Can one appreciate the deep beauty of science, without mastering calculus, quantum mechanics or molecular genetics? I reckon the answer is yes, but I know at least one Nobel laureate disagrees with me. Sir Harry Kroto made the following comparison during a tense press conference on Wednesday: "Try to explain the culture and the depth [...]

What can be done about global health? It’s the question on everyone’s minds following Peter Agre’s moving talk on malaria ‘without borders’ earlier in the week and Christian De Duve handing the baton of all the world’s challenges to the young researchers in the last lecture: "Our generation has made a mess of it… the future [...]

Strawberry red, tangerine orange, banana yellow, honeydew green and plum purple. These are some of the cheesy names for the glowing molecules that were developed in Roger Tsien’s laboratory. To be fair, these names do make one thing clear: Roger Tsien has managed to design and produce fluorescent molecules of almost every colour in the [...]

The future of medicine is contained in "The Four P’s": Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory. Aaron Ciechanover, speaking on a panel on the future of biomedicine at the Lindau meeting, explains: "We may have the ability to profile patients before they get sick, therefore we may have the ability to predict diseases – and also ‘preventative’ [...]

This is the 61st year that the Nobel Laureate Meetings have been held at Lindau. The conference was held for the first time in 1951, funded by the wealthy count Lennart Bernadotte, as an effort to restore the international scientific ties that had been severed by the war. The count’s daughter, Bettina Bernadotte, has been [...]

Sir Harry Kroto gave a talk yesterday that was unlike any other lecture at the Lindau Meetings so far. Kroto didn’t talk about the work he had done, or about his life as a scientist. Instead, he gave a dazzling presentation showing scores of images to his audience. He kept shifting gears from art to [...]

I fear I have already offended Professor Torsten Wiesel only one question into our interview. The softly spoken man and gentle man sitting in front of me is a Nobel Laureate for his work on identifying specialist cell functions in the visual cortex. The Swedish laureate won the prize in 1981, and I am speaking to him [...]

Between the laws of the universe and the rules of life lies a bridge. That bridge, said Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn today, is chemistry. Lehn made his point by asking a simple and intriguing question at the start of his lecture: how does matter become complex? How did elementary particles eventually gave rise to the [...]

Joke van Bemmel (imagine how to say it with a Dutch accent – ‘y’ for ‘j’), is a researcher from The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The enthusiastic 29-year-old van Bemmel is nearing the end of her PhD, and is currently applying to find the ideal postdoc position. The dream is to: "just be doing nice, [...]

Nobel laureates, like all scientists, have published their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Their initial results, theories and thoughts in these publications have been preserved in the digital archives of the scientific literature, as if they have been frozen in time. I thought it would be a nice idea to go back to these papers, and [...]

With excitement building about an announcement due tomorrow from scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider, today’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting talks kicked off with the Higgs, explored some mysterious anomalies with neutrinos and looked forward to some practical applications of spintronics coming soon in information and communication technologies. (You can read all our coverage [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Microsoft founder Bill Gates thrilled a crowd of 566 young researchers from 77 countries gathered here June 26 for the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates, and he wasted no time in telling them what to do. His advice was borne of his own trajectory from technologist to billionaire to philanthropist. [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Play hard. Learn to explain what you do to people who know nothing about science. Put your collaborators’ needs first. A Thursday panel here at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate Lectures at Lindau gave young scientists tips—sometimes counterintuitive—about what it takes to succeed. Play Hard. “I really don’t think you have to work hard,” [...]

LINDAU, Germany—Quick: What do MRI machines, rockets, fiber optics, LCDs, food production and welding have in common? They all require the inert, or noble, gas helium for their use or at some stage of their production. And that helium essentially could be gone in less than three decades, Robert C. Richardson, winner, along with Douglas [...]

LINDAU, Germany—What steps led to the origin of life on Earth? Scientists may be zeroing in on that most profound of questions. “We’ve gone a long way to showing” the processes that “set the stage” for cellular life on Earth, Jack Szostak said Tuesday here in his talk at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate Lectures [...]

LINDAU, Germany–What’s the best way to address a politically charged topic such as the future of energy? Remove the politics. “We’re going to skip over the politics,” Robert P. Laughlin, who won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, told a rapt audience of young scientists and others here at the 60th annual Nobel Laureate [...]

LINDAU, Germany–An astronomer once told me about how he was often miserable growing up as the picked-on nerd. Nobody, he said, had ever told him the big secret: that if you stick with science, you win. You will have a fascinating career, meet and collaborate with intelligent and passionate people, and even get to travel [...]