This is an easy one. Your task for today is to identify the molecule shown on the right. Be as specific as possible.In addition you have to identify the Nobel Laureate who was awarded a Nobel Prize for—among other things—working out the chemical structure of this molecule.
The first person to correctly identify the specific molecule and name the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are two ineligible candidates for this week's reward.
THEME:
Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureates so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings.
Correct responses will be posted tomorrow along with the time that the message was received on my server. I may select multiple winners if several people get it right.
UPDATE: This was much harder than I expected. The winner is Marc Perry, co-author of the textbook from which the drawing is taken. He recognized it as a strand of DNA—I assume everyone got at least that far. Marc figured out that the Nobel Laureate had to be Sir Alexander Todd. He adds,
This was an excellent quiz because it forced me to learn a relevant fact that I was previously ignorant of. I never recall learning of this individual and his work, but based on the fact that there would be no repeats on the list of Sandwalk Laureates, _and_ on my intimate use of the website for NobelPrize.org (for my course on personalities in science, HMB305--shameless plug here), I was able to use the power of a search engine and the process of elimination to inform my guess.If you're a student at the University of Toronto take Marc's course next year. You can also take the course that we teach together: HMB210H "Popular Scientific Misconceptions."
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