When the controversial and talented physicist Edward Teller was doing a PhD. with the great Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig, the question asked at the end of every group meeting that focused on a complex sequence of problems was “Wo ist der Witz?”, supposed to be translated as “What is the point”? but…

Hotels in Lindau don’t do air-con, although I’m pretty sure the Nobel laureates were keeping cool in theirs. So it has been a week of hot, sweaty nights for most of us here. How I longed for a dial with a minus sign on it. Had such technology been installed, I would have whacked that…

Waste is not usually a popular topic for polite conversation. Biochemists also avoided it for many years, thinking of protein degradation as a general process that simply gets rid of unwanted biological waste. It was not until Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose discovered the ubiquitin-based protein degradation system that the specificity and centrality…