LIFE, death and the Universe figured strongly in this year’s Nobel prizes. This time, the winners owed their $1 million bounties variously to nematode worms, enormous proteins and neutrino particles.
The prizes in chemistry and medicine could be the first of many to reap the rewards of the massive global programmes now under way to unravel the gene and protein secrets of entire organisms. Future prizes may be awarded for sequencing the human genome, but this year it was the humble nematode’s chance to shine. By painstakingly studying it through a microscope in the 1970s, John Sulston of Britain’s Sanger…
