Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 January 23

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January 23

Why did Nobel prize consider "genome editing" as Chemistry field?

Why did Nobel prize consider "genome editing" as Chemistry field instead of Medical field? Rizosome (talk) 07:55, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

It's biochemistry, pure and simple. It's a frequent complaint of "hard" chemists that there's too much "biology" in the chem Nobels, but biochemistry is chemistry too. Granted, giving the chemistry Nobel for super-resolution imaging in 2014 was stretching the definition a tad. Fgf10 (talk) 11:04, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Fluorescence is a physical chemistry process. The types of work that went into that prize would be right at home in any physical chemistry journal. At least one of the winners has published in Journal of Physical Chemistry B, for example. --OuroborosCobra (talk) 20:13, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

There are not hard, bright lines between the various science fields, and for subjects which straddle those line, like biochemistry or physical chemistry, it gives the committees some leeway in deciding how to award the prize. It should be noted there is not only 1 committee, there's a different Nobel Committee for each subject. --Jayron32 11:53, 25 January 2021 (UTC)