Repost: BLAST deserves a Nobel Prize
Given that tomorrow (Monday October 3) the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be announced, I am linking to my 2-year old post arguing that BLAST deserves a Nobel Prize:
In terms of impact in the field, it’s undeniable that BLAST has been huge. These people created a verb! What modern biologist does not know what “blasting a sequence” means? The BLAST paper was, at one point, the most highly cited paper in history. The impact on physiology is undeniable.
Lipman and Gene Myers stand out for their contributions to the computational processing of biological sequences. (See how I phrased that in a Nobel Committee way).
[...]
[One] counterargument I’ve heard is that BLAST is mostly a method, but so was GFP [...] Does anybody believe that just the 1962 discovery of a jellyfish protein would have sufficed for a Nobel?
[...]
BLAST was definitely one of the most largest advances in the field of physiology in the last few decades. For this reason, David Lipman and Gene Myers should get a Physiology and Medicine Nobel Prize.
I also add that current favorite CRISPR is also mostly a method (the CRISPR Prize, when it comes, will be awarded for the method not the discovery of some DNA processing mechanism in a Streptococcus species.