Stockwatch: Silence – Nobels and whistles
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded on 3 October to Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann for discoveries in innate immunity, and to Ralph Steinman for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. While the headline news is that Steinman's award will proceed even though he died (on 30 September) without knowing of the prize, the timing of the award can serve to remind those in the life sciences that good science – even Nobel-quality science – is not a surrogate for or predictor of subsequent commercial success.