Sorry, I was too busy winning my Nobel Prize

That's right, the mysterious guest blogger is an American. That gives me a one in sixty-million chance of being one of the five Americans who have thus far been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006. The most recent award in Chemistry went to Roger Kornberg, himself the son of a Nobel Laureate. How did the selection committee do? According to Jeremy Berg, the author of one of the leading biochem textbooks (id est, the one that I use), Kornberg's prize was "fantastically well-deserved."

Kornberg solved the crystal structure of RNA polymerase II in the act of transcribing RNA from DNA. RNApol II primarily transcribes mRNA, the messenger RNA which is later translated by the ribosome into proteins.