Strawberry red, tangerine orange, banana yellow, honeydew green and plum purple. These are some of the cheesy names for the glowing molecules that were developed in Roger Tsien’s laboratory. To be fair, these names do make one thing clear: Roger Tsien has managed to design and produce fluorescent molecules of almost every colour in the rainbow.

Some might wonder why creating glowing molecules would earn someone a Nobel prize. Does the world really need more different coloured glow-sticks? Yes, of course it does! Plus, fluorescent molecules have become a standard tool in the biologist’s toolbox. Biologists tack these glowing molecules to proteins, so that they can track where in the cell it is located, or where in the body a certain genes is expressed.  (More)

Sir Harry Kroto gave a talk yesterday that was unlike any other lecture at the Lindau Meetings so far. Kroto didn’t talk about the work he had done, or about his life as a scientist. Instead, he gave a dazzling presentation showing scores of images to his audience. He kept shifting gears from art to science, to education, only to switch back again.

At one point, Kroto showed a scene from the movie ‘The Third Man’, for reasons that will become clear later in this blog post. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the movie, ‘The Third Man’ is about a young man, Holly Martins, who plans to attend the funeral of an old friend, Harry Lime, in post-war Vienna. It soon becomes clear that Lime’s dead has been staged, and that he is up to his neck in crime. Lime has disappeared in Vienna, a city that for Holly soon becomes a foreign and hostile labyrinth.  (More)

Between the laws of the universe and the rules of life lies a bridge. That bridge, said Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn today, is chemistry.

Lehn made his point by asking a simple and intriguing question at the start of his lecture: how does matter become complex? How did elementary particles eventually gave rise to the thinking organisms that we are?

The answer is self organization, said Lehn. Elementary particles join to form atoms on their own, just like ants join to form a colony. In between the atom and the organism, there’s chemistry. “Chemistry is all about making keys for locks and locks for keys”, is how Lehn defined his scientific discipline. And it is true: chemists design and make molecules so that they fit and bind to other ones, just like the keys that fit in their locks.    (More)

Twenty five years ago, the discovery of the ozone hole above the Antarctic made waves. The ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, which protects Planet Earth from 90% of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, diminished. Only two years later, in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed. There would not have been a chance to stop this ongoing reduction unless some chemists had described the possible reactions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other substances with ozone in the 1970s. These findings by Paul Crutzen, Mario José Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland, who all were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, led to the Montreal Protocol.

At the Lindau Meeting I had not only the chance to listen to Sherwood Rowland’s lecture about “Greenhouse Effect and Climate Change”. I even had the opportunity to talk to the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry together with two young researchers from the Global-Young-Faculty. 

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Energy and sustainability are this year's focus for the panel discussion and the exhibition on the Isle of Maine. A couple of thoughts in advance (1). About 80 percent of the world's energy needs today are met by fossil fuels: oil, coal and gas. The combustion of materials millions of years old has made humans ever more mobile and accelerated the pace of industrialisation. Supplies, however, are finite, and wasteful burning of these resources is leading to exceedingly high emissions of carbon dioxide, with all the attendant consequences for the earth's climate. (More)

After the opening ceremony on Sunday which lasted a little too long, I was pretty excited about the first lectures beginning on Monday morning. Even though the line up was Chemistry, Medicine, Physics, break then M, M & M, I was eager to hear the Nobel Laureates talk about their own work.

Lecture 1: Ada Yonath (Chemistry Nobel 2009) showed a video of the working of the amazing ribosome and discussed in depth the role it plays in the cell. Yonath spoke with such energy that her love for the subject was overflowing. She also touched upon the topic of women in science and said “Young women, go do science. It is a lot of fun even without prizes”. It is possible to be loved by family and still do science she stressed and went on to show the ‘grandma of the year’ award given to her by her granddaughter. (More)

This morning at the Lindau Nobel meeting we had a panel discussion about the Impact of Chemistry and Physics to Biomedicine. Where is the Future? I've summarized some of the highlights below, using the Twitter comments of this session (following the conference Twitter feed at #lnlm10 is highly recommended). The young researchers were asked to submit questions to the panel, and they were used as starting points for the panel discussion (the Lindau version of an unconference session). (More)

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.  Indeed, the measure of our intellectual maturity is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.- G.W. Allport,Becoming, 1955

Science in the popular mind consists of a series of "Eureka!" moments. Such moments are supposed to suddenly propel scientific fields ahead at accelerating rates. Many anecdotes from scientific history seem to confirm this belief. It all begins with Archimedes jumping out of the bath after discovering the principle of buoyancy. Other examples include the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, August Kekule waking up from a dream and realizing the structure of benzene, Enrico Fermi discovering slow neutrons by ‘randomly’ substituting a block of paraffin for a tabletop, Alexander Fleming ‘accidentally’ discovering the action of a famous mold on bacteria, and Werner Heisenberg discovering the awesome structure of the quantum world after an all-night session on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea. (More)

Today I talked with Roger Tsien about his research leading to the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP). I learned that visually beautiful research results are the best motivation, and that winning a Nobel Prize doesn't mean that papers and grants come easily - you might still have a manuscript returned from Nature without review. (More)

Sitting on a stool, like the thinking man, Nicholas stared mindlessly at the reaction that he had just setup. This was the seventh time that he'd done exactly the same thing that day, every time hoping that it will give the result that the darn research paper had promised him. Each time that it did not give the desired output, he blamed himself but not the paper. "There must something that I am doing wrong", he thought, "after all Anderson has a such a reputation, there is not a doubt that he got the results that are mentioned in the paper."

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John Turton Randall was trying hard, real hard. For some time now, the University of Birmingham physicist was focusing on trying to improve the features of a machine which transmitted and received electromagnetic waves. A few years back this would have been just another intriguing academic problem for a physicist to crack, but this time it was a matter of life and death for thousands. Literally. It was 1939, and an ominous menace loomed large over Europe in the person of Adolf Hitler. The machine Randall was working on was designed to thwart Hitler's attempts to invade the British mainland. It sent out electromagnetic waves of meter wavelength and tried to deduce the position of an object based on its reflection of these waves. The operating principle of this humble machine later turned into a household name- Radar. (More)