Champagne corks might have been popping last night in New York and Seattle, home base for the winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but there were no celebrations for the German team who run the Nobel Prize Bourse, an Internet-based virtual stock market designed to predict prize winners.
Around midday on Monday (October 4) in Europe, Richard Axel, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Columbia University in New York, and Linda B. Buck, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, were named winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on olfactory reception.
But Axel and Buck had not been suggested as possible winners by any of the participants of the Nobel Prize Bourse, according to Christoph Kepper, an e-commerce doctoral student at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, who manages technical aspects of the Bourse's Web site.
"It's disappointing. ...
