If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But, crucially, “you cannot understand his use of language, because language is a cultural thing – and the culture is lost in translation.” ‘Lost in translation’ was the title of Kroto’s lecture […]
Chance favors only the prepared mind, said Louis Pasteur. Indeed history is filled with stories of great discoveries through serendipity. As Douglas Osheroff said, "most advances require both insight and good fortune" in his talk about how scientific discoveries are made. Biology is a field that has a particularly interesting history involving good luck as […]
This year’s Lindau meeting has brought together over 550 young scientists from around the world from countries including Germany, Kenya, the US, Egypt, India and South Africa. The often repeated motto at Lindau is “educate, inspire, connect” and although the temperamental wifi in the Inselhalle conference centre means that connections of the digital variety are […]
Many scientific discoveries can have far-reaching consequences when they are applied as new technologies or are used to influence policy decisions. How much is it the responsibility of scientists to be concerned about, and involved with, the use of the knowledge that they contribute to society? Would asking scientists to swear to an equivalent of […]
Dass Nobelpreisträger fast immer würdige ältere Damen und Herren sind, liegt keineswegs daran, dass die bedeutenden Entdeckungen von älteren Forschern gemacht werden. Im Gegenteil. Richard Feynman veröffentlichte seine Arbeiten zur Quantenelektrodynamik, da war er 29. Charles Darwin betrat das Deck der Beagle im Alter von 22 Jahren, und die bahnbrechenden Arbeiten von Gerhard Ertl begannen […]
Nächste Woche treffen sich in Lindau 27 Nobelpreisträger und 580 Studenten um gemeinsam über Wissenschaft zu diskutieren. Es wird aber noch eine weitere Gruppe anwesend sein: 21 Lehrer aus Deutschland, der Schweiz, Österreich und Liechtenstein, die am Programm “Teaching Spirit” teilnehmen werden.In Lindau geht es zwar hauptsächlich um Wissenschaft. Aber es ist gut, dass die […]
“Wenn ich wissen möchte, an was die Laureaten forschen, dann lese ich ihre Papers. Mich interessiert viel mehr, wie sie geschafft haben, dort anzukommen wo sie sind.” hörte ich einen Nachwuchswissenschaftler zu seinem Gegenüber sagen, als wir auf Bierbänken zufällig nebeneinander im Essenszelt saßen und im Geschnetzelten stocherten. Tatsächlich ist es so, dass hier in […]
The future of medicine is contained in ‘The Four Ps’: Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory. Aaron Ciechanover, speaking on a panel on the future of biomedicine at the Lindau meeting, explains: "We may have the ability to profile patients before they get sick, therefore we may have the ability to predict diseases – and also ‘preventative’ […]
Joke van Bemmel (imagine how to say it with a Dutch accent – ‘y’ for ‘j’), is a researcher from The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The enthusiastic 29-year-old van Bemmel is nearing the end of her PhD, and is currently applying to find the ideal postdoc position. The dream is to: "just be doing nice, […]
This year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting involves over 550 young scientists from around the world. We’ve been talking to some of the attendees about their research, their opinions about scientific issues and their experience of the meeting. After meeting Armen Kherlopian at a Science Online NYC meet-up at Rockefeller University and discovering he was also […]
Nobel laureates, like all scientists, have published their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Their initial results, theories and thoughts in these publications have been preserved in the digital archives of the scientific literature, as if they have been frozen in time. I thought it would be a nice idea to go back to these papers, and […]
How do you put a price on inspiration? I don’t believe you can. That elusive feeling is invaluable for the hundreds of medical and physiology researchers from around the world that are swooping into town for the 61st Lindau meetings in Germany. How can being surrounded by 23 Nobel Laureates not be inspiring? And, I […]
