Before listing the articles, I have a confession to make. These are articles that were published in the latter half of the year, when I began to research the blog in earnest. So, if you think there are other articles worth highlighting please do list and link to them in the comments.

In no particular order, here are my favourite Nobel-related reads of 2011, hope you enjoy them.

1) A fight for life that united a field
Lauren Gravitz, Nature
Ralph Steinman’s untimely death from cancer three days before being announced as recipient of the 2011 Medicine Prize provided a solemn note to this year’s proceedings. But, as Gravitz revealed, there was a further element of poignancy to the story, as Steinman had tried to beat his cancer with vaccines based on the very immune cells he had discovered. It’s a story that was years in the making, according to Gravitz. She was previously a science writer at Rockefeller University, where Steinman worked, and had spoken often with him about sharing this story. It’s great when stories like this eventually see the light of day, though sad that it happened through such unfortunate circumstances.

2) The king of human error
Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
One of books of the year will undoubtedly be Thinking, Fast and Slow, by the cofounder of behavioural economics and 2002 Economics Laureate Daniel Kahneman. Lewis, one of the best longform writers in the game, portrays his subject in his usual lucid prose, and finds Kahneman convinced his book is a vanity project doomed to end in miserable failure. Kahneman’s research career has been an unusual one: he seeks out people who attacked or criticized his ideas and persuades them to collaborate with him. “He not only tortured himself,” Lewis observes, “but invited his enemies to help him to do it.”

3) Mandela house spied on by cameras as media prepares for his death
David Smith, The Guardian
Once upon a time, newspapers and broadcast stations created obituaries of notable people in advance, ready to send to press or broadcast live the moment the eventual news broke. Our 24/7 culture demands more information, of course, and Smith reveals some of the covert preparations in place to report on the future death of Nelson Mandela. Known in closed quarters as the “M-plans”, the media’s strategies include pointing hidden cameras at his home, building studios, buying prime locations, and block-booking every helicopter in the area to thwart rivals from getting similar aerial shots.

4) 2011 Nobel Peace Prize speeches
Nobelprize.org
The speeches by the three female Laureates provided the real raising-hairs-at-the-back-of-the-neck moments during this year’s Nobel festivities – from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s rallying call to women, past and present; to Leymah Gbowee’s unbreakable spirit in the face of rape and AK47s; to Tawakkol Karman’s missive from the revolutionary youth. The image burned deepest into my retinas is how Gbowee created the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign with six other women gathered in a makeshift office, armed with nothing but their conviction and $10. It’s an inspiring and profoundly humbling image.

5) Large Hadron Collider & the ‘God Particle’: Six creators, one Nobel Prize
Joseph Brean, National Post
If the Higgs boson is found in 2012, then which of the six possible contenders who postulated the existence of the particle would get a Nobel Prize for it? The article discusses how filling the maximum of three spaces available for a Nobel Prize might prove to be the Physics committee’s greatest headache. It’s a tale of how science happens in the real world, where media campaigns and even a postal strike in 1960s Britain might come into play when it comes to apportioning credit.

6) Scientific American defends Marie Curie—and women scientists—in 1911
Mariette DiChristina, Scientific American
An excellent piece of scientific history, and a compelling case for making scientific journal and magazine archives accessible to everyone. When the 166-year-old Scientific American opened up it’s digital archives for a trial period, its editor, DiChristina, revealed how the magazine ran an editorial in support of Marie Curie in 1911 — the year she received her second Nobel Prize, and also was rejected from joining the French Academy of Sciences. “When science comes to the matter of bestowing its rewards it should be blind to the mere accident of sex,” states the editorial. Sadly, the statement is arguably no less true 100 years later as it was then.

7) Do we need the Nobel?: An exchange
Tim Parks and Per Wästberg, The New York Review of Books
Nobel Prize Committees regularly come under fire, and for my money the best of this year’s grumbles came from Tim Parks. In his blogpost entitled “What’s wrong with the Nobel Prize in Literature”, Parks asked how a small group of Swedish professors can possibly compare, say, a poet from Indonesia with a celebrity author like Philip Roth, and from the broad list of contenders decide who is the greatest novelist/poet of the day on the international scene. His words provoked a response from Per Wästberg, the president of the Nobel Committee, which while not wholly addressing Parks’ point contains the glorious line: “I try to read one book a day to keep ill health away”.

8) Ladbrokes says Syrian poet Adonis is smart bet for Nobel Prize
Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg Businessweek
What could have been a routine article on the betting in the run-up to the announcement of this year’s Literature Prize delivers a great kicker through the entrance of the gloriously, almost Dickensian-named Magnus Puke. Puke, whose job title at Ladbrokes is Nordic Sports and Novelty Odds Compiler, and who writes love poetry in his spare time, outlines his methods for setting odds  — working literary contacts, hanging out in online forums and keeping an eye on Twitter. The question dying to be asked is how different Puke’s reading habits are from Wästberg at the Nobel Committee.

9) China’s Nobel complex
Evan Osnos, New Yorker
Osnos, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine living in Beijing, describes the “awkward anniversary in China” that marked the day of the 2011 Peace Prize announcement. One year on from the award to imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, China’s embarrassment and anger with the Peace Prize Committee runs counter to its obsession with hooking its first Nobel Prize to a domestic-based scientist. It’s a short post but filled with lovely detail from someone on the ground, so it provides a great sense of China’s singular determination to distinguish itself and be recognized for its accomplishments.

10) Arsenic, quasicrystals and the myth of the science martyr
Michael Eisen, it is NOT junk
Many outlets ran the story of how Daniel Schechtman’s startling discovery of quasicrystals ran counter to everything that was perceived to be true in his field, and how he overcame prejudice and ridicule to eventually get this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize. Eisen took a terrific “success and failure as twin imposters” angle on this, by illustrating how a similar story could apply to Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s much-criticized announcement last year that she had isolated a strain of bacteria that could use arsenic (unlike all other life on earth which uses phosphorous). Portrayals of scientific history love to glorify the ideal of the suffering, unrecognized genius, says Eisen, and yet they also reveal the destructive influence the myth of the scientific martyr can have on people who believe they fit that mould.

11) Do you love science? Well, that depends, do you like sleep?
Scicurious, Neurotic Physiology
Should we really glorify the workaholic culture cited by many Nobel Laureates as a key factor behind their success? Why do we accept that working all hours makes you a better scientist and produce better results? Scicurious argues excellently against this myth, with a neat inclusion of Storify to illustrate how several of her scientific peers feel about the subject of work/life balance.

Peace
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf writes about Alfred Nobel’s legacy for women in the New York Times. http://ow.ly/7Z8sH

The “M-plans”: The secret strategies the media has put in place to report the future death of Nelson Mandela. http://bit.ly/rM3PuK

British writer and iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens died from cancer this week. No-one was safe from his sharp, outspoken views, not even Peace Laureates. http://slate.me/noomIl

Two Icelandic MPs have proposed their government should offer Chinese Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo political asylum in the country. http://bit.ly/uPzmUU

New documentary from Nobelprize.org called “Women of Peace”, where the three 2011 Laureates tell their stories. bit.ly/sd9lqU

… and if you are in Oslo, the 2011 Peace Prize exhibition has opened, with free entry until the New Year. http://bit.ly/rxy9Pa

Physics
Paul Dirac’s dizzying 1939 lecture on the relationship between maths & physics. http://bit.ly/tKmKgB

Interesting analysis of graphene patents, showing how little has been patented by its Nobel Prize-winning discoverers. http://bit.ly/sWXY9I

Medicine
Former research colleague questions whether Jules Hoffmann deserved this year’s Medicine Nobel Prize. http://bit.ly/sNZHZU

Literature
Egypt’s Ministry of Culture stops Sotheby’s auction of Naguib Mahfouz’s manuscripts. http://bit.ly/vmEIj6

Economics
Why New Delhi should heed what an Economist Laureate said in his Nobel Banquet speech last week. http://bit.ly/vIhha4

After each year’s Peace Prize is announced, the lovely people at the Nobel Peace Center have only a few weeks to create an exhibition in time for the Laureates to open it. This year’s exhibition is called SHEROES. http://nobelpeacecenter.org/english/?did=9087488

If you haven’t seen the inspiring and humbling Nobel Peace Prize speeches, I urge you to read them. http://bit.ly/rraufF http://bit.ly/sdM1YV http://bit.ly/uWv69t

… and see the CNN interview afterwards, where the question of tokenism is dispatched pretty sharpish.  http://bit.ly/tAnbnt

Nobel Prize Ceremony opening speeches have a different theme each year. This Year’s theme was fostering creativity & innovation through education. bit.ly/sYmhUz

If you care about your daughters, don’t let them watch the Nobel Prize ceremony. http://bit.ly/sZhYJF

But if you want royal fashions during the Nobel Prize ceremony, I’ll give you royal fashions. http://bit.ly/rRn1dL All eyes were on Crown Princess Victoria, who is 6 months pregnant. http://bit.ly/sUvqWVAnd here’s some other people you won’t recognize too. http://bit.ly/suu9NO

And here’s the slacker’s guide to winning a Nobel Prize http://ow.ly/7V8IZ

Nobel Week: Laureates
Nice New York Times profile of this year’s Economics Laureates – Intellectual sparring partners for 40 yrs & now reluctant celebrities. http://nyti.ms/vxCN6E

The perennial question of how Nobel Prize winners spend their money has been answered this year by Brian Schmidt – he’s donated $100,000 to an Australian primary school science programme. http://bit.ly/va4Xml

Excellent profile of Dan Shechtman, the Chemistry Laureate who was told he was a disgrace after showing colleagues his groundbreaking quasicrystal result. http://bit.ly/ul9qQx

Charming profile of Tomas Tranströmer, which provides a taste of how popular his award of the Nobel Prize is in his home country. http://bit.ly/vmAK75

Did you know this year’s Literature Laureate is a keen entomologist & even has a beetle named after him? http://bit.ly/v49zra

This year’s Nobel Prize Banquet menu… which for some inexplicable reason is always kept a secret until the guests are seated. http://t.co/P3kAKyZj

Don’t often see this. The Wall Street Journal ran an ad from NYU Stern congratulate Thomas Sargent on his Nobel Prize. http://ow.ly/i/n6Ir

And in other news… 

Physics
Physicists offer their thoughts on whether they think the Higgs boson real, including a limerick from one Nobel Laureate. http://bit.ly/rBg2Ig

If the Higgs boson is found, then which of at least 6 possible contenders would get a Nobel Prize for it? http://natpo.st/vrwoIn

Chemistry
Excellent piece of scientific history: Scientific American defends Marie Curie—and women scientists—in 1911. http://bit.ly/szbFI4 

Literature
Sotherby’s are auctioning manuscripts by only Arab writer to win Literature Nobel Prize. Cost? A cool £50-70K. http://bit.ly/vPs4uZ

Peace
“It’s become more than a movie, it’s become a lesson in life as well.” The new Aung San Suu Kyi film premiered this week. http://nyti.ms/uZBBou

Five Peace Prize winners have called for the release of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, arguing that the world has already begun to stop thinking about his case. http://on.wsj.com/vWRQsv

Meanwhile, China’s Nobel-naysaying alternative honours Vladimir Putin with Confucius Peace Prize. http://wapo.st/vPZXoQ

So, for any budding Nobel Laureates out there, I’ve popped up on the UK’s Guardian to provide some tips on how to best survive Nobel Week.

You’ll find me speaking on their Science Weekly podcast (around 17 mins in), plus I’ve written a post on the same subject on their Science Blogs site.

Hope you enjoy them, and many thanks to Alok Jha and Jason Phipps at the Guardian for allowing me to talk about all things Nobel.

The statutes declare that Laureates give their lecture before, or no later than six months after the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. In truth, the rules are often relaxed under extenuating circumstances. If Laureates are too ill to travel then recorded video lectures can be screened to an audience in the run-up to the ceremonies, as was the case with Economics Laureate Leonid Hurwicz in 2007 and Literature Laureate Harold Pinter in 2005. This year, there won’t be a Literature Nobel Lecture owing to Tomas Tranströmer’s health, instead there will be a programme featuring his texts. Due to Ralph Steinman’s untimely passing away, his colleague from Rockefeller University Professor Michel Nussenweig will deliver a lecture for the Medicine Prize outlining Steinman’s achievements.

Laureates don’t tend to forfeit the prize if they fail to give a lecture, either. When Wilhelm Roentgen, discoverer of X-rays, received the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901, he said he would return to Stockholm to give a lecture, but he never did. More recently, Liu Xiaobo was incarcerated by Chinese authorities when he was awarded the Peace Prize last year, and in his place the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann recited the final statement Liu wrote before his arrest.

The brief for Nobel Lectures is usually simple: talk about a subject connected with the prize-awarded work, and stick to the 45-minute time slot. If there’s more than one Laureate, they usually work out in advance who will say what with regards to the prize-awarded work, so that they avoid any repetition.

What you shouldn’t do is use your brief time on stage to discredit a rival, especially if that person happens to be there to receive the Nobel Prize with you. And yet, that’s exactly what the Italian anatomist Camillo Golgi did in 1906, when he launched into a malicious attack on his Medicine co-Laureate, the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Both scientists had developed staining methods that revealed the complex anatomy of the nervous system in exquisite detail. Working by candlelight in a hospital kitchen that he had converted into a laboratory, Golgi discovered a technique in the 1870s for impregnating brain and other tissue with a silver solution in such a way that made it possible to stain nerve cells black and view under the microscope.

Drawing by Camillo Golgi of the brain's hippocampus region made visible thanks to his silver-staining method

Cajal refined Golgi’s silver staining method, and blessed with an artist’s hand, he created thousands of beautiful drawings that depicted the nervous tissue as resembling in his words “a forest of outstretched trees”.

But, though both researchers used similar methods, Cajal spotted something different through the microscope. Golgi viewed the nervous system as being a seamless, continuous network of interconnected cells, with nerve signals firing along in all directions. Cajal, on the other hand, proposed that the brain is composed of billions of individual cells, or neurons (a term coined by the German anatomist Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hart), receiving information at one end and transmitting it in one direction along to the next cell.

One of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's many intricate drawings of brain cells.

To promote his theory, Cajal went on a two-month tour of European scientific centres in 1889 and presented his slides and drawings to the great and the good. Most of his peers were eventually persuaded by his arguments, except for Golgi, who made sure he was out of town when Cajal visited Pavia to see him.

An indignant Golgi refused to give up on his theory. He spent years seeking evidence that both supported his views and refuted Cajal’s, and he used the opportunity of his Nobel Lecture in 1906 to outline what he thought was wrong with the Spanish anatomist’s views. With the provocative title of “The neuron doctrine – theory and facts”, Golgi began his Nobel Lecture by saying:

It may seem strange that, since I have always been opposed to the neuron theory – although acknowledging that its starting-point is to be found in my own work – I have chosen this question of the neuron as the subject of my lecture, and that it comes at a time when this doctrine is generally recognized to be going out of favour.

Golgi then proceeded to outline experiments conducted by researchers at his institute that had exposed flaws in the theory, before concluding grandly:

My wish is that these new anatomical studies, on which this Institute, in such a high order of thought, has wished to draw the attention of the world, may represent a new element of progress for humanity.

Cajal handled the uncomfortable situation with grace, beginning his lecture as follows:

In accordance with the tradition followed by the illustrious orators honoured before me with the Nobel Prize, I am going to talk to you about the principal results of my scientific work in the realm of the histology and physiology of the nervous system.

Golgi might have thought that he won the battle on that day in Stockholm, but Cajal won the war. [UPDATE: see comment below] The neuron doctrine remains a fundamental principle for understanding the central nervous system.

So this episode provides two salutary lessons for budding Nobel Laureates. First, even a scientist as brilliant as Golgi, without whom Cajal could not have made his prize-awarded observations, can be undone if they lose objective sight over rival claims. Second, if you are going to wrongly attack your rival’s theories, try not to do so on one of the highest-profile of stages − especially as your words will be recorded for generations of scientists to discover.

Unless you have been to Sweden or Norway, it’s difficult to appreciate just how much the Nobel Prize festivities are ingrained into their popular culture. Newspapers and TV programmes will cover the Laureates’ movements all week, and the Nobel Prize Ceremony and Banquet will be broadcast live on TV. For science Laureates more accustomed to university halls than red carpets, the next few days will provide a rare glimpse of the celebrity lifestyle.

As you can see from the official schedule, there’s a lot of events packed into Nobel Week, and so over on the Guardian Science Podcast I’ve provided a brief survival guide for Laureates. For those Laureates arriving in Stockholm today, enjoy the surroundings of the Grand Hotel, and get some rest. You’re about to experience a long and memorable week.

Interview with the new Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation, Lars Heikensten. Wish he had been pushed more on future directions, especially the three-person rule. http://bit.ly/v9tVMc

Physics 
Two physicists have bet chocolate Nobel Prize medals on whether evidence for the Higgs boson will be found at the Large Hadron Collider. http://nyti.ms/ukFazo
(P.S. Another Physics Laureate appears to have made a bet on whether the Higgs boson will be discovered http://bit.ly/rJ2LhR)

Charming cartoon on how to win a Nobel Prize, according to this year’s Laureate Adam Riess. http://bit.ly/vqVWfN

Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose crowd-sourcing philosophy is gaining traction in the university classroom. bit.ly/tOCGtM

Medicine
Nobel Laureate Françoise Barré-Sinoussi says she is “furious” that funding into HIV & AIDS research is dropping. http://bbc.in/s7Owo5

Literature
Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight with man claiming his life story provided the basis for the main character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. http://bit.ly/t1WrU1

Will Bollywood’s Big B play Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in a new movie? http://bit.ly/rFFOwG

Hollywood is taking on the “impossible” challenge of trying to film literary works by William Faulkner, the Nobel Laureate famous for his stream of consciousness writing. http://tgr.ph/uDabKP

Polish poet and 1996 Laureate Wisława Szymborska is said to be recovering well after surgery. http://bit.ly/t3E0S6

Remember this New York Review of Books article on what’s wrong with the Nobel Prize in Literature? The president of the Nobel Committee has responded. http://bit.ly/ufwfK5

Peace
US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton and Aung San Suu Kyi have made an unprecedented public vow to work together and promote democratic reforms in Myanmar. http://bit.ly/uxrhG2

On Twitter @DigitisationSA is mining the Luthuli Museum archives to relive the stories and the controversies surrounding Albert Luthuli’s trip to Oslo 50 years ago, when he became the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Peace. http://bit.ly/vovb5c

The first English-language collection of works by Liu Xiaobo has been published in English on the first anniversary of his Peace Prize award. http://bbc.in/tqGXwS

The leaking of nominations for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize has begun… http://bit.ly/vVxktw

Economics
Readers of Freakonomics put their questions to Daniel Kahneman, father of behavioural economics. http://bit.ly/u15ngl

And finally…
In society news… Princess Madeleine is skipping this year’s Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm to attend a women in science event in NYC. bit.ly/vIVeBf

So, for any trivia buffs out there, here’s a list of Laureates and their endeavours that make them members of an even more exclusive club.

Academy Award

The Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw is the only Nobel Laureate to have received an Academy Award. (I know what many of you are thinking, but bear with me…).

Shaw followed his Literature Prize in 1929 with the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1938 for Pygmalion, which starred Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, and was adapted from Shaw’s 1913 play of the same name.

Incidentally, the noted critic and socialist accepted his Nobel Prize in a typically non-straightforward manner. He accepted the prize, but not the money, and said afterwards: “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

So what about Al Gore, I hear you cry? Well, the former Vice-President of the United States of America and 2007 Peace Laureate may have accepted the Academy Award for Best Documentary (feature) for “An Inconvenient Truth”; however, he didn’t actually win the coveted prize. The winner of the Academy Award for the film was in fact the producer and director Davis Guggenheim.

Olympic Games

Again, contrary to some opinion, there’s only one Nobel Laureate who has won an Olympic medal. Step up to the podium Philip Noel-Baker, British diplomat, 1959 Peace Prize winner, and who as a middle-distance runner won a silver medal in the 1,500 metres at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp.

Noel-Baker (later Baron Noel-Baker) received the Peace Prize for his lifelong commitment to disarmament and international peace, and he participated in the formation of the League of Nations and the United Nations. Blessed with a talent for middle-distance running, he took part in three Olympics, captaining the British track team at the 1920 and 1924 Games. (The 1924 Games were immortalized in the film Chariots of Fire.) His official biography on Nobelprize.org contains a line you don’t often find on other Laureates’ pages: “Although his days of active participation in track have long since passed, Noel-Baker retains the lean look of the athlete and an absorption in athletics.”

Some sources claim that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr was part of the Danish soccer team that won a silver medal in the 1908 summer Olympics. But that honour went to his younger brother Harald. Niels may have played in goal for the same Danish club side as his brother, but Harald was the only Bohr selected to play for the silver-medal winning national side. Harald also studied mathematics, and such was the public response to the team’s achievement in the 1908 Olympics, it’s claimed that when he defended his doctoral thesis a few years later, the audience contained more football fans than mathematicians. I wonder what they chanted during his defence.

Number 1 pop song

Nowadays, Charles Gates Dawes is perhaps remembered more for his contribution to pop music than his 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. Dawes was a self-taught pianist and composer, and lyrics were added to his 1912 composition, “Melody in A Major”, to become a song called “It’s All In The Game”, which became a number 1 hit in the US and UK for Tommy Edwards in 1958. A host of artists have covered this song since then, including Nat “King” Cole, Elton John and Keith Jarrett.

For the record, Dawes received his Peace Prize for his League of Nations report on German reparation payments after World War I. Like Al Gore, Dawes also held the position of Vice-President, though Dawes’ term is generally considered to be one of the worst ever. “Hell’n Maria” Dawes (as he was known, this being his favourite expression) wasn’t Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge’s first choice as running-mate, they were barely on speaking terms with each other, and Dawes didn’t attend cabinet meetings. Even his Senate biography says witheringly: “[H]is tenure was not a satisfying or productive one, nor did it stand as a model for others to follow.

Cricket

Being a Brit and a cricket lover I have to include this one, but if you have no appetite for the sound of leather on willow, or have no idea what that expression means, I suggest you skip this part… 

There’s only one first-class cricketer to win a Nobel Prize, and horror upon horrors, he isn’t British. This honour goes to the Irish-born playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, best known for the absurdist drama Waiting for Godot. The 1969 Literature Laureate played two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926. Described in the cricketing bible Wisden as “a left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defence, and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler”, Becket never lost his affection for cricket.

Million-dollar quiz prize

When George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for years of work that recorded the faint echoes of the birth of the universe, he received one half of the prize amount, around $800,000. Three years later, he won a bigger cash prize on the US TV quiz “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” Appearing as the final contestant on the last episode of the game show, which posed grade-school level questions to adults, he reached the final question: “What U.S. state is home to Acadia National Park?” Smoot gave the correct answer “Maine”, and in doing so became the second person (and the first man) to win the $1million top prize.

Lech Walesa’s wife’s frank biography is causing a stir in Poland, because she describes the loneliness and domestic grind she faced as her husband rose to power: http://reut.rs/rCMdl4

On Wired Science blogs, David Dobbs describes the only time Gabriel Garcia Marquez met fellow Literature Laureate Ernest Hemingway: http://bit.ly/uB3EKJ

After boycotting last year’s election in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy voted unanimously to re-enter the formal political process: http://bit.ly/tViUph

If you like the classic photograph taken at the 1927 Solvay physics conference, in which 17 of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Laureates, check out the video: http://bit.ly/178B1t

“The Swedes have made a serious error by giving the prize to a writer whose limited talent is in his best books watered down by 10th-rate philosophizing”. The New York Times in response to John Steinbeck’s Literature Prize in 1962: http://bit.ly/rMEKL6

“A great deal of prejudice is built-in.” Video interview with Nobel Laureate and father of behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman, on the cognitive biases that affect our decision-making: http://bit.ly/szs086

ZDNet’s handy take-away guide to graphene: http://bit.ly/uJS2uO

The bravest person Martin Luther King said he ever met was Norman Thomas, a white-haired ex-preacher and leader of the Socialist Party of America. http://bit.ly/tZhJ3V

There’s been little coverage of the death of Har Gobind Khorana, 1968 Medicine Laureate, so it’s nice to see this multi-part series on the man who with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley broke the genetic code. http://bit.ly/tM7awZ http://bit.ly/uE3nc8

People are more vain about their prowess at hobbies than their life’s work, says John Casey in his new book. For example, there was the time Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus got miffed when a Swedish newspaper ran a photo of him taking a tumble on his skis: http://on.wsj.com/sswEzE

Chicago will host the 12th annual World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in April 2012: http://cbsloc.al/vTp565

This morning BBC Radio 4’s Today programme featured a mini rant on the subject. (Audio clip might be accessible in the UK-only, apologies if so.) John Rentoul, author of The Banned List: A Manifesto Against Jargon and Cliché explained why promoting this two-letter word to the beginning of a sentence has become a plague. As he said:

It’s the first on a three-part scale of offences against the English language, because you can start with “So”, then “And so”, and the worst of all is “And so it begins”.

According to Rentoul, this probably originates from posting comments on the Internet, which provides a handy device for grabbing other people’s attention instantly. Rentoul’s assertion might not be too far off the mark, as Giridharadas wrote in his New York Times article Silicon Valley might be the source of this plague:

The journalist Michael Lewis picked it up when researching his 1999 book ”The New New Thing”: ”When a computer programmer answers a question,” he wrote, ”he often begins with the word ‘so.”’ Microsoft employees have long argued that the ”so” boom began with them.

So, why bother mentioning this on Nobel Prize Watch? Well, in the literary world perhaps the best-known and most subversive use of “so” at the beginning of a sentence is by the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney. His translation of the Anglo Saxon epic poem Beowulf doesn’t employ the word “so” to begin any old sentence, he uses the word to begin the first sentence of the first verse.

Previous translations of the original Old English sentence “Hwæt. We Gardena    in gear-dagum”, adhered to the poem’s complex style, resulting in somewhat archaic-looking sentences such as “What ho! We’ve heard the glory / of Spear-Danes, clansmen-kings.” In Heaney’s hands, the translation reads like a poem in its own right, and his first sentence becomes: “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by.”

As Heaney himself explained, he wanted his version of Beowulf to sound like it could be spoken by descendants of the characters. He said:

I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon…

Conventional renderings of hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and – more colloquially – ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, ‘so’ it was.

Or as the writer, editor and publisher Eric McMillan says, the first line of Heaney’s translation is the equivalent of beginning an anecdote like “So. A guy walks into a bar…”.