诺贝尔化学奖究竟应该授给谁?——MALDI的研究发表竞争透视

Who Deserves the Nobel Prize in Chemistry?——A Study on Competition in Experimentations and Publications about MALDI

文章分别考察了日本岛津制作所年轻工程师田中耕一和德国法兰克福大学两位教授上个世纪80年代展开MALDI研究的经纬及其相关研究成果的发表情况。文章指出:尽管双方各自独立地开发出了MALDI法,但前者当年只是以专利的形式,而后者则是以论文的形式公开自己的研究结果,不过,无论是从实验研究,还是从论文发表来看,田中都称得上是使用MALDI法对蛋白质分子展开质谱分析的第一人。文章最后还对田中这位非西方出身,只有大学本科学历,且无SCI论文的企业工程师最终脱颖而出,荣获诺贝尔化学奖一事的意蕴进行了分析。

This paper respectively reviews the process of studying the MALDI and the publications of relevant research results carried out by young engineer Koichi Tanaka in Shimadzu Corporation and two German professors in the University of Frankfurt during the 1980s. The author points out： Although both parties independently developed the methods of MALDI, the former merely published his research results in the form of patents while the latter in the form of papers at that time. However, either from the perspective of experimentations or publications, Koichi Tanaka deserved to be called the first person who made mass spectroscopy to the protein molecules using the meth-ods of MALDI. Finally, the paper analyzes the implications of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to an enterprise engineer, who was of Non - Western origin, merely had bachelor＇ s degree and even without SCI papers.