This week's announcement of the Nobel
Prize for Shinya Yamanaka brought along some interesting
tidbits, including who was “snubbed” as well as recollections
from the recipient.
wrote the “snubbed” piece and quoted Christopher Scott of
Stanford and Paul Knoepfler of UC Davis about the selection issues.
Bardin's piece mentioned Jamie Thomson and Ian Wilmut as scientists
who also could have been considered for the award but were not named.
Ultimately, Bardin wrote that the award committee was looking for a
“singular, paradigm shifting discovery,” which he concluded was
not the case with Thomson or Wilmut.
was another topic in the news coverage, much of it dry as dust.
However, Lisa Krieger of the San Jose Mercury News began her story
with Yamanaka's travails some 20 years ago. At the time, no one was returning his phone
calls as he looked for work, and he was rejected by
50 apparently not-so-farsighted American labs.
decided he was less than successful as an orthopedic surgeon,
according to an account in JapanRealTime. “Slow and clumsy” was
how Yamanaka described himself.
again he reported stumbling. In this case, he found a way to reduce
“bad cholesterol” but with a tiny complication – liver cancer.
That in turn sent him on a journey to learn how cells proliferate and
develop, which led him to the work that won the Nobel Prize.
orthopedic medicine was stimulated by his father along with the treatments
for injuries young Yamanaka received while playing rugby and learning judo. The JapanRealTime account continued,
“'My father probably still thinks in
heaven that I’m a doctor,' he said in the interview(with Asahi
Shimbun last April). 'IPS cells are still at a research phase and
have not treated a single patient. I hope to link it to actual
treatment soon so I will be not embarrassed when I meet my father
someday.'”
report from a high school biology teacher that said the 15-year-old
Gurdon's desire to become a scientist was “quite ridiculous.”
The teacher, who is unnamed, wrote,
“If he can’t learn simple
biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a
specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part
and of those who would have to teach him.”
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/uqpFc/~3/7J31SRIukpg/yamanaka-rejected-slow-and-clumsy.html
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