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 The predictions announced on Thursday come from the Intellectual
Property & Science unit of Thomson Reuters (which also owns the
Reuters news service). Since 2002, it has accurately predicted 35
Nobel laureates, including nine who won in the year of the forecast
and 16 who won within two years.
IP&S, which sells data, bases its forecasts on scientists'
citations, or references to their published papers by others.
Citations can reflect how influential a study was, but are not a
perfect benchmark. Breakthroughs in specialized fields could have
few citations while a lesser finding in a popular one could have
many.
But some citations are essentially tips-of-the-hat by one scientist
to another and can indicate standing in a field. Since Nobel
nominations come from past winners and other eminences, reputation
counts.
The IP&S analysts predicted seven possible winners in medicine and
physics and eight in chemistry. The Nobel committees honor a maximum
of three scientists in each field, so predicting more than twice
that number increases the odds of being right.
 For the Nobel Prize in medicine, which will be announced on Oct. 6
in Stockholm, the Thomson Reuters analysis shows deserving
discoveries going back decades.
David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco, is in
contention for discovering the cellular receptor for the hot-pepper
molecule capsaicin in the late 1990s. He worked out how it is
activated by capsaicin as well as heat, triggering pain.
Discoveries by three other contenders overturned the belief that
humans are 99 percent alike at the DNA level. In 2004 one of the
trio, Michael Wigler of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, found that
more than 10 percent of the genome contains DNA that is duplicated
as if by a biological photocopier run amok. Such "copy number
variations" are associated with autism, schizophrenia and other
devastating disorders.
This year might finally be the charm for breakthroughs from the
early days of molecular genetics, specifically discoveries by James
Darnell and Robert Roeder of Rockefeller University, and Robert
Tjian of UC Berkely, of how DNA is transcribed within cells so
proteins can be synthesized.
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The Nobel Prize in physics, to be announced on Oct. 7, may also
recognize achievement from a past decade. One contender whom Thomson
Reuters highlights is Charles Kresge of Saudi Aramco, whose
breakthrough invention of molecular sieves, now used as industrial
catalysts, came in 1992.
In chemistry, Ching Tang of Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology and Steven Van Slyke of Silicon Valley start-up Kateeva
Inc are in contention for inventing organic light-emitting diodes,
which became ubiquitous in smartphones, tablets and high-definition
televisions.
If Thomson Reuters' crystal ball is right, lay people will have
their work cut out for them trying to understand some of the
achievements. One physicist deemed to have a shot described how
"spin frustration causes sinusoidal antiferromagnetic ordering,"
while three in contention for chemistry developed "the reversible
addition-fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization process."
(Reporting by Sharon Begley, editing by Michele Gershberg and
Cynthia Osterman)
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