The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes continuing to crown some of the greatest achievements in the history of modern science.
The prizes are exclusive by design and their prestige is enforced through a system of secrecy: the reasons for picking each laureate are locked away for 50 years even as the selection process happens behind closed doors. In keeping with a historical tradition of all prizes being distinguished by their laureates, the Nobel Prizes are sought after so scientists can enter the same ranks that hold Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.
Of course the institution like others of its kind reinforces the need for itself, creating self-fulfilling conditions by mooching off the reputation of scientists who have laboured for decades in specific social, economic, cultural, and political contexts to produce knowledge of incredible value and in return conferring a reputation of a different kind. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre tried to decline the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964.
Then again, the way the award-giving foundation conducts the prizes’ announcements has also helped to ameliorate the neglectful treatment many sections of the mainstream media, especially in India, have meted out to the sort of scientific work the prizes fete, even if the foundation’s conduct also panders to the causes of such treatment.
The prizes
I think the Nobel Prizes for physiology/medicine and for physics caught many science communicators off guard because they were both concerned with very involved pieces of work with no direct applications. The medicine prize was for the discovery of microRNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation, which when it happened overturned what biologists had assumed was a complete picture of how the body’s cells regulate genes to make different proteins.
The physics prize was for the first work on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which produced a machine-friendly version of cognition by drawing on ideas in biology, neuropsychology, and statistical mechanics. If this work hadn’t happened, ChatGPT may not exist today, but several other developments built on the first ANNs to produce more new knowledge whose accumulation eventually led to ChatGPT et al. Ergo, calling ChatGPT et al. an application of the first ANNs would be thoroughly misguided.
The chemistry prize — for the development of computational tools to design proteins and to predict their structures — presented a slightly different problem: the tools’ advent meant humans suddenly found themselves spending much less time on deciphering the structures, yet the tools didn’t, and still don’t, say why proteins prefer these structures over others. Scientists still need to figure out the why by themselves.
All this said, I’m grateful this year as I’ve been before for the prizes’ ability to throw up an opportunity for all sections of the media to discuss scientific work many of them would most likely have neglected otherwise. Reading the research papers that first reported the existence of microRNA and the papers that explained how models to understand exotic states of matter lent themselves to the first ANN concepts allowed me personally to refresh my basics as well as be reminded of the ability of blue-sky scicomm — as a direct counterpart of blue-sky research, one that isn’t fixated on applications — to wow us.
This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel and Mahima Jain.
The Rosalind Lee issue
To reiterate from the introduction, the Nobel Prizes are one institution with deep and well-defined flaws. And I have learnt from (journalistic) experience that there’s no changing its mind. It’s too big to change and doesn’t admit the need to do so, and its members have had no compunctions about articulating that in public. The vast majority of scientists also subscribe to the prizes’ value and their general desirability. So it is my view today that we work around the prizes and/or renounce the prizes altogether when dealing with the award-giving group’s choices.
A third option is to change the foundation’s mind but this requires a considerable amount of collective work to which I doubt more than a few would like to dedicate themselves. Mind-changing work is demanding work. Then again the problem is if you fall anywhere in between these two more-viable options, you risk admitting other possibilities vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes that (I imagine) you’d rather not.
For a background on the Rosalind Lee issue, I suggest you browse X.com. My notes on it follow:
(i) The Nobel Foundation has historically reserved the Nobel Prizes for persons who conceived of important ideas and made testable predictions about them. The latter is important. IIRC this is why SN Bose didn’t win a Nobel Prize for coming up with Bose-Einstein particle statistics. Albert Einstein could have won instead because he built on Bose’s ideas to predict the existence of a particular state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate. Who came up with the testable predictions in the paper that won Victor Ambros a share of the medicine Nobel Prize?
I’m not directly defending the exclusion of Rosalind Lee, who was the first author of that and in fact many of the more important papers Ambros published in his career. Instead, I’m pointing to an answer that could explain her exclusion with a reminder that the answer is flawed and that it has always been flawed. I suppose I’m saying that we couldn’t have expected better. 🙃
(ii) Physics World recently published an interview with Lars Brink, a physicist who has been part of the decision-making for many physics prizes the last decade. Brinks bluntly states at one point that the Nobel Academy doesn’t give the prizes to collaborations or in fact even more than three people at a time because they don’t want 5,000 people (for example at CERN) claiming they’re Nobel laureates all of a sudden. There is an explicit and deliberate design here to keep the prizes exclusive, like Hermes handbags.
(iii) The first author is often the one who designs the experiment, performs it, collects the data, analyses it, etc. — basically everything beyond, but not necessarily excluding, the act of having an idea itself and including most of the legwork. The Nobel Prizes however are not awards for legwork. This sucks because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the people required to produce good-quality scientific knowledge.
Thanks to the influence the prizes exert on the scientific community, the people who are left out also fade further — in the public view and also in terms of not being able to benefit from the systematic rewards vouchsafed for the Nobel laureates who are now institutions unto themselves. The fading is likely compounded for people already struggling to be noticed in the scientific literature: the “technicians” who equip, maintain, and operate laboratory instruments, among others (a.k.a. the Matthew effect). Of course the axis of discrimination is gendered as well: as one friend put it, “the ‘leg work’ of science is historically feminised”, and when awards and other forms of recognition exclude such work they perpetuate the Matilda effect.
Overall, whether the prize-giving body is aware of these narratives and issues is moot. What matters is that it acknowledges and responds to them — which it has signalled it won’t do. QED.
(iv) In fact, all these rules of the Nobel Prizes are arbitrary. It’s effectively a sport and a poorly managed one at that. You make up a playing field, publicise some of the rules, keep the governing body beyond reach or reproach, hide the scorecard, and then you say you have to jump five feet in the air to qualify. The outragers are raising their voices for Rosalind Lee (what does she want, by the way?) but not for the first authors of all the other papers by other laureates over the years. If they don’t belong to marginalised social groups, is it okay to leave them out? Then again these are moot questions, pursuits leading nowhere at all thanks to the Nobel Prizes’ presumption that they’re not of this world.
The Nobel Prizes have also wronged many women, but I can’t claim to know whether there’s a case-by-case explanation (with arbitrary foundations) or if it was a systematic program to do so. Both seem equally likely given how slow attitudes have been to change on this front. This said, just because women have been wronged doesn’t mean all forms of reparation will be equally useful. More specifically, what will breaking the (arbitrary) rules do to change for women in science?
Obviously this is part of a broader question about the influence of the Nobel Prizes on doing science. Mukund Thattai ran a survey on Twitter years ago asking scientists about why they got into or stayed in science. “Because of a Nobel laureate” received the fewest votes in a large pool of respondents. It wasn’t a representative survey but it does hint at an important piece of reality. Once we start to argue that including Rosalind Lee would have been better, we also tacitly admit the Nobel Prizes matter for who chooses to stay in science and who is condemned to fade — but do they?
On the other side of this coin lie all the other prizes that did fete Rosalind Lee along with Victor Ambros. If we’d like to have any prizes at all (I don’t but YMMV), shall we celebrate the Newcomb Cleveland Prize more than the Nobel Prizes? Likewise, by railing against Rosalind Lee’s exclusion on arbitrary grounds, what do we hope to achieve? It may be more gainful to spread awareness of the Nobel Prizes’ flaws and finitude and focus on the deeper question of how the opportunities to win X award can influence the way science is done, who does it, and why.