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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 identified 37
scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates, although not
necessarily in the year in which they were named.
IP&S, which sells data, bases its forecasts on the number of times a
scientist's work is cited by others in published papers.
Citations can reflect a study's influence, but also serve as a way
of measuring a scientist's standing. And since Nobel nominations
come from past winners and leading scientists, reputation counts.
Scientists selected as "Citation Laureates" rank in the top 1
percent of citations in their research areas.
"That is a signpost that the research wielded a lot of impact," said
Christopher King, an analyst with IP&S who helped select the
winners.
Among the predicted winners for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry are
Emmanuelle Charpentier of Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in
Germany and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California,
Berkeley. They were picked for their development of the CRISPR-Cas9
method for genome editing.
The technique has taken biology by storm, igniting fierce patent
battles between start-up companies and universities, and touching
off ethical debates over its potential for editing human embryos.
Missing from the list is Feng Zhang, a researcher at the MIT-Harvard
Broad Institute, who owns a broad U.S. patent on the technology,
which is the subject of a legal battle. King said he was aware of
Zhang's claims on the technology, but noted that his scientific
citations did not rise to the level of a nomination.
Other contenders for the chemistry prize, which will be awarded on
Oct. 7 in Stockholm, include John Goodenough of the University of
Texas Austin, and Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University in
New York for research leading to the development of the lithium-ion
battery.
Also in contention is Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University for
her contributions to "bioorthogonal chemistry," which refers to
chemical reactions in live cells and organisms. Bertozzi's lab is
using the process to develop smart probes for medical imaging.
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For the Nobel in medicine, to be announced Oct. 5, Thomson Reuters
picked Kazutoshi Mori of Kyoto University and Peter Walter of the
University of California, San Francisco. They showed that a
mechanism known as the unfolded protein response acts as a "quality
control system" inside cells, deciding whether damaged cells live or
die.
Other contenders include Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in
St. Louis for showing a relationship between diet and metabolism and
microbes that live in the human gut.
The group also picked a trio of researchers - Alexander Rudensky of
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi of
Osaka University, and Ethan Shevach of the National Institutes of
Health - for discoveries relating to immune cells known as
regulatory T cells and the function of Foxp3, a master regulator of
these cells.
For the prizes in physics and economics, to be announced Oct. 6 and
12 respectively, Thomson Reuters predicts winners from scientists
who helped pave the way for making X-ray lasers and work that helped
explain the impact of policy decisions on labor markets and consumer
demand.
Science enthusiasts can weigh in with their own predictions by
taking part in Thomson Reuters' "People's Choice" prizes at
StateOfInnovation.com.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Richard Chang)
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