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Nobel Betting Begins

It's about 10 days until the Nobel Prize committee begins its announcements of this year's laureates, and the predictions are kicking into high gear.

For the physiology or medicine prize, Thomson Reuters, drawing on its bank of citations, says the time is ripe for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Michael Wigler, Charles Lee at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, and the University of Toronto’s Stephen Scherer to take home the prize for their work linking large-scale CNVs to specific diseases.

Conversely, Thomson Reuters says the prize could go to James Darnell and Robert Roeder, both at Rockefeller University, and the University of California, Berkeley’s Robert Tjian for their studies of eukaryotic transcription and gene regulation.

Or it could possibly go to David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, for determining the molecular mechanisms behind how pain is sensed.

Thomson Reuters also presents its predictions of potential winners in chemistry, economics, and physics.

Thomson Reuters has a decent track record of predicting winners as 35 of its predicted winners since 2002 have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize, though not necessarily in the same year.

Meanwhile, for the literature prize, bookmakers Paddy Power and Ladbrokes are favoring novelist Haruki Murakami, and Paddy Power likes Pope Francis for the peace prize.

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