On Friday, November 16, Convocation Hall’s imposing dome was surrounded by an even more imposing spectacle: several limousines pulled up to deliver seven Nobel laureates who would speak at the Nobel Prize Centennial Lectures: A Canada-Sweden Celebration.

The auspicious event, planned to roughly coincide with Stockholm’s Nobel Week—which will celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Prize—was the brainchild of U of T president Robert Birgeneau. By inviting all Nobel laureates who were born or educated or who worked in Canada to give a series of lectures, he hoped that Canada and Sweden would be drawn closer together through recognition of research excellence.

Lennart Alvin, Canada’s Swedish ambassador, was quick to compliment Birgeneau’s aspirations. “Our two countries have a lot in common,” he said. He stressed that both Canada and Sweden place great value on education, research and development and bringing the fruits of scientific discovery to market.

Most of the laureates who spoke at the event were scientists, but James Orbinski (who received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Doctors Without Borders) brought a much-needed humanitarian perspective to the event. For, as he opined later in the day, as much as science and technology have improved First World nations, bringing the fruits of research to underdeveloped societies would improve international security far better than any missile defense shield.

Here’s a brief taste of the series:

John Polanyi

Professor Polanyi is U of T’s perennial prizewinning wunderkind. Raised in England and educated in the U. S., he came to U of T’s Department of Chemistry in 1956 and has been here ever since. His groundbreaking research into reaction dynamics—which probes the fundamental mechanisms of chemical reactions—earned him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986.

His talk, which opened the lecture series, was appropriately holistic, entitled How Discoveries are Made, and Why it Matters. “What is a discovery?” he began. “What a discovery is not, is a fact. It’s a story.”

Polanyi reinforced the notion that great scientific knowledge is not arrived at by following a strict set of rules. There are no rules for having an idea, he claimed—much like writing a poem or falling in love.

A great deal of coming up with meaningful answers is asking the right kind of questions, and this skill cannot be learned from a book. He claimed that scientists must consult their inner compasses when considering which questions to ask and what experiments to perform. “A scientist depends on his world view,” he said. “We succeed only in proportion to the novelty and charity of our world view.”

Although Polanyi claims that a nose for great discovery can’t be learned, he did say that a young scientist can pick up a lot of clues on how to do good research from a mentor. He thinks that quality apprenticeships are necessary to train the scientists of the future.

“The students of Nobel Prize winners are most likely to win Nobel Prizes,” he concluded.

Andrew Shally

Dr. Andrew Shally is a world expert on hormones. Most of us associate these powerful chemicals with zits and horny teenagers, but pioneers like Shally showed that they influence everything from human growth and development to cancer treatment.

Shally was born in Wilno, Poland in 1926 but emigrated to Canada in 1952, where he received a doctorate in endocrinology from McGill University. His talk was much too technical for the average layman, but demonstrated how much one successful researcher can accomplish in a lifetime. Shally won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the hypothalamic hormones, especially LHRH. LHRH is instrumental in the human body for controlling follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), two hormones essential for the proper function of the female reproductive cycle.

But Shally also discovered that certain cancerous tumours possess receptors to LHRH, and that changing the concentration of LHRH in the body can sometimes control cancer.

In recent years, Shally and his colleagues have focussed on making chemicals that have a very similar structure to LHRH. He shows that when tumours are bathed in these chemicals, they tend to occupy and disable the LHRH receptors on the surfaces of the tumour cells. So if any LHRH is present near the tumour, the LHRH can’t interact with the receptors, making the cancer easier to treat.

Sidney Altman

For many, the first thought that comes to mind when imagining Nobel-winning scientists is that of an elite group of white-haired geniuses, comparable to the likes of Albert Einstein. Admittedly, it was with this stereotype in mind that I attended the Nobel Prize Centennial Lectures: A Canada-Sweden Celebration at Con Hall. However, I soon realized that most of the speakers were relatively ordinary people who had simply worked hard and made extraordinary discoveries. Take Dr. Sidney Altman, for example. In 1989, Altman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of RNase P—a catalytic RNA enzyme. Most of the time, proteins are the workhorses of the cell—they catalyze the chemical reactions that keep us alive. RNA is a cousin of DNA, the genetic material. When your cells read the DNA code so proteins can be made, a carbon copy of the DNA is made with RNA; this copy is read by a cell’s protein making machines. It used to be thought that RNA was confined to this process and was pretty inactive in other areas of cell metabolism. RNase P is an enzyme that works in concert with these protein machines to speed up production. It was known that it was comprised of both a protein strand and an RNA strand. Altman and his team of researchers looked in bacteria and found that the RNA strand of the complex is catalytic on its own. His discovery shattered convention because it was thought that only proteins were able to do any work in the cell. His discovery also provides insight into how life may have begun billions of years ago—before proteins ever existed.

Altman is currently exploring ways of utilizing RNase P to reduce the expression of genes inside cells, which involves “fooling” the enzyme into slicing up desired molecules. Mastering this technique could allow us to switch off the activity of the flu virus, the common cold, and perhaps even the AIDS virus, by simply chopping up their RNA transcripts. Altman concluded his speech by encouraging the students in the audience to work as diligently as he had, as it took him over a decade to discover catalytic RNA. Maybe it’s true that scientists like Dr. Altman are rare geniuses who comprise an elite group—after all, it’s not very often you pass someone on the street who is doing research that could put an end to AIDS. Then again, the Nobel laureate that followed Altman at the podium didn’t know how to work the data projector. Maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.