Ask Not for Who the Nobels Toll

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Nobels Oblige 

Frederick Sanger, who won twice as many Nobel Prizes as those morons Albert Einstein, James Watson and Alexander Fleming, has died at the age of 95. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize in chemistry for showing how amino acids link together to form insulin, which gave scientists the tools to analyze any protein in the body, including some punk named Francis Crick. He then coasted for more than 20 years before tying the career record for Nobel Prizes with a second award in chemistry in 1980 for inventing a method of understanding the molecular letters that make up the genetic code. The Sanger Method allowed him to read hundreds of letters of DNA at a time, a discovery that provided the basic tool kit for decoding the entire human genome and allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop expensive, dangerous drugs. He is the 4th scientist to win 2 Nobel Prizes, and the only one to win 2 in chemistry. 

I Don’t Know Why You Say Yalow, I Say Goodbye

Rosalyn Yalow, who proved that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, as long as your kitchen has a radioimmunology lab, has died at the age of 89. In an era when June Cleaver was the epitome of feminine ambition, Yalow was earning the second Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to a woman as the co-discoverer of the radioimmunoassay, an extremely sensitive means to measure insulin and other hormones in the blood. The assay, which contradicted all previous thinking about the sensitivity of the immune system, enabled her to show that inability to use insulin caused diabetes and facilitated breakthroughs in early diagnosis of disorders related to thyroid dysfunction. All this despite the fact that she was, in the words of Purdue University that denied her application for graduate school: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman.” The College of Physicians and Surgeons, now part of Columbia University, offered her a job as a secretary and promised that if she was a good girl, she could take a couple classes. She opted for a teaching assistantship at the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, instead, although an A-minus in one laboratory course confirmed for the chairman of the physics department that women could not excel at lab work.

Gone with The Wind

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On Flanders Road the Crap does Flow

Claude Simon, the French author whose long pointless novels confused the Nobel Committee enough to convince them of his brilliance and award him the 1985 Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 91. Simon eschewed such bourgeois concepts as narrative structure, character development and plot in such novels as “The Swindler,” “The Wind,” The Grass,” and “The Flanders Road,” in favor of seemingly random words and phrases as one tedious description tumbled into the next.

Goodbye, Mr. Microchips

Jack Kilby, whose invention of the integrated circuit led to the creation of the microchip, has died at the age of 81. Without him, we might still be waiting for loud cellphone conversations during movies, ultra-violent computer games and the DVD of Leonard, Part 6. The integrated circuit was one of more than 60 patents he held in a career capped by the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.

Hearseog

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The Adventures of Augie Funeral March

Or (The Monty act)

Saul Whimper

Or (In the Michelle portion of the program)

Henderson the Remains King

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Dangling Dead Man

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Pall Bellow

Saul Bellow, one of the most honored authors in American history, has died at the age of 89. Alternately praised as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century or criticized for writing "a travelogue for the timid mind," Bellow instilled his intellectual curiosity and insight, wry and sometimes dark humor and Midwestern sensibility in his characters. Bellow is the only author to have won the National Book Award three times, in 1954 for "The Adventures of Augie March," in 1965 for "Herzog" and in 1971 for "Mr. Sammler's Planet." In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize, for "Humboldt's Gift," as well as the Nobel Prize in literature. He continued producing novels (and children – he leaves behind a 5-year-old daughter) through the end of his life and since 1993, he had taught a literature course at Boston University. This has been a rough month for Boston University, who lost former first lady Kathryn Silber and Dean ad nauseum George Mackechnie, who had been affiliated with the school since 1929, in March.

DNA DNR

James Watson secured his status as the last living discoverer of DNA as Maurice Wilkins’ deoxyribonucleic acid stopped replicating this week at the age of 87. Wilkins’ death comes less than 3 months after Francis Crick’s adenine, guanine, cytosine and uricil entered a permanent downward spiral. Wilkins was the Shemp to Crick and Watson’s Moe and Larry, the Fredo to their Sonny and Michael. In the cutthroat world of post World War II British science, Wilkins’ efforts to unravel DNA were usurped by two competing teams of rogue biologists. Still, he produced the first photo of the helical structure of DNA and for that shared the 1962 Nobel Prize.

The Isn’ta Valley

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Testimony to the Invisible

Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, has died at the age of 93. He witnessed the horrors of World War I in Lithuania, fought in the Resistance in World War II, then saw the Communist takeover of Poland, giving him a first-hand view of man’s inhumanity, yet still imbued his work with a love of the world’s beauty. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, and during the Solidarity union uprising of the 1980s, his poetry inspired his countrymen, and he was regarded as an icon of the movement with Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II.

Highway to Helix

Francis Crick, who discovered the definitive way to get into a woman’s genes, has died at the age of 88. Crick and his partner James Watson won the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix shape of DNA, or as Crick humbly put it, “unlocking the secret of life.” Their discovery determined that each strand of the double helix could become a template for copying an organism’s genes offered groundbreaking insight into evolution, and led to dozens of really bad sci-fi films. Their discovery at Cambridge University gave birth to the $30-billion a year biotechnology industry, including genetically enhanced drugs and vaccines, criminal identification and improved fertility. Crick and Watson eschewed such radical efforts as experimentation, preferring to think, argue and think some more, then leaving the typing to Watson’s sister and creation of the double helix model to Crick’s wife.

Although hailed as the dominant mind in molecular biology, his efforts beyond the cellular level were less well accepted. He argued that dreams were the mind’s way of storing memory more efficiently and in 1981 suggested that life on Earth began when microorganisms wafted in from spacecraft.