credit where it's due

Last year two Canadians, Tony Pawson and Charles Taylor, won Japan’s Kyoto Prize, which has nothing to do with climate-change treaties but has been, for more than 20 years, that country’s most prestigious award for great thinkers. Charles Taylor you may know: he’s the McGill University philosopher. Tony Pawson is a Distinguished Investigator — I’ve only now learned he’s no longer Director of Research, and I suspect he’s greatly pleased to be out of that job — at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. I’m told by people who know this stuff better than I do that his research on how cells communicate with one another may already have won him his Nobel — there is, as you can imagine, a long lag between discovery and recompense in this line of work.