further define the whole class of G-coupled protein receptors.
As Kenneth Chang noted in The New York Times, the work of Lefkowitz and Kobilka has obvious practical implications; drugs targeting the GPCRs are already widely used (from beta blockers to antihistimines) and others are in various stages of research development. And Eva von Schaper at Businessweek got even more specific, naming some of the well-known existing pharmaceuticals such as the antacid Zantac and the drug Abilify, used to treat mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Chris Gorski, at Inside Science News Service, quoted Lefkowitz on the medical applications of his findings: "As physicians, what we need to do in cases of disease is to manipulate the activity of these normal substances, like adrenalin, serotonin, dopamine — the diversity of substances in our body that work through this mechanism that makes them so crucially positioned to be able to respond to drugs of various types." Gorski also made a point of calling the two new Nobel Laureates "physician-chemists."
But hese stories – as did others from traditional news organizations – also generally followed to the very traditional path of Nobel reporting, which entails explaining the merits of the research and telling human interest stories about the scientists (Lefkowitz was wearing earplugs while he slept and had to be woken by his wife to receive the phone call). For instance, von Schaper interviewed the president of the American Chemical Society, Bassam Shakhashiri of the University of Wisconsin, quoting him on the "fantastic" nature of the science.
But there was no sign that she'd read his commentary at The Huffington Post, titled "2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Did the 'Right" Science Get Its Due?" In this essay, he enlarged on his praise for the work and argued that chemistry itself needs to be recognized as a science with broad horizons He also acknowledged the controversy, noting that "some might wonder about the world's most prestigious chemistry prize being awarded for research in biology and medicine."
And that issue repeated itself across a number of leading chemistry blogs, such as in this eloquent post from Chemjobber, "Why I am discomfited by today's Chemistry Nobel" that concludes "We can always rely on the public to be willing to support (and fund!) disease cures and advances in human biology (and they have their own prize for Physiology or Medicine!), but gaining public acceptance or recognition for these other (more fundamentally chemistry?) fields is much more difficult. I think that's why I wince a little bit when it's yet another life scientist that gets to step up to the mike."
The discussion was intense enough that other bloggers came forward to defend the award. At Science Geist, Matt Hartings wrote, "One of the major points of contention has been: “But the winners aren’t even chemists!” My answer to that is, “Well, so what!” The discovery of GPCRs greatly affects the field of chemistry. For an entire portion of our field (those trying to make new pharmaceuticals), this topic DOMINATES their day to day life." At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe, made a similar point and urged his fellow chemists to "cheer the hell up already", an argument then applauded by Matthew Herper at Forbes.
All of which added up, for me, to one of the more interesting looks at the Nobels, how they're chosen, and the way they're seen both inside and outside the scientific community, reinforcing my own feeling that the rise of science blogging has made the profession a great deal richer.
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