A Nobel Prize for BLAST?

Although the Nobel prizes will be announced in coming weeks there is an increasing interest about possible winners. The winners of the prize for Physiology will be announced on Monday 5th. Like every year Thomson Reuters has predicted a list of likely winners in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics for year 2009. According to Thomson Reuters predictions scientific works leading to discovery of cell aging, solar cells and functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, are all top runners for the Nobel prizes for this year. As Thomson Reuters website suggests about methodology used for prediction

Since 1989, the Scientific business of Thomson Reuters has correctly predicted at least one Nobel Laureate each year with the exception of the years 1993 and 1996. David Pendlebury’s predictions, combined with those of Dr Eugene Garfield — Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters — have shown that citations in the journal literature reveal influential researchers who have contributed significantly to scientific advances, such as those recognized by the Nobel Prize committees

If higher citations counts and number of high impact papers are effective predictor of Nobel Prize winner then what are the odds that the creators of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST will win a Nobel Prize in Physiology. I know this is an extreme scenario but if you look on few facts then may be you will be equally surprise that what is coming in their way to win very first Nobel Prize for the Bioinformatics. For example the original paper about BLAST published by Altschul, et al. is cited more than 26,587 times. Similarly paper describing the Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST is cited more than 22,827 times. Apart from that early papers by David J. Lipman and W. R. Pearson describing rapid similarity searches of nucleic acid and protein data banks are highly cited too. Following is a list of 5 highly influential papers (in top 0.1% of their field) by Stephen Altschul, David J. Lipman and W. R. Pearson

Record 1 of 5
Title BASIC LOCAL ALIGNMENT SEARCH TOOL
Author(s) ALTSCHUL, SF; GISH, W; MILLER, W; MYERS, EW; LIPMAN, DJ
Source JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY 215 (3):403-410 1990
Times Cited 26587
Record 2 of 5
Title Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs
Author(s) Altschul, SF; Madden, TL; Schaffer, AA; Zhang, JH; Zhang, Z; Miller, W; Lipman, DJ
Source NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH 25 (17):3389-3402 1997
Times Cited 22827
Record 3 of 5
Title IMPROVED TOOLS FOR BIOLOGICAL SEQUENCE COMPARISON
Author(s) PEARSON, WR; LIPMAN, DJ
Source PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 85 (8):2444-2448 1988
Times Cited 8613
Record 4 of 5
Title RAPID AND SENSITIVE PROTEIN SIMILARITY SEARCHES
Author(s) LIPMAN, DJ; PEARSON, WR
Source SCIENCE 227 (4693):1435-1441 1985
Times Cited 3045
Record 5 of 5
Title RAPID SIMILARITY SEARCHES OF NUCLEIC-ACID AND PROTEIN DATA BANKS
Author(s) WILBUR, WJ; LIPMAN, DJ
Source PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 80 (3):726-730 1983
Times Cited 1416

If you look on the citations for other Nobel winning works you may realise that creators of BLAST are absolutely deserving of the award. For instance papers about the BLAST have been cited more than paper describing the Kary Mullis‘s Nobel winning work on Polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Top 5 cited papers on PCR are following

Record 1 of 5
Title PRIMER-DIRECTED ENZYMATIC AMPLIFICATION OF DNA WITH A THERMOSTABLE DNA-POLYMERASE
Author(s) SAIKI, RK; GELFAND, DH; STOFFEL, S; SCHARF, SJ; HIGUCHI, R; HORN, GT; MULLIS, KB; ERLICH, HA
Source SCIENCE 239 (4839):487-491 1988
Times Cited 14510
Record 2 of 5
Title ENZYMATIC AMPLIFICATION OF BETA-GLOBIN GENOMIC SEQUENCES AND RESTRICTION SITE ANALYSIS FOR DIAGNOSIS OF SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA
Author(s) SAIKI, RK; SCHARF, S; FALOONA, F; MULLIS, KB; HORN, GT; ERLICH, HA; ARNHEIM, N
Source SCIENCE 230 (4732):1350-1354 1985
Times Cited 6460
Record 3 of 5
Title SPECIFIC SYNTHESIS OF DNA INVITRO VIA A POLYMERASE-CATALYZED CHAIN-REACTION
Author(s) MULLIS, KB; FALOONA, FA
Source METHODS IN ENZYMOLOGY 155335-350 1987
Times Cited 3310
Record 4 of 5
Title ANALYSIS OF ENZYMATICALLY AMPLIFIED BETA-GLOBIN AND HLA-DQ-ALPHA DNA WITH ALLELE-SPECIFIC OLIGONUCLEOTIDE PROBES
Author(s) SAIKI, RK; BUGAWAN, TL; HORN, GT; MULLIS, KB; ERLICH, HA
Source NATURE 324 (6093):163-166 1986
Times Cited 1489
Record 5 of 5
Title IDENTIFICATION OF HUMAN-IMMUNODEFICIENCY-VIRUS SEQUENCES BY USING INVITRO ENZYMATIC AMPLIFICATION AND OLIGOMER CLEAVAGE DETECTION
Author(s) KWOK, S; MACK, DH; MULLIS, KB; POIESZ, B; EHRLICH, G; BLAIR, D; FRIEDMANKIEN, A; SNINSKY, JJ
Source JOURNAL OF VIROLOGY 61 (5):1690-1694 1987
Times Cited 325

Now some of you will argue that fundamental contribution of PCR was more bigger than BLAST. May be or may be not. Honestly speaking BLAST is one of the biggest fundamental contributions in area of molecular biology with application ranging from gene prediction to protein function prediction. Contribution of BLAST in our research cycle is so obvious that sometime we may not realize this. Just imagine where human genome project could have gone if there have been no tools like BLAST. To me BLAST is not a curse but it is cursed and it’s time for Swedish Academy to recognize the novelty and importance of BLAST that had withstood the test of time. I can see it coming but not sure when, not this year then perhaps in coming years.