Monday, October 7, 2013

3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine

                I read the article “3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine,” by Lawrence K. Altman. The article discusses how this Monday three scientists, James E. Rothman of Yale University; Randy W. Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley; and Dr. Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. They discovered how cells transport large molecules in an organized fashion, delivering the molecules where they are needed, when they are needed. Each scientist developed a little piece of the puzzle to solve the mystery of how cells organize their transport systems. As stated in the article, “Dr. Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for vesicle traffic. Dr. Rothman unraveled protein machinery that allows vesicles to fuse with their targets to permit transfer of cargo. Dr. Südhof revealed how signals instruct vesicles to release their cargo with precision.” All three scientists come from different backgrounds with different educations, a diversity that allowed them to research cell transport in different ways and with different focuses. Their diverse methods led them to their key discovery.
                This article is important to our society because it is a great example of how an increase in the diversity of the educations and backgrounds of scientists who are working together can greatly benefit the scientific community. It allows them to bounce ideas off of each other and ultimately discover things together that would have been much harder, maybe even impossible, to discover on their own. This is important to us because it shows us how much more productive it can be to work with others who have different ideas from our own. Diversity can be very beneficial in the scientific community. In addition, this article is significant to the AP Biology students at Bronxville because we recently learned about the cell and all the functions of the organelles.
                A criticism I have of the article is that it was not very interesting. Most of the article just talked about the three scientists and where they went to school and got their Ph.D.s. While their backgrounds are interesting and somewhat relevant to the article, I would have found it more interesting if the author had talked more about the science behind their discovery and how this could have an effect on science in the future.

Altman, Lawrence K. "3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine." New York Times. N.p., 7 Oct. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/health/3-win-joint-nobel-prize-in-medicine.html>.

3 comments:

  1. After reading Fiona's review of “3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine” I had a good understanding of who won the Nobel Peace Prize in medicine and what they won for. Overall, Fiona did a very good job reviewing this article. One aspect she did really well was her organization of information. Her review was very well organized which made the information very clear and easy to understand. Another aspect she did very well was her selection of information. She chose the most important information and left out some things that were unnecessary. This selection of information allowed for the main points of the article to be addressed in a efficient way. A third aspect she did particularly well was her connection to the community. Her direct connection to the AP Biology students was effective because it allowed me to really connect to the article and showed me how this article could relate to me.
    Although her review was very good there are some things that I think could have made it better. I think it would have been helpful if she went into a little more detail about the backgrounds of each scientist, and how that specific background mixed with the other two unique backgrounds helped the discovery. Also, it would have been easier to understand her review if she paraphrased each individual scientists discovery in simpler words. However, overall I believe Fiona did a really great job.
    I really enjoyed this article and review because it was a clear example of how working together with people of different backgrounds is more productive than working alone. I have read and heard that this is the case. However, this article was a concrete example of this and I was really impressed by how well this collaboration actually works.

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  2. Fiona did a great job of summarizing and explaining the article “3 Win Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine.” She started off with a clear summary of the article that was easy to read and understand because it was concise and to the point. I also liked that she gave a brief description of what each of the three scientists contributed to the project. This gave me a good idea of how three scientists working on the same research can bring different things too the table, building off of each other to ultimately make an incredible breakthrough worthy of a Nobel Prize. Fiona also gave a great analysis of how the information from the article is relevant to our lives and to some of the societal trends that we have been seeing for many years now. Increased diversity in the work place, for instance, can enhance scientific development since collaboration with others often leads to ideas and conclusions that we would not have reached on our own. I think that Fiona could have improved her review a little bit by elaborating on the actual research that the scientists conducted, in order to give the reader a better idea of why these scientists are so important. I also would have liked to hear more about how their diverse educational and ethnic backgrounds played into the success of the project on the whole. I was impressed that three people could win a joint Nobel Prize. I had never heard of that happening before I read this article. The three scientists worked on an interesting research topic, and I enjoyed reading about their success.

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  3. I read Fiona’s review of the joint win of the Nobel Prize in medicine by three scientists. She wrote that she didn’t find the article very interesting, but I felt that she presented the information in an interesting way to the reader as she made it easily relatable and simplified the language for ease of comprehension. I really liked that Fiona wrote specifically about how their discovery of how cells organize transport applied to us, as AP Biology students, and to society in general. She also mentions that their method of working with one another is a great model for the scientific community, as they were able to achieve something very difficult because they used their differing perspectives to further one another’s work.
    I enjoyed reading her summary, but thought she could have written more about how and what diverse methods led to this great discovery. I would have also liked to know how the scientists came to work together, as this is an important part to creating diverse relationships that hopefully many AP Biology students will have if we enter the scientific community.
    I liked reading Fiona’s article because I had heard about the three scientists’ success, but did not know much about why they won. After reading the article and her review, I feel much more well-informed about their discovery of specifics of intracellular transport, which is specifically relevant to what we are learning in Biology, as she mentioned.

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