I like how they always present the work in a readable way for laymen. Look forward to the various awards each year just because it's interesting to dive into all the different stuff. The talks are also often worth a watch.
I appreciate that some Nobel selections, like this one, are for core biological discoveries rather than hot topics.
How our bodies perceive / interface with the world is fundamental to our human experience: Pain, temperature, positioning. And that these perceptions can be significantly modulated by how our bodies process them (eg pain).
Not only is their actual body of work impressive, as it cuts across so many methodologies to get a glimpse at “how things work,” their discoveries opened up fields for others.
Hard disagree. These are for lack of better word standard discoveries that the high intensity labs discover with pretty much standard methodologies and no Innovations worthy of a Nobel. Of course we have receptors for heat and touch, and of course someone eventually found them. What’s original in that process? This is not RNAi, or CRISPR, or GFP. One of the more underwhelming Nobels in recent times. Somehow worse than superresolution.
If you throw a vase in the air it will fall down and shatter: like, duh it’s gravity. But how many years to figure the equations? To tie the how/why to the obvious?
Don’t trivialize their work because your work didn’t receive a Nobel. K thanks.
These discoveries could be game changers for prosthetics, brain computer interfaces, augmented reality, etc.
I’m trivializing their research based on their inherent triviality. Any new gene could be game changers for a plethora of ailments. The correct gravity comparison would be trying to celebrate someone finding the value of g in Oxford when the original measurement was in London.
I didn’t say I am sour I didn’t get one. When did a film critic need an Oscar before he could criticize moviemakers?
I've no background in the field but tend to agree. "Humans have thousands of different kinds of sensor mechanisms, and here are two of them" - seems like an award that could be given repeatedly, no?
The criteria for winning the prize depend more on the outcome of the research (importance) than its process (originality):
"The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine …” (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel)".
Again, why are these genes more important than say, GM-CSF? That gene has 10 times more therapeutic importance than these genes. I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes. That’s the reason none of the early scientists were scrambling to discover them.
>I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes.
The arrogance of this statement is astrounding. Perhaps you didn't mean it to come off that way?
First of all, these are important genes - extremely important genes, because they are a large part of the basis of that whole "response to stimulus" thing that people are pretty fond of associating with life.
That said, regardless of their actual importance, it's pretty remarkable for anyone to say any gene is important or not important considering how little we actually know about biological processes. I see all the time people doing "omics" work and wanting to jump to conclusion because of data, but data-only makes a relatively blind conclusion. There's still far far more unknown than known, and these genes are fundamental genes for starting to actually build a functional model of human biology. They are boilerplate genes.
Wait what exactly are you saying. In one paragraph you’re saying that these genes are unquestionably important. Then next paragraph you’re saying no gene can be told as important. Pick a side?
You seem to be a biologist, is it truly heresy that there are 500 other genes that are more important than the temperature receptors? I’m talking practical therapeutic use.
Something as fundamental as heat and pressure are not important? I don't have a biology background, but learning that we just discovered these genes gave me the impression that we're still living in the stone age. Kudos to the award recipients for discovering the genes responsible.
It's probably that much harder to find these genes responsible for such basic sensory abilities that so much work must have gone into them if not for their lack therapeutic importance as you suggest, but also for the prestige scientists knew they would receive if they did discover them first.
You are absolutely right that it’s dumb that it took so long for us to have discovered these receptors so late. Consider for a second though that this might be a symptom of a fundamental myopia in the way biological science itself has progressed? That perhaps we have been congratulating people for the wrong thing - discovering expected genes instead of finding new ways to do everything faster or finding things that are completely unexpected. As much as heat and pressure sound like fundamental senses (they are), they aren’t very high on the priority list of basically anyone trying to do biology with applications in mind. Heat receptors don’t cure cancer or cystic fibrosis. Or Covid.
TRP channels were first cloned over 20 years ago, and are indeed medically relevant for nociception and pain. The piezos are equally relevant; knockouts are embryonically lethal, and the function of mechanosenstation in somatosenation and in general continue to be elucidated. For instance, it was only a few years that they were identified as being required for the baroreceptor reflex.
I think it is very likely that it will be rewarded, just not this year. Some time need to pass, and even though the discovery should be rewarded, it also needs to be figured out who to reward it to. Probably there are more than 3 contenders.
I would bet money that there is one awarded in the next 10-15 years.
Nobel prizes are notorious for not being reactionary, and waiting for the full effects of the work to be realized - i.e. GFP tagging awarded the nobel prize 16 years after it was first used.
mRNA vaccination technology is just getting started, the impact of which will likely be on the level of penicillin.
It might take even longer, though the all encompassing impact of the pandemic might bring it to the forefront. Although there are outliers, at this point the average time from discovery to Nobel recognition is over 20 years for the most recent prizes: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/09/the-nobe...
That's a chemistry prize and most likely will happen in the next 2-3 days. Typically technologies are rewarded in chemistry whereas basic science (physiology) is rewarded in medicine.
I agree, but I guess the challenge here is who are the 3 scientists to credit? Katalin Karikó is certainly one of them, but who are the other two? Weissman? Ugur Sahin? Özlem Türeci? Ingmar Hoerr? Noubar Afeyan? And then there is the weirdo guy that calls himself "mrna vaccine inventor"?
I guess the committee needs another 1-2 years time to decide on that, with the benefit of hindsight.
If you look at the past awards, the Nobel committee prefers awarding those who published the earliest, fundamental results. Even if it was published in some obscure non-English language journal (see the artemisinin prize, for example).
They've given it to organizations before (Doctors Without Borders won in 1999). Give it to Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford University then. Or "front line COVID-workers" or something. Exactly who gets it is not the main point, the main point is rewarding this incredible achievement in medicine (both the science of it, but also the work in testing, manufacturing and delivering it to patients).
MSF won the peace prize, not a science prize. Science prizes have not gone to organizations; if there were ever an opportunity to break that tradition it was with the discovery of the Higgs (the 2013 prize) and they didn't.
I've really been holding out hope for K. Karikó. She put up with such monumental struggles. Obviously the MRNA Covid vaccine is a huge "prize" and vindication for her, but I'd love to see even more. She deserves it.
It's not a popularity content. Nobel prizes are typically not given until several years after the work is complete and enough time has passed to fully appreciate the significance of it.
If you look back it’s usually a decade or more before a discovery gets a Nobel prize. Which makes sense, since it’s relevance isn’t usually immediately apparent.
Considering we’re about half way through an epidemic with new variants on the horizon I’d argue it’s a little early to start patting ourselves on the back?
Lobotomy is still used and it is still “scientific”…
We luckily have better treatments available for almost every scenario, but it’s definitely still a tool in the toolbox. Same with electroshock therapy. We can be thankful for advancements without being dismissive of some of the less ideal steps along the way.
There is a great quote from Norbert Wiener about the procedure:
"[P]refrontal lobotomy ... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."
I've studied medicine but i'm not aware that it is still taught as a "tool in the toolbox" in the modern medical community.
You can write lists like that for pretty much half the genes in the genome. If you ask a pharma company to rank order genes they would like to get exclusively as targets these would be ranked in 4 digits if not 3. There’s a reason no lab bothered to discover it for so long.
Sydney Brenner said in the 60s that they already discovered all there is to molecular biology and leave the details to the “Americans” (1). These are the details. This work would have been pedestrian back in the 60s, it’s downright boring at this point. When people ask why science sucks today this is a great example. Not that this research was performed, of course someone had to at some point. But that people have been led to believe this is worth of celebration at this level.
Sydney might be proud and vain but his statement of relevance here was not due to that. Scientists are supposed to constantly try and indemnify what’s hard and important and pursue those fields. He said that statement because back then he believed the important fields to explore were developmental biology and neuroscience. More recently he wrote an editorial suggesting how a field like connectomics would be the equivalent new, exciting, important field would be.
The celebration of mediocrity with Nobels for no real reason except probably politics (I sat near to the Nobel cabals in lectures these candidate prize winners will come give talks at) isn’t in the interest of science or progress is all.
On the one side, you are correct and it's only last year / this year that mRNA vaccines have seen widespread adoption.
On the other, mRNA research goes back to the 80's, and mRNA vaccine research goes back twenty years; these facts are often overlooked by the "it was developed too fast" crowds.
That said,
> It's not a popularity content.
And yet, they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize the year he was elected, without any merit or achievements to back it up. That decision was politically motivated. Same with giving it to Al Gore for his climate activism. They even tried to nominate Hitler in 1939, albeit in jest.
The Nobel Peace prize has always had political motivations that have reduced it's credibility. Last year it was awarded to the "World Food Programme" and in 2001 it was awarded to the “United Nations”. It’s best view the peace prize separately.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been nothing but a meme for a while. The science prizes are still respected, and if they want them to stay that way then they should continue to award them based on science and not politics.
The Nobel peace prize is handed out by a different committee compared to the other prizes, so how its handled should generally not be seen as an indicator for the other Nobel prizes.
I don't know and I don't care about that faux prize.
The Peace prize is handled by a special Norwegian committee in accordance with Nobel's wishes, so it has its own everything (including its own ceremony), while the other prizes are all under the same umbrella in some form (although I believe the scientific subcommittees doing the acual awarding are independent).
>On the other, mRNA research goes back to the 80's, and mRNA vaccine research goes back twenty years; these facts are often overlooked by the "it was developed too fast" crowds.
I am on that camp, that it was developed too fast and I do not think people should be mistreated because they think that. After all, there has been some adverse effects for some of the people who took it (like the auto-immune disease for the Janssen vaccine or thrombosis that caused some deaths in women who were taking the pill at the same time). I am not against vaccines in general, I am just worried that, as there is clearly an economic interest in rushing things up, that some bugs may still be on these vaccines that will need to be fixed. We have no idea of the long-term effects these vaccines have, unless someone has invented a time-machine and gone to the future. When concrete, well-made studies have been made that these vaccines are safe long-term and effective, I do not see why should someone not take it. Until then, I will wait at the comfort of my home.
After all, even if I took the vaccine, I would also continue to spread the virus just as someone who did not take it.
Another point is: How deadly is this vaccine to someone who is healthy? Is that value so big that we should rush to take not fully tested vaccines? I would get that criticism if there was a rate of 20, 30% of guaranteed death to someone who contracted the virus. At these current values? I think I will take my chances.
What I fail to understand is how you seem to think that you can can assess the risks associated with contracting the virus better than the risks associated with getting the vaccine.
At this point, so many more people have received the vaccine than have contracted the virus that I think it's fairly safe to say that we know much more about how people react to the vaccine than the virus (which also keeps mutating unlike the vaccine).
It's true that we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine but
1) my understanding is that medically speaking, a few weeks after the shot every trace of the actual vaccine is gone from the body and all that remains is that your immune system has learned how to fight the virus and
2) we certainly do not know the long-term effects of the virus either
So unless you are in a position where you can completely seal yourself off and be sure you will not get the virus, it's a choice between getting vaccinated and getting the virus. Considering what I wrote above, to me that is an obvious choice.
> What I fail to understand is how you seem to think that you can can assess the risks associated with contracting the virus better than the risks associated with getting the vaccine.
As I said, I cannot. Actually, nobody can. What I do know is:
- A vast majority of who gets the virus does not die or get any effects.
- A lot of people who die of Covid-19 has a comorbidity factor of 4 (Which means suffers from 4 comorbidities).
- I am 40 years old and no other comorbidities than a very light asthma. I eat well and try to do some exercise (but not as much as I would like, for sure).
- There are no studies of long-term effects of getting the vaccines or getting the virus.
- Anyone who took the vaccine can be infected and spread the virus just as someone who is not vaccinated.
- Things that are made under political/financial pressure rarely get right the first time.
So, with this data, for me it is logical for people to wait if they can. If they have comorbidities or are old, then it is another story.
>A vast majority of who gets the virus does not die or get any effects.
To the OP's point, the same can be said about the vaccine. Their point being, because of the transmissibility of the virus, it's fairly safe to assume that most people leading normal lives will be exposed to the virus at some point so the choice is whether or not to be exposed while vaccinated or not. There seems to be less uncertainty around the vaccine than the virus, so the risks are better known.
Both of these scenarios are possible (among others, obviously):
- I take the vaccine and either die or have a side-effect for life because of some unknown related to my body.
- I contract the virus and have no symptoms at all.
Nobody knows which one will happen to each individual. That woman that took the vaccine and died one day later? We will never know if she was better off without taking the vaccine and having the virus instead. Our body is too complex to predict that right now.
I find it particularly amusing that people that question the vaccines safety are being treated as idiots that know nothing about science. Like, never the scientists were wrong before or the big pharma/government never had their own interests in their mind. I guess it is easier to attack us than to have a rational conversation.
393 million doses of the vaccine have been administered in the US
I think the safety of the vaccine has been established. You are welcome to take whatever risks you want. Just because you have been lucky so far, doesn't make it the correct approach. If you really believed it was no big deal, you'd run out and get COVID. Instead, you hope your luck will hold. Thing about luck is that it always runs out.
How many of those 700k deaths are from people with 3 or 4 comorbities?
If you remove that from the equation, it would give a lot lower number I am sure. Now compare this with the flu. Would these people with comorbities die if they catch the flu? Do you absolutely know they wouldn't?
If you have comorbidities, by all means, take the shot. If you do not have comorbidities and want to take the shot as well, fine it is your body, you can do whatever you want with it that does not put me in danger. I, for instance, want to take the shot only when I know for sure it won't affect me. After all, the city where I live was one of the firsts that got Covid cases and it got so bad that the city was in complete lockdown and at the time there was no guidance for masks usage. So, I went to supermarkets, pharmacies, whatever at that time with no mask and if I had to bet, I would bet that I already got covid and was asymptomatic.
COVID has been fatal to people without comorbidities. The fact that you have a respiratory issues and want to take a chance with a respiratory disease shows you are just counting on your luck. I wish you well
I have no personal umbrage if somebody weighs the risk and decides against the shot. What's confusing is when people only acknowledge one side of the risk equation and couch it as some sort of risk-based decision.
>I, for instance, want to take the shot only when I know for sure it won't affect me.
That's fine. What's incongruent is when it's followed up with the sentiment below.
>I went to supermarkets, pharmacies, whatever at that time with no mask
I don't quite understand the logic. You don't want the shot because the risk uncertainty is too great. Yet you have no problem (likely, in your words) exposing yourself to the disease at a frame when there was little data about it and the uncertainty was also great. Now that there's more data, the uncertainty is even more in favor of the vaccine being safer than the disease.
Again, I don't really care if people don't want to get the vaccine on a personally level. But, absent of some grand conspiracy, don't try to rationalize that decision as some pragmatic risk-based analysis. If you do think its riskier due to some large conspiracy that, too, will need some data to back it up. Make peace with the fact its an emotionally based decision and not a data-driven one and move on.
At the time, there was no guidelines to use the mask. Actually, people still thought that masks would be worse than not using at the time. This was at the beginning of the pandemic.
This has to be an emotional decision as well, I am not a doctor, I have to follow my gut before there is data to analyze.
>I have to follow my gut before there is data to analyze.
The real question then is: how well have you adjusted your posterior risk assessments now that there is more data to analyze?
Based on your previous posts, it sounds like you prior risk assessments (under uncertainty) were so strong as to prevent much modification or you may not be properly weighting the new data.
it's reasonable to discount for comorbidities with covid deaths.
how many vaccine deaths occurred among people with 3/4 comorbidities?
assuming vaccine deaths are lower, and the long-term risks for the virus and vaccine are both unknown, why would a risk-based analysis suggest the virus is safer than the vaccine?
I am not suggesting the virus is safer, like I said nobody knows. What I do know, is that I can work from home for now and I can use a mask when going out and have proper hygiene to avoid catching the virus. Also, if people vaccinated do not spread the virus as some people here suggest, then I should be okay, as most of the people here is vaccinated. I do not believe that, I am just pointing out a flaw in this logic that I must take the vaccine.
Another thing people are forgetting is that you will have to take additional vaccine shots after a few months as its protection will wane, like Israel is doing. Will be interesting to see people getting multiple doses of something they do not know its long-term effects.
> how many vaccine deaths occurred among people with 3/4 comorbidities?
I don't think anybody is disagreeing here to the level insinuated. The OP's point wasn't that the vaccine has no risk. It's that both choices have risks, but since there's more data regarding the vaccine, there is less uncertainty about the risks.
With most of the population (possible exception being teenage males, the last I looked, regarding myocarditis), the same outcomes are prevalent regarding the virus as the vaccine, but at lower probabilities with vaccine. Since risk = severity x probability, that generally makes the risk of the vaccine lower.
Questioning a vaccine is prudent and doesn't make someone an idiot. But sometimes there does seem to be a conflation of ideas regarding risk, data, and uncertainty.
Janssen vaccine is vector based, not mRNA like Pfizer Comirnaty or Moderna.
Although vaccinated people can be infected and even spread the virus, the disease is usually mild, amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller. And that is no speciality of covid immunizations, other vaccines like measles or influenza also don't prevent infection, but aim to prevent the disease.
The "not fully tested" meme is nonsense, many hundred million people have been vaccinated in the meantime, the safety profile is known.
Regarding long time effects beside immunity of vaccines, this interview https://lexfridman.com/vincent-racaniello/ goes into some detail. TLDL: there is nothing to expect/fear.
> Although vaccinated people can be infected and even spread the virus, the disease is usually mild, amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller.
I confess I haven't watched that video yet, but I believe there are not any studies that claim that "amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller". But I will watch it later and see if something new came up. I claim this because not long ago, our prime minister was infected after being fully vaccinated and had to be at home for 10 days before coming back to work.
Like I said, I am healthy and can work from home, so I have the luxury of waiting a little while to make my decision. After all, I am only affecting myself with this decision. A lot of people die from smoking/drinking alcohol as well, should we prevent them from getting it?
Part of the Israeli study showed that the viral count/load of breakthrough infections was not significantly lowered compared to non-breakthrough infections.
I know of one other study (can't find it at the moment though) that specifically looked not for CT value but if they are able to infect cells. The outcome was something like vaccinated people do replicate virus, but the spikes of those viruses are (mostly) deactivated by antibodies and therefore not as infectious as virus obtained from unvaccinated people. In rt-PCR tests you can't really distinguish infectious from deactivated virus.
The correct null hypothesis is that in the counterfactual world where those people had gotten the virus rather than the vaccine, they would have ended up dead anyway.
The news say that it was unrelated to the vaccine and it was a heart attack. However, I do not believe in coincidences and am very skeptical that the vaccine has not had some effect on this. Note that she died 1 day after getting the vaccine.
Such "anecdotal evidence" doesn't say much per se.
In austria, a women died of a heart attack while waiting in line to be injected. Just imagine what would have happend if the heart attack would have happened 30 minutes later, it would have been very hard to convince people the heart attack was not related to the vaccination.
Sure it does not, but it does not say that it was not from the vaccine as well.
I am also very distrustful of our government influence in investigations after covid vaccines. The government wants the vaccine to work so that it can go back to normality and not have to worry about the impending financial crisis that would come faster if there was no vaccine.
How do I know that other people that died after getting the vaccine were not from a side effect of it? How can I be sure that these numbers are 100% correct? How can I be sure that all those covid deaths are really from covid and not something else unrelated to it? I am not saying that the vaccines are responsible for 20, 30% of the deaths or something like that, but there is the incentive from the government to not provide the real picture of these numbers (if they are not ridiculous numbers of course).
As in tech, be very distrustful of everything version 1.0. It always has some bugs to iron out ;)
6 billions vaccine doses have been injected, about 1% of the world population dies every year, doing simple math, it means about 160000 people should die less than one day after getting the vaccine from unrelated causes. Heart attacks are a common cause of death, if not the most common, at around 1/4. It means 40000 of these deaths should be heart attacks.
That was only to make a point that it was a vaccine that was developed very fast and had some (nasty) side-effects and that we should be careful not to rush things out. But rest assured that the second example I gave about the woman who died, died after taking the Pfizer vaccine.
That's what I was hoping to see, an award to Karikó and Weissman for their mRNA research. I'm sure they'll get the Nobel within the next few years, but it would have been appropriate to award it now. The Nobel Committee doesn't rush the prizes, and they don't generally go to new research, but mRNA would be a very justified exception. We're currently in the worst pandemic in a century, and over the last ten months we've seen how the mRNA vaccines provide amazingly high protection against hospitalization and death.
The parent is sarcastically suggesting that there is a conspiracy to suppress ivermectin for use in treating covid. Ivermectin won the 2015 Nobel for its use in treating roundworm parasites. (Just to be maximally clear, covid is a virus, not a parasite.)
Plenty of medicines are used for multiple things. Just because something is labeled X, doesn't preclude it from also being effective at Y.
I'm not claiming that ivermectin is effective or not, but there is an incentive in preventing any FDA approved treatments from being used against COVID:
emergency authorizations (including the current "full", "non-emergency" authorization that is contengent on the completion of ~12 additional detailed studies over the next 3 years) are only allowed by law if no FDA approved medicine is available as an alternative treatment.
The fact that other, still experimental medications and vaccinations are allowed is proof that the FDA doesn't consider the current "non-emergency" vaccine authorization to be a "fully" authorized one.
The full authorization of any new or existing medication would preclude all other experimental treatments from being used under emergency authorization.
I can only assume they are waiting until next year to be sure how the vaccine picture shakes out. MRNA vaccines are clearly safe and effective, and have saved countless lives, but with the dopey politics in Sweden about Covid, I am not really that surprised.
- Sweden's handling of Covid has not been particularly influenced by politics, it's been run by the government-appointed experts (that were appointed before Covid broke out), so the "dopey politics" referred to have never really been politically motivated.
I don't think there's any reason for connecting Sweden's Covid response with who got the Nobel prize in Medicine this year.
Before it gets hijacked by zealots on both side in saving or depopulating the planet.
It was a quite conservative pick given the complexities and interwovenness of discoveries in a given field: Citation Index and some fundamental property (TRPV --> Temperature/Heat/Pain & PIEZO--> Touch/Proprioception), it was relatively easy to pinpoint those two (no pun intended).
The mRNA technology would not be so clear cut in terms of persons involved since it had to go through many hurdles. There are two illustrative roadmaps [1][2] (And yes, Malone et al. was a early contributor as well (1989)[3])
Are there useful possibilities opened up by increased understanding of how the touch receptors work? I can imagine that our ability to manipulate those more effectively could have a lot of useful applications.
Seems to me like maybe a more worthy recipient of this prize might be the vaccines that are currently saving hundreds of million of people from dying in the worst pandemic in a century? You know, the miracle vaccines that were developed many times faster than any other vaccine in history? The ones that (despite being perfectly safe, effective, and arguably the greatest achievement in medicine since antibiotics) are subject to an epidemic of skepticism, where a Nobel Prize could really help?
In general the Nobel committee really dislikes awarding scientific prizes to applied research. People have been pointing out for years that they ignore this at their own detriment [0].
The Peace Prize has it’s fair share of whoppers (Henry Kissinger!), but the science ones are usually not quite that clueless. This oversight though, this one is pretty baffling to me.
The peace prize is also very different from the science prizes.
The peace prize is handed out by politicians (members of the Norwegian parliament), whereas the science prizes are handed out by scientists.
The members of the peace committee are _selected_ by Stortinget but no member of the committee currently serves as a member of parliament (although some are former members/politicians).
Isn't that exactly why they should not give a prize for mRNA vaccines. The Norwegian Nobel Committee (the people who hand out the peace prize) has a history of handing out the prize too early (Obama, Arafat, etc) while the Swedish Research Council are much more cautious when handing out prizes.
I am sure people said the same for lobotomy back when Moniz won the prize. I am personally all for the mRNA vaccines and am vaccinated with Pfizer myself but I understand why they are cautious when handing out prizes. What harm is there in waiting a few years?
