The phenomenon of the third floor Nobel laureates
In real estate, they say the key is location, location, location. At Harvard, the same could perhaps be said of the Nobel Prize. A single floor in a single building housed the research laboratories of three Nobel laureates. Six more were trained there, going on to receive the coveted honor after leaving Harvard. A 10th researcher followed the same path, although he was on the floor above. The place? The third floor of the Bio Labs on Divinity Avenue. Walter Gilbert, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry, worked on the third floor as he developed ways to work out the sequence of genetic building blocks in DNA. Thirteen years earlier, in 1967, George Wald won the Nobel in medicine or physiology for his research into the biochemistry of vision; and in 1962, James D. Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, was awarded the prize in medicine or...