Sir Harry Kroto gave a talk yesterday that was unlike any other lecture at the Lindau Meetings so far. Kroto didn’t talk about the work he had done, or about his life as a scientist. Instead, he gave a dazzling presentation showing scores of images to his audience. He kept shifting gears from art to science, to education, only to switch back again.

At one point, Kroto showed a scene from the movie ‘The Third Man’, for reasons that will become clear later in this blog post. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the movie, ‘The Third Man’ is about a young man, Holly Martins, who plans to attend the funeral of an old friend, Harry Lime, in post-war Vienna. It soon becomes clear that Lime’s death has been staged, and that he is up to his neck in crime. Lime has disappeared in Vienna, a city that for Holly soon becomes a foreign and hostile labyrinth.

I fear I have already offended Professor Torsten Wiesel only one question into our interview. The softly spoken man and gentle man sitting in front of me is a Nobel Laureate for his work on identifying specialist cell functions in the visual cortex. The Swedish laureate won the prize in 1981, and I am speaking to him at the 61st meeting of the Nobel Laureates in Lindau.

I ask him: "I'm interested in how you have used your science as a springboard to work in human rights and peace and other humanitarian issues?"

He disagrees. "I wouldn't phrase it that way, he says. "I didn't have initial plans to get into all these things, like human rights. But it sort of happened, since I am inclined with a certain amount of compassion towards human rights and civil rights. When asked to do things, it's hard to say no," he chuckles.

Wiesel was at the lab bench for 40 years, and then was president of The Rockerfeller University, a biomedial research college in New York, between the ages of 68 and 75. After retiring from that post, Wiesel decided to devote himself to humanitarian work, especially finding research opportunities for young people around the globe. He says: "Science is always interesting… but as you get older, I'm 87 years old, you realise your limitations and focus on other things."  

Between the laws of the universe and the rules of life lies a bridge. That bridge, said Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn today, is chemistry.

Lehn made his point by asking a simple and intriguing question at the start of his lecture: how does matter become complex? How did elementary particles eventually gave rise to the thinking organisms that we are?

The answer is self organization, said Lehn. Elementary particles join to form atoms on their own, just like ants join to form a colony. In between the atom and the organism, there’s chemistry. "Chemistry is all about making keys for locks and locks for keys", is how Lehn defined his scientific discipline. And it is true: chemists design and make molecules so that they fit and bind to other ones, just like the keys that fit in their locks.  

Being the clever chemist that he is, Lehn took this approach one step further. Given the right set of molecules, he showed, the molecules can self-assemble into a larger structure, without any tinkering on the chemist’s part. He gave several examples of such self-organizing structures that he has made this way, such as molecular grids and nanocylinders. All it took for the nanoscopic cylinder to form was a mix of three linear molecules, four flat ones and 12 ions.

Last week, self proclaimed "geek," Miss California, Alyssa Campanella made beauty pageant history...by default. When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was one of only two delegates to use the scientific definition of the word "theory" in her response.

The honey-drenched, colloquial, conjecture-based definition that the majority of her competitors clung to was, yes, diplomatic. Miss California, now Miss USA, however, did not aim to please or to appease the 60% of Americans that a 2009 Gallup Poll concluded do not believe in Evolution.

Joke van Bemmel (imagine how to say it with a Dutch accent - 'y' for 'j'), is a researcher from The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The enthusiastic 29-year-old van Bemmel is nearing the end of her PhD, and is currently applying to find the ideal postdoc position. The dream is to: "just be doing nice, cool, interesting science."

She is excited to tell me about the study of chromatin that she has worked on with others in her lab, which was published in Cell last year. Chromatin is a combination of proteins and DNA in the nucleus , and is 'important for the regulation of transcription', the researchers wrote. Van Bemmel tells me it's too soon to say what kinds of implications the basic research into the types of chromatin will have.

A few weeks ago, I was graced with an honorary doctorate in social media from Social Media University, Global. My dissertation has been wonderfully received; I have been given high accolades and several once closed opportunities have opened. I have been humbled by the response and am sincerely grateful that people have been touched by my journey.

And yet, there’s more to the whole story. While Social Media has given me the PhD behind my name, I would never have attained this level of success without the one subject that has played a major role in my life for the last 40 years: science.

Or more specifically, sharing science.

Sharing was indoctrinated in me by my mother, Patricia, when I was young. She had been born and raised in India, spent time under the tutelage of Mother Teresa, and worked in England as a nurse’s assistant prior to coming to Canada; her story alone could fill a novel.

Nobel laureates, like all scientists, have published their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Their initial results, theories and thoughts in these publications have been preserved in the digital archives of the scientific literature, as if they have been frozen in time.

I thought it would be a nice idea to go back to these papers, and see whether they contain traces of remarkable insight or glorious discovery. Are there paragraphs that hint at the future recognition that its writer would receive?  Does the Nobel prize-winning sentence exist?

Of course not. It is ridiculous to suggest that the advancement of science can be captured by a single sentence, or even a single paper. Scientific understanding is a process, and does not arrive via a stroke of genius. Even the Nobel laureates have built on the knowledge of the scientists who came before them.

Still, I think it is an interesting exercise to find out how the laureates that will attend this year’s Lindau meeting initially reported their findings. I therefore reread their key papers, and picked out the sentence that I think best represents their Nobel prize-winning work.

Yesterday's opening ceremony was concluded with a panel session that featured Bill Gates, Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, Sandra Chisamba and Jonathan Carlson. Together they discussed how we should deal with threats to global health, such as HIV and malaria, and how young scientists could be stimulated to research these important, but relatively neglected topics.

Jonathan Carlson was part of the panel as a computer scientist working for Microsoft. This doesn't mean that he is trying to improve Internet Explorer or working on the next iteration of Windows. Quite the contrary. At Microsoft, Jonathan studies how HIV adapts to its host. Earlier this week, I interviewed Jonathan Carlson about his work and expectations of the conference. 

So you are researcher at Microsoft. How does that work? Are you part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?

In her lecture today, Ada Yonath compared her scientific quest to determine the structure of the ribosome to a climb of the Mount Everest. Time after time she thought that she had reached the peak, only to discover a taller summit. While her journey was long and arduous, Yonath eventually reached the top and was rewarded with a spectacular view of the ribosomal landscape. She shared some of those insights with her audience today. 

To solve the structure of any molecule, scientists first need to make crystals from it. The same is true for the ribosome, one of the cell's most important molecules (it converts RNA into proteins). But crystallizing the ribosome turned out to be impossible using conventional methods. As unlikely as it sounds, Ada Yonath first found some evidence that ribosomes can crystallize in a paper about polar bears.

Even if you adore red meat, you'll put off your big juicy steak by hearing what Harald zur Hausen has to say about it. At the 61st Lindau meeting, the Nobel laureate spoke about his current hypothesis about why beef causes colorectal cancer. He thinks it might contain a nasty pathogen that infects us that then causes the disease but the source hasn't been discovered yet.

Colorectal cancer has a high incidence among men and women worldwide, and cases are increasing. Researchers blame this on the 'Westernisation' of lifestyles, including eating more red meat, in economically transitioning countries, such as China. 

Right: Harald zur Hausen at Lindau, photo: Christine Ottery