We need a Biological Sciences Nobel Prize.

I've always found it weird that there was no Nobel Prize for Biology. There is one for medicine, but that's not the same. Especially when you consider that the Lobotomy procedure won its creator a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The impact of not having a Nobel prize in biology is rather far reaching. Not only is the prestige such a prize brings to a institution like a University not there but lacking a Nobel prize decreases funding to areas like basic biological research and ecology that are vitally important but not directly tied to any industry. Chemistry has an industry, Physics has engineering, but non-medicine biological sciences doesn't have an industry. All this global-warming studies aren't funded by the solar-energy lobby, they're funded by Universities and grants. So a Nobel prize would really help there.

Having a Biological Noble prize would help the environment which in reality helps us all. Take for example the Colony collapse of Bee hives. Research in Europe suggest that there is a link to pesticide use. But who in the US founds studies into pesticides? There is no "natural" industry there. Having a Nobel prize could fuel founding into those areas. And if you don't think bees are important, Florida's Orange Juice production and California's Almond production both depend on bee pollination.

Comments

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...

Testing with Cucumber, Sinatra and Capybara

Everything you need to know There are many elements you need to simultaneously learn to do effective testing of your code. Because some of these elements are very simple a lot of explanations just jump over what you need to know and give them up as obvious. Let’s start with a list of the things you need to learn: Gherkin (the language of Cucumber) ——> super easy Capybara (the DSL that controls the browser tests) Rspec (the DSL in which the actual pass/fail tests are written.) None of these are hard. But having to learn all at the same time can seem daunting. But it’s not! It’s easy peasy but takes time. :-/ It took me three days to get a handle on this. And I hope by reading this you’ll get a handle on it much much quicker. Let’s start with Cucumber first. Cucumber Five things you need to know about Cucumber: Cucumber tests are located on a features folder that have plain text files with a .feature extension and written in Gherkin . The .feature files contain t...

Best Tech Books

Best Tech Books for Programming Language Learning I'm a bit of a polyglot no only in human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese) but also with programming languages. I found that the best way to get a deep understanding of the programming field, I needed to be broad. I got introduced to Bruce Tate's 7 languages in 7 weeks series right when I was starting to learn Ruby and found the cross-language trends to be very useful in knowing what to learn for the future. So here is a list of Programming Books that I found good for learning a language. These are the must have books in my opinion to "get" or "grok" the language. Most of these books I have not finished but they're so good I can recommend them for other language learners and polyglots. All these books should accelerate your learning dramatically. Poignant Guide to Ruby Ruby: POODR and _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby . Okay, so _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the reason I fell in love with ...

David Acevedo's Blog

Search This Blog