Today we're taking a bit of a break from boring old biochemical molecules and fruit flies to look at some specific individuals of the species Homo sapiens. Your task for today is to identify these men. I need all of their names and the name that collectively identifies them.The answer is indirectly related to this week's Nobel Laureate. See if you can make the connection.
The first one to correctly identify the individuals and name the Nobel Laureate(s), wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are only three ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Bill Chaney of the University of Nebraska, Dima Klenchin of the University of Wisconsin and Dale Hoyt from Athens, Georgia. Dale has agreed to donate the free lunch to a deserving undergraduate so the first undergraduate to win and collect a free lunch can also invite a friend.
THEME:
Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the "molecule" and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureate(s) so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.
Correct responses will be posted tomorrow. I reserve the right to select multiple winners if several people get it right.
The band is Aerosmith and this should remind you of the book "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. Arrowsmith is a book about scientists.
Three people knew who the band was—one of them was Ms. Sandwalk! Only one person saw the connection between Aerosmith and a Nobel Laureate but that person (Dima) is ineligible. I decided to award the free lunch to Ms. Sandwalk, making her ineligible for any more lunches for one month!!!
I read Arrowsmith this year for the first time, and damn if I couldn't tell someone what I was reading without them asking about the damn band.
ReplyDeleteThere's a passage in the middle of the book that really stuck out:
“To be a scientist–it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victims all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious–he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!
“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess scientists–like these pscyho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless–so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors–and see once what a fine mess they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling he loves everybody!
“But once again always remember that not all men who work as scien are scientists. So few! The rest–secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing–no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So. . . . I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”
I decided to award the free lunch to Ms. Sandwalk
ReplyDeleteNepotism at its best :-)))
>>Nepotism at its best :-)))
ReplyDeleteNo, more a response to the recent elections:
"Preserving Domestic Tranquility"
Bill Chaney
Not a joke-- When I saw the pic of Aerosmith, I thought you were going to talk about hepatits (1976 Nobel).
ReplyDeleteIsn't there a clause in most contests that family members are automatically ineligible?? Personally, I think you should take some starving student out for lunch. I figured the Nobel had to be some biochemist who discovered a cure for wrinkles!!!
ReplyDelete