That NY Times article is a very interesting read. I've reproduced it here since a lot of people don't have subscriptions. Nice to know a real Nobel laureate liked the movie!
----
Tickling Worms Leads to Discoveries, and a Measure of Fame
By CLYDE HABERMAN
On Wednesday, if all goes as planned, Martin Chalfie will fly to Stockholm for a batch of celebrations leading up to a ceremony on Dec. 10. That is when he will accept the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It should be exciting. But he will miss the scheduled opening of a new film back home in New York.
In the scheme of things, that may seem like an exceedingly minor concern. But this movie happens to be about a scientist who wins the chemistry prize.
Dr. Chalfie, a biology professor at Columbia University, said that his teenage daughter Sarah had “gotten me somewhat addicted to going online and looking at movie trailers.” While on the Web a couple of weeks ago, he discovered this film, “Nobel Son.” He wanted to see it. But it opens next Friday, when he will be away.
“In something I don’t think I would have done in any other circumstance, I contacted the publicist for the movie,” he said. “When she found out I was one of the winners this year of the chemistry prize, she said, ‘Oh, come to the showing we’re going to have.’ ” So he did, and he loved it, especially the fact that the film’s Nobelist, played by Alan Rickman, is “a completely despicable person.”
Winning one of the world’s most prestigious prizes does come with perks, as Dr. Chalfie keeps learning since the Oct. 8 announcement that he had won the prize with two other scientists, Drs. Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien.
They were honored for their work in green fluorescent protein, which is used in molecular biology to observe and track living cells and their proteins. One hope for this fluorescence is to enhance research in a range of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and cancer.
The “funny thing” about winning the chemistry prize, “is that I’m a biologist,” the Harvard-educated Dr. Chalfie said in his spare office at Columbia. His principal research involves a transparent roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, for insights into the sense of touch. “I basically tickle worms,” he said.
Being in no danger of ever receiving a Nobel ourselves, we called on Dr. Chalfie out of curiosity about how life might change after winning the prize. “You rapidly learn that fundamentally you don’t change,” said Dr. Chalfie, who is 61. “But things around you do, to some extent.”
Some past prize winners have cautioned him that the next year will be “pretty intense.”
“You get invited to places that you never expected to be invited to,” he said. “People want to be associated with it,” including some who have reached out to him after years without contact. One woman from his high school days in Skokie, Ill., told him, “You know, several of my friends had crushes on you.”
“I wrote her back,” Dr. Chalfie said, “to say, ‘Why are telling me this now? Back then, it would have been a very useful piece of information.’ ”
The true Nobel perk, though, could not be more serious. “If there are things that you feel deeply about,” he said, “you can get an opportunity to say something, and at least some people will listen.”
In this regard, one of the first things he did was add his name to a letter already signed by 61 Nobel-winning scientists who supported Barack Obama for president. “One gets the impression that there is a respect for learning and knowledge in the Obama campaign that was not there in the others,” Dr. Chalfie said.
Like many scientists, he is dismayed by how the Bush administration has pushed science to a back burner so distant that it is barely on the stove. Budgets for research have shrunk. “Ideology,” he said, “plays a role instead of scientific information.” Though he feels that Senator John McCain is better than President Bush in this regard, he also finds Mr. McCain overly eager to bash science.
Take the campaign attacks on Mr. Obama’s attempt to get $3 million in federal funds for “an overhead projector,” as Mr. McCain called it, for a Chicago planetarium. You’d have thought from his stump speech that this was a projector for showing home movies.
“To me this was a prime example of belittling science and particularly science education,” Dr. Chalfie said. A planetarium projector is complex and, naturally, expensive. “It’s to learn about astronomy,” he said. “It was a tool for the support of science education, and a very important one.”
Politics aside, there is in general “a bit of an assumption that we have learned enough, that we actually know all the basic bits and so now what we should do is apply that basic information,” Dr. Chalfie said. Not so. In his own field, “the truth is that we are woefully ignorant about the basic building blocks of our bodies and how these all work together,” he said. “There’s a vast amount of basic research to be done.”
And that is the significance of the Nobel for him. Sure, movie invitations are fun. But profound issues are at stake. “It’s really a prize about basic research,” he said.
reply
share