2007 Chemistry Prize: last minute revision

Sorry, but the Nobels have somehow been a minor interest of mine for a long time. I like to know about Nobel stats the way baseball fans like to know about their sports's stats. While I have already listed my thoughts, I also have some personal favourites. These are folks who either work in my field(s) or whose work I have known about for a long time and admired. I also liked the colour of their sports jackets.

Martin Karplus: The doyen of theoretical and computational chemistry, especially as applied to biological problems. More than anyone else he influenced the field

Stuart Schreiber: Great pioneer of chemical genetics. Great life story and again the dominant influence on his field.

J. Fraser Stoddart: Need toys get some from this guy. Sometimes though, his work sounds like too much fun to get a Nobel Prize ...

Ronald Breslow: I have always loved to read about his work. Chances do look a little slim, but a general prize for biomimetic chemistry missing him would be sacrilege. It might miss others though. I am thinking that Ron Breslow being awarded might make both the "pure" and "impure" chemists happy.

Harry Gray: Gentle, unassuming giant of a man. His work on electron transport in proteins is spectacular and I was very impressed when I read about it. Might be a little premature. A general bioinorganic prize might include him and Stephen Lippard. Again, many other contenders, and field may be too general.

Personal favourite fields for Nobel contention: chemical biology, crystallography, medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, nanotechnology

And Al Gore for detecting anthropomorphic changes in the ozone layer.

In general, I will be happy if anyone who might be called a "chemist" without too much head-scratching gets it. I also realise that the probability of knowing about a correct potential winner would correlate with the number of bloggers in diverse chemical fields who make predictions. At this stage, we have a bunch of bloggers from almost every field of chemistry here who know the biggies in their field who they then can write about for the others' benefit. Thus, one might think that between all our blogs, we have potential "winner space" covered. Nonetheless, last year can only be a sobering lesson, when not a single blogger could predict Roger Kornberg winning. However, we can argue that perhaps it was because there weren't many molecular biologists blogging who could have made that prediction. Since the possibility of a "pure" chemist winning this year seems higher, I am keeping my fingers crossed that at least one of the blogs made the correct prediction.

Now, fight! Till tomorrow.

P.S. Damn...there should be some remuneration for correct predictions.

P.S.2 Last second addition: Albert Overhauser