The fickle food of fame

Abstract

How to Win the Nobel Prize—An Unexpected Life in Science J. Michael Bishop Harvard University Press, London, UK 320 pages, $18.50 ISBN 0 674 00880 4 ![][1] I first met J. Michael Bishop at a Gordon Conference in the late 1970s, just after Ray Erikson had discovered that Src was a protein kinase, and before Tony Hunter had realized that it transferred phosphate to tyrosine residues. It was an unnerving experience, because although I had had some experience of protein phosphorylation and protein kinases, whereas Mike had little or none, he had read far, wide and deep, and hadn‘t missed a trick. I felt myself to be in the presence of a superior being. I had a similar experience years later with Bishop's colleague Harold Varmus, this time in connection with protein synthesis. Together, Mike and Harold made a formidable team, as was confirmed in 1989 when they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Years after our first meeting, I found myself serving under Mike on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. Once, while we were chatting in a room in the Opera House, he recalled his first inkling of his Nobel Prize, which had come in that very room. “Where are you going to be in the second week … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif