In two weeks, the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute will award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology.

Who will win? We don’t know for sure - but I think that we can make some educated guesses.

Science is dominated by a phenomenon called “the Matthew effect”. In short, the rich get richer. Getting one grant makes it more likely you’ll get the next. Winning one prize makes it more likely you’ll win another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

I looked back at the last 20 years of Nobel Prizes in Med/Phys.

83% of them had won at least one of three prizes before the Nobel: the Lasker, the Gairdner, or the Horwitz Prize.

So, let’s define the pool of the most likely Nobel Laureates as people who have won one or more of those three prizes. Using data on these prizes from Wikipedia, that creates a set of ~190 candidates.

Who’s at the top?

5 people have recently won all 3 - Allison, Varshavsky, Horwich, Ambros, Ruvkun.

Allison got the Nobel in 2018. Varshavsky, Ambros, and Ruvkun made pathbreaking discoveries, but they work close to fields that have already been awarded Nobels, which may leave them out of luck.

That leaves Art Horwich, pioneer of protein folding and chaperones.

Gairdner, 2004
Horwitz, 2008
Lasker, 2011

So that’s guess #1.

Who else could win it? I think that we can narrow down the list by looking at fields of biology that haven’t been recognized recently. In particular, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a pure *genetics* prize. (Not since telomeres, 2009?)

I think that a prize related to gene sequencing, gene editing, or gene regulation may be likely.

Gene regulation - epigenetics is due! Likely David Allis (winner of both the Lasker and Gairdner).

Gene editing - CRISPR will win. It’s a question of when, not if. Zhang/Doudna/Charpentier/Horvath/Barrangou shared the Gairdner. Pick 2 or 3 of them?

My guess is that CRISPR will get the Nobel after the Lasker, but a win for CRISPR will never be surprising.

Gene sequencing - this is tough, and could go in multiple directions. The Human Genome Project could win (Collins/Venter/Lander won the Gairdner and Hood won the Lasker).

I could also imagine a mapping prize (Botstein/Collins) or a tech prize (Klenerman/Balasubramanian/Hood).

So - those are my guesses. Who do you think will win?