Failure continues to characterize my record for predicting who will win Nobel Prizes. So far this century, my successes have been limited to just two direct hits: the 2010 literature prize to Mario Vargas Llosa for his socially and politically astute novels set in his native Peru and the 2013 chemistry prize to Martin Karplus for pioneering the use of computers in chemistry.

My near misses also total two: the 2010 chemistry prize to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (they won that year's physics prize) and the 2013 literature prize to Margaret Atwood (a different deserving Canadian woman, Alice Munro, won in 2013).

Why do I continue to air my speculations? As I remarked last year, science editors like me have to decide—sometimes daily—what research makes it into our publications and what doesn’t. Evaluating scientific importance is a big part of the job. If a member of the nonscience laity asks me for Nobel nominations at a party, I should have a ready answer, even one that (most likely) turns out to be incorrect.

Tumor suppressor genes

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be the first to be announced—on Monday, 6 October. I favor geneticist Alfred Knudson for the honor. In 1944 he began a multigenerational study of the causes of retinoblastoma, a form of retina cancer that afflicts children. His collection and analysis of clinical data led him to conclude, in 1971, that retinoblastoma is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which he named RB1.

Both copies of a patient's gene must undergo mutation for the disease to take hold, a requirement that Knudson called the two-hit hypothesis. One mutation doesn't suffice because the unaffected gene could continue to express the correct, tumor-suppressing protein.

Other tumor-suppressing genes have since been identified, including perhaps the best known, BRCA1 and BRCA2. The proteins that the two genes express help to repair broken DNA and to destroy cells whose DNA is irreparably broken. Mutations in the genes increase the risk of breast cancer.

Oscillating neutrinos

Tuesday sees the announcement of the physics prize. Some of my colleagues at the American Institute of Physics think that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will shift its attention away from particle physics, in which last year's winners, François Englert and Peter Higgs, made their respective discoveries. Even if my colleagues are right, I still asked myself which big, important idea in all of physics awaits science's highest honor. My answer: neutrino oscillations.

The oscillation of the neutrino between its three flavors—electron, muon, and tau—touches on several important questions. It explains why the flux of electron neutrinos from the Sun is one-third of the value you'd expect if you didn't account for flavor oscillations. Neutrino oscillations can't occur if all three flavors are massless, yet the standard model of particle physics presumes that neutrinos are massless. The existence of oscillations therefore requires the Standard Model to be extended somehow, potentially with new and interesting physics. Lastly, neutrino oscillations are turning out to be a promising region in which to search for the origin of CP violation and, with it, the origin of matter's preponderance over antimatter.

Who would be awarded a neutrino oscillation prize? The first strong evidence that neutrinos oscillate as they whizz through the atmosphere on their way to and through Earth came in 1998 from the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan. Confirmation that neutrino oscillations account for the deficit of solar neutrinos came three years later from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Canada. The leader of Super-Kamiokande, Yoji Totsuka, died in 2008. The physicist who devised the detection method, Takaaki Kajita, gets my vote the physics prize, as does Art McDonald, who led the SNO project.

Photolysis of water

In 1972 Kenichi Honda of the University of Tokyo and his former graduate student, Akira Fujishima, published a paper in Nature in which they outlined a simple recipe for splitting water into H₂ and O₂. The two ingredients were UV light and a catalyst made from titanium dioxide.

Given that the reverse reaction, the oxidation of H₂, could serve as a cheap and clean source of energy, the Honda–Fujishima effect inspired—and continues to inspire—the search for ways to split water with light. According to Google Scholar, the 1972 paper has been cited 13 501 times! Ultimately, TiO₂ did not fulfill its early promise as a path toward cheap energy, but its photocatalytic properties are now being put to use in other applications, including pollution mitigation and disinfection.

Honda died in 2011. I'd like to see Fujishima awarded the 2014 chemistry prize.

Peace, economic sciences, and literature

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five people chosen by Norway's parliament. Three politicians, a lawyer, and a bishop make up the current committee. I've no inkling whom they might pick. This year has not been among the century's most peaceful. But if the committee considers democracy as condition for peace, then I hope they award the prize to Hong Kong's Martin Lee. Since the 1980s, when the UK began negotiating with China over the transfer of sovereignty, Lee has insisted that the rights and freedoms of the territory's citizens can be upheld only through a democratic constitution.

The economics prize has tended to reward theoretical models, which makes it challenging for nonexperts like me to identify deserving work. But it's less challenging to identify successful economies. According to the World Bank, Poland's per capita GDP has tripled since 2000. Credit for that success belongs to the Polish people and their leaders, notably economist Leszek Balcerowicz, who served as the country's deputy prime minister and finance minister after the first post-Communist elections in 1989. The plan that Balcerowicz and his advisers implemented was harsh in its initial impacts, yet it set Poland on a path to prosperity. Balcerowicz deserves a Nobel.

Given the worlds' myriad languages and cultures, choosing who will be awarded the literature prize is perennially difficult even for the prodigiously well read. The selection committee continues to favor authors whose work is not only artfully written but also broad in its political and social ambitions. Writers in European languages have predominated, but not all European languages have been represented among the laureates' ranks. One that's missing is Welsh. For that reason and because I grew up in Wales, I nominate Alan Llwyd. The poet, critic, and screenwriter is perhaps the nation's foremost person of letters and is a master of Wales's traditional and demanding verse forms.