Editorial pubs.acs.org/cm
The Nobel Prize, Social Media, and Materials
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his editorial was written on the Friday of the anticipated week of Nobel Prize announcements (October 6−10, 2014), which started with the Medicine Prize on Monday and ended with the Peace Prize today. On the Tuesday of the week prior, Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) held a live “Nobel Prize Hangout” on YouTube to talk about contenders for the Chemistry Prize, which was hosted by C&EN’s senior editor, Carmen Drahl, and deputy assistant managing editor, Lauren Wolf, and had as guests the chief editor for Nature Chemistry, Stuart Cantrill, a citation analyst from Thomson Reuters (the corporation that runs Web of Science), David Pendlebury, and the editor of Chemistry Today of the RSC, Neil Withers.1,2 Lila Guterman of Science News participated via Twitter. In a rather entertaining discussion, this group went through their list of possible contenders for the Chemistry Prize with their reasons for each, which ranged from recent high profile awards (Japan Prize, Kavli Prize, and Wolf Prize, for instance), to citation analytics, to gut instinct. The sense from the discussions was that this year would be a “materials year”, and since several of the names proposed were highly cited Chemistry of Materials authors (John Goodenough, Galen Stucky, and William Moerner, for instance), we were excited. Because the “hangout” fortuitously took place during my graduate materials class (composed of 20 students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds), we watched in real time and tried our hand at participation via Twitter. As the predictions were bantered about on YouTube, some names sparked recognition in the students’ eyes, while those heard for the first time became the source of discussion afterward. The idea of the hangout might strike some as a touch frivolous (since it is clear that the Nobel Prize committee has a mind of its own), but I believe that events such as these are actually very important from an educational standpoint. The banter helped to draw us out of our own areas of expertise and reminded us of the incredibly good and interesting science going on in areas outside of our own. Scientists do not have mainstream celebrity status, and even for practicing researchers, it is challenging to know the identities of leading researchers in areas distant from where we practice our art. Another useful aspect of the hangout was the chance to see and hear editors discussing their thoughts in real time, in an interactive manner; electronic paper submission lacks a human element, and having the chance to see these people in real-time, each as a face and a voice, was important. In the end, it certainly was a materials year, with the Physics Prize awarded for the development of the blue light-emitting diode (LED) and the Chemistry Prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”, or “how the optical microscope became a nanoscope”.3 Congratulations to this year’s Nobel Laureates, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura (Physics) and Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell, and William E. Moerner (Chemistry).
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i40/Nobel-Prize-Hangout.html. (2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iVHkLeOolY. (3) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/ 2014/popular-chemistryprize2014.pdf.
Jillian M. Buriak, Editor-in-Chief
© 2014 American Chemical Society
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Published: November 11, 2014 6087
dx.doi.org/10.1021/cm5037343 | Chem. Mater. 2014, 26, 6087−6087
