In this issue of The Biochemist, we are celebrating the 20th anniversaries of the 2002 Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was jointly awarded to Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston ‘for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death’. In this issue, we explore fertilization and how the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans can be used as a genetic model system, work that descends from the findings of Sydney Brenner.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded ‘for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules’. Half was awarded to John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka ‘for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules’ and the other half to Kurt Wüthrich ‘for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution’. In this issue, we explore mass spectroscopy, with feature articles on matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight spectroscopy (MALDI-TOF) and electrospray mass spectroscopy from the Trost and Emmott labs, respectively.
We also celebrate prizes and awards offered by the Biochemical Society in this issue. You can read about the awardees of the Krebs Memorial scholarship, which this year has been expanded due to the pandemic and awarded to three outstanding PhD students. Sir Hans Krebs, who was a pioneer of cellular respiration, published his work on the citric acid cycle in the Biochemical Journal, and the scholarship was started in 1982. Krebs himself won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1953.
This issue also holds the full written entries of the winners of the 2022 Science Communication Prize – I strongly encourage you to read their fantastic and creative entries in full. I was involved in the judging for this competition, and I can confirm that all the entries I saw were incredibly impressive. We also direct you to where you can find the winners of the media entries – a number of which I think might be useful for teaching in biochemistry. We also feature an education issue from the winner of the 2022 Biochemical Society Teaching Excellence Award, Barry Ryan (TU Dublin), on making education more equitable in undergraduate studies.
Finally, you can find an interview with the new Biochemical Society President, Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, who started her term in July 2022. You can find out about Julia’s background, what drew her to the Biochemical Society president role and what she wants to achieve over the course of her term.
Our next issue will be ‘Debunking urban myths and false science’ and our first issue of 2023 will be ‘Protein Engineering’ – if you are interested in contributing an article, we encourage you to get in touch with us.
