Nobel Prize season is quickly approaching, and Thomson Reuters has released its annual predictions about who may be receiving a call from Stockholm.
The information company sifts through research citations to compile their predictions; it has predicted 27 winners since it started making a list back in 2002.
For the prize in medicine or physiology, Thomson Reuters predicts that the laurels may go to the University of Edinburgh's Adrian Bird and Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Howard Cedar and Aharon Razin for their work on DNA methylation and gene expression. Thomson Reuters, though, also highlights the work of the University of California, Los Angeles' Dennis Slamon on the HER-2/neu oncogene and Yoshinori Ohsumi from the Tokyo Institute of Technology for his studies of autophagy as other possible winners.
In chemistry, Thomson Reuters says that the University of California, Berkeley's Paul Alivisatos, Chad Mirkin from Northwestern University, and Nadrian Seeman at New York University have a shot at winning for their work on DNA nanotechnology. Again, though, it notes that Bruce Ames from Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and UC-Berkeley may be honored for inventing his mutagenicity test.
Thomson Reuters also says that the physics prize will likely go to François Englert and Peter Higgs for their prediction of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson particle. In addition, they say that the economics prize may go to Sam Peltzman and Richard Posner, both from the University of Chicago, for their work on economic theories of regulation.
For literature, online bookmakers Paddy Power and Ladbrokes are favoring novelist Haruki Murakami, and for the peace prize, Paddy Power likes Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen activist who was shot by the Taliban.
The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes are to be announced early next month.