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Two Americans Won a Nobel Prize, Because We’re Not Idiots

Two Americans Won a Nobel Prize, Because We’re Not Idiots

Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have taken home 2012’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry, after the brains at Stockholm recognized their groundbreaking work for something with an awful lot of fancy words in it:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two researchers had made groundbreaking discoveries, mainly in the 1980s, on an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors. About half of all medications act on these receptors, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs. The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.

Whew. Reading that paragraph was like going to a college for geniuses. Congratulations to Mr. Lefkowitz and Mr. Kobilka for doing something that, in the only real part of that that makes sense to the common person, “will help scientists come up with better drugs.” Please enjoy your Nobel Prizes responsibly, lest you accidentally publish your research somewhere where unsuspecting readers could come across it by accident and have their brains melt from the sudden effort …

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