The medicine prize (over physics and chemistry) has the advantage of being more directly applicable to people's lives.  People with no intrinsic interest in science sometimes care about medical news because they are worried that they or someone they know will get sick. 
 
Physics, or at least particle physics and cosmology, had the advantage over chemistry that these fields deal with Big Questions like "where did the universe come from?" 
 
Chemistry has a lot of practical use, but the uses tend to make our lives better (Better Living through Chemistry), but tends not to deal with the big questions or directly save lives.  People who aren't interested in science aren't going to follow what's going on in chemistry.  You can see this in any bookstore. 
 
As a side note, we really need a Nobel Prize in biology.  In the last few years, biologists have been stealing the chemistry prize.

That is just what I would expect Eric Raymond to say based on his vociferous political opinions. As a software engineer myself I would not have characterized him as a "serious software expert" in this regard--when has he ever dealt with scientific data?

I happened to read the first chapter of _The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History_ today. The author, Fred Previc, thinks that handedness is an indirect effect of human bipedalism (and thus will not be found in the genome). Specifically, he thinks that due to the mother's sometimes upright, sometimes seated, etc. position, the fetus lies asymmetrically during the third trimester of gestation, leading to lateralization. Possibly his theory is contradicted because lateralization is more widespread among non-bipedal primates than he thinks?

Is there any genetic data from the Russian fox-taming experiment?