Has the Science Nobel lost its way?

That the Nobel prize has been the most consistently prestigious accolade of the 20th century, particularly in science, is in no doubt. Despite the high acclaim the Nobel signifies worldwide, there are a few nagging questions.

Has the original desire of Alfred Nobel, who instituted the award in 1895, been fulfilled? Has the award always gone to the most deserving? Should discoveries take precedence over inventions? Have the rules followed in deciding the award stood the test of time or become archaic, reminding one of the caution sounded by Rabindranath Tagore against becoming trapped in the “dreary desert sand of dead habit”? Will the Nobel lose its sheen now that more lucrative prizes are being instituted by the modern breed of science and technology leaders such as Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg?

While controversies surrounding Nobel for peace, literature and even economics are routine, science prizes too are not without their share of major controversies. Essentially, the contentious awards have set off debates , often acrimonious, among the scientific community on issues such as who should be awarded and why; the purpose of the three-limit rule; bias against women and bias in favour of Western researchers; why not posthumously and so on.

Many misses The gravest of the charges includes the Awards Committee’s historic failure to recognise the greatness of Einstein for his theory of relativity. One of the most controversial awards related to the successful extraction in 1922 of insulin from dog’s pancreas to treat diabetes. While the award met the clause of the Nobel mandate which said that it should be for achievement in the previous year, there was a bitter fight on the 1923 Award for medicine as to who all the credit should go to among a clutch of researchers. Dr Banting, a Canadian, who got the award, was publicly angry and even threatened to return the medal since his assistant Best was not included for sharing the prize and, instead, his supervisor Dr MacLeod was declared as his co-winner who, according to Banting, did not do much.

Incidentally, Banting is the youngest awardee till date at 35 for physiology or medicine and, needless to say, the discovery of insulin was the biggest breakthrough on par with discovery of serum therapy and vaccines. The stigma of failure by the Nobel Committee to acknowledge the contribution of the lady scientist Rosalind Franklin for the structure of DNA was also telling. Even when the evidence was so overwhelming, it appeared almost as if the Nobel committee waited for her death so that it could be given to Watson and Crick Einstein’s case is ironical. It was like giving someone his school diploma when the student had defended successfully his doctoral thesis.

Einstein was never awarded a prize for the Theory of Relativity; instead, he was given an award, in 1921, for his work on ‘Photoelectric Effect’ on which he had published a paper in 1905. Linus Pauling, one of the greatest scientists, also got a prize only once, while relatively lesser mortals in science have been awarded more than once.

Ignoring the greats A major controversy surrounded the premature award to the neurologist Antonio Egas Monitz for lobotomy, untested brain surgery to cure mental illness. The “Three Limit Rule” by which not more than three can share an award resulted in the denial of contribution for the development of mass spectrometry in protein chemistry to Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas; the award was given to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn.

So, also in 2013, while the prize for how the cosmos began should have been awarded to five physicists, it went to Peter Higgs and Francoise Englert, it was denied to Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and Tom Kibble. Both the groups of scientists arrived at the same conclusion but through different routes in the same year, 1964.

Politics too has had its share in denying the prize to outstanding scientists. Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann missed sharing the chemistry prize for nuclear fusion with Otto Hahn as they fled Germany from the Nazis.

Arguments have been advanced in a paper published by Mathias Rauterberg in Nature that the award has moved away from its “original intention of rewarding the greatest contribution to society”. Thomas Alva Edison was not given a prize for inventing the bulb or Graham Bell for telephone. Instead, prize was given to JJ Thomson and Robert Millikan for the discovery of the electron.

No system of awarding prizes can be perfect. However, the Nobel appears to be out of sync with modern day science which involves research teams rather than individuals or limited to three. There is also scepticism about the awards, since there is a long gap between landmark discoveries and Nobel recognition.

Wrong recognition Does Nobel Prize motivate research or what has its impact been on scientific community, has been occasionally the subject of symposia. Perutz, who got his Nobel for work on globular proteins at a comparatively young age of 45, felt that receiving the prize greatly boosted his young career.

However, most people get the prize when they are quite old and may not be productive. A counter point was also made by Hoffman who got his prize for his theory on chemical reactions; the public spotlight that results from receiving the award has a downside as scientist may come under “unfavourable” public scrutiny.

One of the reasons for insufficient appreciation of the impact of scientific discoveries by the public is the lack of scientific literacy. Only in the 21st century is a lot of emphasis being given to educate youngsters in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Will the hard-earned prestige of Nobel endure through this century too?

That will not only depend on the adaptability of the administrators of the awards but the changing dynamics of discovery, invention, adaptation in a mass scale and, above all, rapid spread of scientific literacy.

Discoveries and inventions are now being made at an amazing pace, and so are their applications. The best example is the World Wide Web or internet for which, by the way, Tim Berners-Lee did not get a Nobel. Money-wise, prize money for Nobel is valued at only $1.2 million, whereas new science prizes have set far higher standards. Breakthrough Prize (2012) in life sciences and fundamental physics with prize money of $3 million, Tang Prize (2013) for advances in sustainable development and biopharmaceutical science with prize money of $1.7 million, and Queen Elizabeth Prize (2014) for engineering, $1.5 million are some of them.

Ashoke Sen, the leading string theorist, was an early recipient of the Fundamental Physics Prize of $3 million in 2012. It is not clear if the Nobel committee would have been awarded the Physics prize to the string theorist as the award is given so far only to discoveries which have attestable hypothesis.

Some of the recipients of the new prizes feel that “the new Nobels could rival the prestige of the old ones in about 30 years, if they can constantly identify high-calibre winners.” However, says Lars Heikensen, executive director of the Nobel prizes based in Stockholm, “If we fail, it will be because we fail to maintain that level of respect, not because other prizes are acting as rivals us. We have been in this business for 110 years and we plan to be in it forever”.