The holy grail of energy storage may lie in chemical bonds, but a process for making this happen remains unknown. All of the Nobel Laureates who weighed in yesterday on a chemical energy conversion panel agreed on this much. “Replacement of liquid fossil fuels is still in far reach,” said moderator Wolfgang Lubitz, director of […]
Insight must precede application. — Max Planck, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1918 One summer day a young Martin Chalfie walked out of a lab after a particularly frustrating experiment. He thought—quite erroneously—that the life of a scientist was not for him. After teaching high school chemistry for some years, he gave one more try. Working […]
Being able to meet 35 Nobel laureates is a rare and highly desirable opportunity. A question that arises when preparing to meet people of such stature is: What can we learn from them? It was my good fortune that I already had the chance to meet one of the laureates – Paul Crutzen (Nobel Prize […]
There is no other prize in the intellectual realm with the prestige of the Nobel Prizes. They also have a visibility that can hardly be compared to any other. But why are they important? What do they contribute to society? In an age in which we are gradually losing whole sets of values, fundamentally humanistic […]
Elizabeth Blackburn grew up in Hobart on the Australian island of Tasmania. It was a long journey from there to a Nobel prize and the lab she runs at the University of California in San Francisco. Malaria researcher Clare Smith is also a Hobart girl, and she’s trying to decide whether to follow in Blackburn’s […]
