Today the 61. Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting will be openend and Sandra Chishimba will play a special role: She will take part at a panel discussion together with Bill Gates, Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath (Chemistry 2009) and Jonathan Carlson (Microsoft Research) – maybe because Malaria is the main topic of her life. She has battled […]
An inspiration from the birth of aviation A few weeks ago I visited the small coastal town of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. Kitty Hawk is where the Wright brothers made their epoch-making first powered flight. Big stones mark the start and end points of the flight. There is a huge monument on top of […]
In the early 1940s, as war raged over the continent, the British mathematician Freeman Dyson and the Indian physicist Harish Chandra were taking a walk in Cambridge. Harish Chandra was studying theoretical physics under the legendary Paul Dirac while Dyson was getting ready to spend a depressing time calculating bombing statistics at Bomber Command. “I […]
Francoise Barré-Sinoussi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for her role in the discovery of HIV. As she detailed in her plenary lecture on Monday 28th June, she considers a combined approach of mainly Western-led lab-based research and locally based education and treatment centres in developing countries as crucial for the control of […]
Edmond Fischer shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edwin Krebs "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism". I had the chance to talk to him in Lindau last week. My name is Edmond Fischer, but everybody calls me Ed. I’m a retired professor at the University of Washington […]
Harald zur Hausen’s discovery of the link between infection and cancer provides a window into what may turn out to be one of the most fascinating lines of inquiry in twenty-first century medical research: the link between microorganisms and what have been traditionally considered chronic diseases. This line of inquiry is founded on an evolutionary […]
This is a translation of Bastian Greshakes article "Evolution – auf ein Ziel hin?" in the German blog posts Werner Arber is at the Lindau meeting for the tenth time this year and again he has been giving a lecture. His topic for this year’s meeting was “Genetic and Cultural Impacts on the Course of […]
We’ve all had bad experiences of sitting in lectures, trying to focus on the slides while feeling like we’re really missing out on the key points of the subject. You want to stay motivated and learn something new, but somehow the speaker doesn’t make it easy for you. How to encourage good science communication was […]
Monday morning Jack Szostak talked about his ongoing work on creating artificial cells, where he is trying to create simple protocells from chemically synthesized material that in their simplest form only contain a membrane and genetic material. Later in the afternoon Hamilton Smith gave a detailed account of the work by the J. Craig Venter Institute cumulating in the […]
The late morning in Lindau was a non-stop marathon of medical researchers – first Harald zur Hausen talked about the links between infections and cancer, then Luc Montagnier gave an insight into his research that analyzes DNA under physical as well as biological aspects – venomous tongues may have linked that talk to homeopathy. At […]
There are many reasons to get excited in anticipation of this year’s Lindau Nobel meeting that is now less than two weeks away. One aspect of the meeting I personally enjoy is the appreciation for the historical perspective of science. One recurring theme of many Nobel laureates in Medicine or Physiology during the last 50 […]
