Chalfie

Martin Chalfie, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry (today):

Dr. Chalfie never received the phone call from Sweden. “I slept through it,” he acknowledged at a news conference at Columbia. He said he had inadvertently turned down the ringer on his telephone a couple of days ago. He woke up at 6:10 in the morning and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment.

“I was a little bit annoyed that they weren’t answering their phone,” he said. “I then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook.”