# Have you met any Nobel Laureates?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-met-any-nobel-laureates/531440>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [March 5, 2010, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-met-any-nobel-laureates/531440 "2010-03-05T17:29:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-met-any-nobel-laureates/531440/61 "2010-03-08T17:53:18Z")

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I’ve met a bunch. I used to work at the Smithsonian as a AV guy who helped out visiting lecturers.

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**Author:** ![Aeternalis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/82dd89/32.png) [@Aeternalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aeternalis)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-met-any-nobel-laureates/531440/62 "2010-03-10T17:44:11Z")

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This is where lounging around in academia scores you points on the (not-so) cool scale.

I met Oliver Smithies, who co-won the prize in 2007 for developing the technique behind creating knockout mice (homologous recombination). He’s also credited with the invention of gel electrophoresis. He’s a sassy, down-to-earth old man, and showed us copies of his grad school notebooks, pointing out how he was in lab on Saturday evenings and Christmas morning.

About a year later, I inadvertently had dinner with Rayla Temin, the wife of Howard Temin, who discovered reverse transcriptase.

I also had Jonathan Patz–a lead author of the IPCC who shared the prize with Al Gore–as a guest lecturer for a class, but he was a tool.

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**Author:** ![mischievous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@mischievous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mischievous)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-met-any-nobel-laureates/531440/63 "2010-03-10T18:38:45Z")

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Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had dinner with David Baltimore at his house, where he tried to convince me that the near-total absence of female faculty at MIT wasn’t because they were sexist, it was just that MIT “doesn’t have very family-friendly policies”.

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