Image: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; GETTY IMAGES
Two teams of scientists simultaneously announce the discovery of a lifetime—a breakthrough that profoundly alters our view of the universe. A Nobel Prize is surely not far away. Yet the statutes of the Nobel Foundation state that the honor may not be “divided into more than three prizes at most.” A committee in Sweden now faces a knotty choice: Who among the teams' many worthy scientists deserves to win the world's most prestigious medal?
This scenario could easily apply to the search for the Higgs boson, which appears to have reached its climax [see “The Higgs at Last?” by Guido Tonelli, Sau Lan Wu and Michael Riordan, on page 66]. But it could also describe last year's Nobel Prize in Physics, for which three researchers representing two teams totaling 51 scientists were recognized for uncovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. These three winners were deserving. Yet they did not work alone. Many other researchers made equally important contributions but will not have the special asterisk reserved for Nobel laureates next to their name.
Snubs are not new to the Nobel, of course. Physicists Nicola Cabibbo, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa helped to predict a new family of quarks; today scientists use the “CKM matrix” to do calculations. Yet half the 2008 physics prize was split only between Kobayashi and Maskawa. That year's chemistry prize recognized three researchers for green fluorescent protein (GFP), now widely used as a cellular tagging tool. Not included was Douglas Prasher, the man who first cloned the GFP gene. After publishing his work in 1992, Prasher freely shared his insight with two of the eventual winners before his grant ran out. At the time of the award, he was driving a courtesy shuttle for an auto dealer.
The Nobel committees force a category error: they insist on awarding the prize to a few individuals, while in reality, the nature of the scientific enterprise has changed. Teams now perform the bulk of the highest-impact work. Whereas a century ago a patent clerk famously divined the theory of relativity in his spare time, discovering a Higgs boson requires decades of planning and the efforts of 6,000 researchers. No one person—no troika, even—can legitimately claim all the credit. The scientific papers that document the Higgs discovery are signed “The Atlas Collaboration” or “The CMS Collaboration,” with members listed alphabetically in appendixes that run more than 15 single-spaced pages.
As we see it, the Nobel Foundation has two ways forward. The first is to keep the three-honoree maximum in place, but to award organizations as well as individuals. The Nobel Peace Prize has long favored this approach. The committees that choose the science prizes have never recognized an organization, but nothing in the statutes of the Nobel Foundation prohibits it. Certainly an award split between the ATLAS and CMS collaborations would make a worthy first.
Alternatively—or perhaps in addition—the Nobel Foundation should amend its statutes to allow the award to go to more than three individuals. This adjustment could help solve the dilemma surrounding the award for the theoretical work that led to the Higgs. Six researchers developed the Higgs mechanism in 1964; five are still alive today and thus eligible for Nobel's honor.
In many ways, the Nobel Prize is a charming anachronism. Recipients fly to Stockholm and meet with the Swedish royal family in white-tie tuxedos. Other scientific prizes now offer larger cash prizes. Yet the Nobel continues to capture the world's imagination—and that of the scientific community—with a 111-year pedigree of offering exemplars of extraordinary lives spent in pursuit of truth and discovery. In the years since the prize was first awarded, the nature of that pursuit has profoundly changed. It is time that the Nobel did as well.
This article was originally published with the title Solve the Nobel Prize Dilemma.
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8 Comments
Add CommentThe Nobel Committee awarded a Nobel to "Doctors Without Borders", a very large world wide group, to rival the 'thousands" at CERN, who are equally deserving.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo team can replace a creative mind of a single bright individual. A really new, breakthrough idea is always born in a single brain. It can be later developed and elaborated by many others, but it is therefore even more important to recognize and award those who start all that. If the author wants to award Nobel prize to 6,000 people handling the particle accelerator, why not to add all the workers who manufactured the magnets, dug the tunnels, produced electricity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Team science" these days means that a scientific work is signed not just by its real creators but also by all sorts of "helpers" - academic administrators, sponsors, technicians, etc. etc. Scientific research itself is much less rewarding than scientific administration and management. Why don't we keep Nobel as one of the few incentives to reward a spark of individual scientific genius?
The peace prize is awarded by a different organization and has different rules. The awards in the sciences are under the control of the Nobel Foundation in Sweden whose "Statutes" contain the limitation of no more than three individual winners. The award winners are chosen by The peace prize is controlled by The Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeither organization has been particularly faithful to the instructions in Alfred Nobel's will. It specified that each annual award would go to "the person" "who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind". Nobel intended the entire award go to one person and that the one person would most likely be young, having just made an important contribution. Half of this year's prize in Medicine and Physiology went to Sir John B. Gurdon, who just celebrated his 79th birthday, for work done fifty years ago.
"You didn't build (create) this yourself. " It's the collective team that's responsible for the insight that made it possible. It makes my skin crawl.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt should go back to individuals and what was done in the previous year.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo 3 people is good enough, if the group is larger, than no award to anyone. I also question the 3, I would think it would be split between three people doing 3 independent things, than happened to be in the same year. Sounds to me like Alfred Nobel was not wanting teams at all, he was just giving accommodation to the possibility three different discoveries of equal value could have been discovered in the same year and the limit of 3 was just to make sure the that list of useful discoveries did not become 20 or 30 or eventually everyone getting an award.
I would add that it be something moderately useful, since that proves it is real, though what is useful is probably too subjective. The Higgs for example has not been discovered, it has been rendered statistically likely to have been found, which is not the same thing as discovered. Plus if it takes 6000 people to find something, then really there is no award to give out because it was not the effort or intellect of one individual making a breakthrough. As to the 5 guys still alive who came up with the idea to find Higgs, unless they are the ones who turned theory into reality, they have not done anything real, so no award.
I get the previous year stipulation too. It seems harsh because some discoveries may not have their value known for decades. However, totally irrelevant. If the original inventor did not figure out how to make it valuable upon invention, then how can he get credit when it was decades later and the efforts of others that actually took his invention and made it a winner. The originator would have nothing if not for their efforts and whoever came after would have nothing without the original discovery, this in effect makes a team and teams really should not get an award, at least not a Nobel. There are other awards.
Of course, even though Norway handles the peace prize, considering they handed the prize to a guy for just showing up and previously the inventor of modern terrorism, I would speculate that some of the Swedish controlled awards are being handed out to 80 year old physicists for something 50 years ago as a way to just hand out an accolade. In effect, the prize is not going to scientists for the discovery, that is just an excuse, they are really handing it out as a way to show prestige, sort of the same way the peace prize was handed out. Going by Nobel's rules, if the prize is only for the previous year, then it must be for the discovery and not for the person.
Expanding the Nobel Prize to teams? Not a good idea. There's enough nationalism at play even now over the current awards. This would make the team awards so politicized that they would become meaningless. Besides, only the politically astute administrators would get the recognition. Good scientists are not usually political because they don't have the time or inclination. Even now, the system fails, as in the case of Rosalind Franklin and the DNA discovery that lead to the Nobel for Wilkins, Crick and Watson. A team Nobel equals team politics. SA editors, please stick to science writing, and stop pushing politics into science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExpanding the Novel Prize to teams is, I think, is not a good idea - certainly - because it is very likely to become a game of rich scientists / organizations in some years. More over prizes may not go to really seminal ideas. Let me note the Letter of C. Sharp Cook in the American J. Physics, March 1980. According to his investigation, number of significant discoveries in science has decreased after 1970. This is indirectly evident in ever-increasing cost of research and I think we have to oppose this trend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCyclotron was a really good brain-child of Ernest Lawrence and deserved a Nobel. For some years, I am looking for such an idea.
Comments from Jarl-Thure Eriksson of The Millennium Technology Prize:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Editors suggest that the Nobel Prize in sciences should be open to groups. The subject is highly relevant, as such achievements are increasingly due to the work of large teams. Scientific teamwork deserves recognition. Universities are ranked annually. Similarly, research groups could be ranked on a “leading science” list of, say 50. The data would help in analyzing progress in science and improving identification of frontiers or omissions.
In contrast, society tends to iconize individuals. The media focus on success stories--and misfortunes. Even science needs icons. The objective is to identify a mental leap from one paradigm to a new insight. Such an event only takes place in the brain of a single person, even though environment moulds the contexts of individual reasoning.
The awards challenge is to find an idea's origin. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm nominated John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Gurdon succeeded first in cloning a tadpole from the mature intestinal cell of a frog. Yamanaka evaded ethical concerns related to embryonic stem cells by developing a procedure to create induced pluripotent stem cells. The elegant decision by the Nobel committee immediately won wide acceptance.
The Nobel Prize's exclusiveness is largely due to the revolutionary progress in the sciences during the 20th century. To quote Swedish author Jan Guillou, “Our grandparents entered the 20th century driving a horse cart, just over a half-century later man walked on the Moon.” Developments in science were reflected by the Nobels, beginning with x-rays and culminating with the transistor, both closely connected to basic research and the new physics. They also have a strong bearing on human welfare and the technological development to come. Alongside the prizes one can track chains of key mentors. Giants like Ernest Rutherford (Physics Prize in 1908) personally influenced a dozen future laureates. Mentoring has always been crucial for top scientists, a fact that underlines the value of individual impact.
Esteemed awards, like the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Japan Prize and the Wolf Prize, are all intended for individuals. Such awards encourage young people to make a career in science, and to focus. Ultimately, humans identify with laureates rather than organizations.
Jarl-Thure Eriksson
Chairman, International Selection Committee
The Millennium Technology Prize
Finland