Sometimes chemists cop the biology prize

As I mentioned previously, there is no Nobel prize for biology. But there are a surprising number of chemistry Nobel laureates who show up in my general biology lectures, and this year seems to be another case of that. An award to Roger Kornberg for the study of how DNA makes RNA, which I also mentioned in my previous post.

Also interesting is that this is a rare case of a family with two Nobel winners -- Roger's father Arthur Kornberg won it in 1959 for Medicine, but he was also studying genetics. I knew of one other example: the Tinbergen brothers, Jan (Economics) and one of my own intellectual heroes, Niko (Physiology or medicine, but really animal behaviour). But there are several others...