For one week in October each year, the announcement of the Nobel Prizes lands arcane scientific concepts on the front pages of the papers and briefly imbues staid research labs with the carnival atmosphere of a Hollywood gala. On October 8, scientists at Rockefeller University in New York City got their turn in the spotlight, celebrating the crowning of Roderick MacKinnon, a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics, as a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for 2003. McKinnon responded by providing a personal perspective on what it means to win a Nobel. DISCOVER reporter Laura Wright was on the scene.
It is the wee morning hours of October 8, 2003, and Roderick MacKinnon lies asleep in his bed in his quiet summer house on Cape Cod. At around six o’clock, he wakes to his telephone ringing. It’s Wendell Chin, an assistant in his laboratory at Rockefeller University. “You’ve won the Nobel Prize,” Chin says. He’s just seen the news on the Web. In disbelief, MacKinnon tells Chin to get off the phone: He wants to go online to see the news himself, but he has only a dial-up Internet connection. MacKinnon logs on and does a quick Google search on Nobel Prize. There’s no mention of his name or anyone else’s under Chemistry. Wendell must be wrong, he thinks. He logs off. If it were true, surely someone else will call soon.
MacKinnon never gets back to sleep. The phone rings again. Another caller congratulates him. “Did you hear it from anybody from Sweden?” MacKinnon asks. No, just from folks at Rockefeller. Another call. Same news. But this time the person on the line is Paul Nurse, the president of Rockefeller University and a Nobel laureate himself. A credible source, MacKinnon decides. Finally, he believes that he has indeed won a Nobel Prize.
The potassium ion channel's selectivity filter allows
