10 great discoveries without a Nobel

The ritual of Nobel speculation, particularly about who will win the three science prizes, got the editors at National Geographic thinking: What amazing discoveries haven't won? We asked our Phenomena science bloggers, science editors, and select contributors to pick their favorite advance or invention that was passed over, National Geographic reports. Here are their ten picks for discoveries and inventions that haven't won a Nobel, but sorely deserve one. The World Wide Web When the National Geographic folks asked what discovery deserves the Nobel Prize but never won, my first instinct was to ask my followers on Twitter. After they gave me a few candidates, I Googled "Velcro" and "dark matter" and "embryonic stem cells" and read about these discoveries. Then it occurred to me: What could be more deserving of the Nobel Prize than the invention I had so relied on to learn about inventions? Beginning in the 1960s, researchers in the U.S. federal government created computer communication networks that would evolve into the Internet. But I'd give the Nobel to British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 proposed the idea for the World Wide Web and in 1990 created the first website (a page describing the Web). The Web democratizes information, whether dumb videos of dancing cats or brave tweets from the Arab Spring. And information is power. -Virginia Hughes, Phenomena blog: Only Human

The First Genome A lot of people wonder why there has been no Nobel Prize for one of science's most humongous achievements: the completion of the human genome in 2001. Perhaps it's the sheer humongousness. For all its importance, the human genome wasn't a discovery or an invention-it was an engineering project, requiring the scaling up of automated DNA sequencing to industrial proportions. As Human Genome Project scientist Eric Lander said at the time, "You don't get a Nobel Prize for turning a crank." One might get a Prize, however, for inventing the crank in the first place. Six years before the human genome, Craig Venter and his colleagues had shown that automated DNA sequencing and an assembly technique called whole genome shotgun could be combined to read out the entire code of a free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. The methods employed are essentially the same as the ones Venter's private company later scaled up to sequence the fruit fly and human genomes, and the same as what other labs have subsequently employed to crank out the codes of hundreds of other species. The Nobel committee would be hard pressed to select the three scientists most responsible for this first triumph of genomics. But Venter should be among them. -Jamie Shreeve, National Geographic executive editor for science

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