Paul - Mario Pagliaro's blog

Rudy Baum sadly reports the Economist opinion on chemistry commenting this year's Nobel science prizes:

"The chemistry prize is for a piece of X-ray crystallography, a favourite subject of the academy's prize committees over the decades, and a way of awarding an extra physiology prize (since X-ray crystallography is used mainly to examine large biological molecules) without confessing that much of the intellectual oomph has gone out of chemistry in the century since Alfred Nobel, himself a chemist, drew up his will."

Rudy argues instead that chemistry "has hardly lost its intellectual oomph" and that "the reason so many Nobel Prizes in Chemistry are being awarded for discoveries that are biological in nature is because biology has effectively become a chemical science".

I am afraid Rudy is not much convinced as he concludes that "we (chemists) do need to do a better job communicating the intellectual vitality of chemistry to the public".

That's not the point, Rudy. We do need to do a (radically) better job communicating the intellectual value of chemistry to chemistry practitioners. And that's one of the main objective of the new Institute for Scientific Methodology: close the gap between science and culture. And elucidate the foundations of disciplines to young scientists.