NOBEL PRIZE: Canadian geneticist in the running
Media firm’s predictions a tradition
WINDSOR, ONT. — Canadian world-class geneticist Steve Scherer — who stands out for showing how much humans stand out from one another — could end up winning a Nobel Prize.
So says the Thomson Reuters list, which has accurately forecast 35 Nobel Prize winners since its inception in 2002.
On Thursday, Thomson Reuters included Scherer, a native of Windsor, as a candidate to win the prestigious award in physiology or medicine. Scherer is among 27 on the media company’s list, which has nothing to do with the secretive Nobel decisions but has become a pre-prize tradition that generates buzz in the scientific community.
“It’s an absolute honour just to be on a list of mainly giants of science,” Scherer said. “It’s independent validation of our work because the system they (Thomson Reuters) use is completely unbiased.”
The Nobel predictions are based on the number of citations in scientific journals and Scherer, the director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, is cited a lot.
In 2004, Scherer and fellow Canadian Charles Lee, who was then at Harvard University, helped discover copy number variation, a type of genetic difference between people. Though Scherer concentrates on detecting and treating autism in children, his work allows earlier, better diagnoses for a number of diseases.
Winners of the 2014 Nobel Prize will be announced Oct. 6 through Oct. 13. Meanwhile, talk of a possible Nobel inspires a lot of people, including Scherer.
“We hope to use the renown that comes with this and other awards to our advantage to get lots of funding for research toward our goal, which is to help families,” Scherer said. “We have a lot of really good discoveries in the pipeline. We’re trying to apply this type of information to develop better diagnostics and treatment for kids with autism.”
Thomson Reuters gushed about the work of Scherer and Lee, along with Michael Wigler of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York who independently helped discover large-scale copy number variation.
The much-discussed list also includes Peter Howitt, a Canadian-born professor emeritus at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who has a shot for a Nobel Prize in economics. Howitt’s theories focus on innovation and economic growth.
Though it’s impossible to know what chances someone named on the Thomson Reuters list has to actually win, Scherer is well aware that about 25 per cent of members of past lists have claimed a Nobel Prize, while others have earned most major scientific prizes.
That’s why the 50-year-old married father of a 10-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl feels so elated that he’s even deemed in the running.
“I told my wife that in the very short term I planned to do really tedious grunt work, to stay grounded,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s easy to get your head in the clouds.
“It has been a good year for me so far.”