FEEDBACK has come across a touchy question of etiquette. If Nobel prizewinners are treated like royalty, how should the winners treat royalty? One insight into the dilemma comes from Richard Roberts, who won the prize for medicine in 1993 for the co-discovery of split genes.
Roberts told a meeting of the British Expats in Life Sciences group in Boston recently that at the formal prize-giving ceremony the King of Sweden had congratulated him with a friendly handshake. What Roberts hadn’t realised, however, was that this is the only occasion the King deigns to touch the flesh of mere plebians. So…
