The Nobel Prizes Need A Makeover

"This Monday, at precisely 11:30 a.m. Stockholm time, the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prizes will start rolling out in marathon fashion, as befits the world's most coveted award. The Pulitzer Prizes are distributed over lunch; the Academy Awards require a long evening. The Nobel announcements will cover eight full days, not counting the banquets and formal presentations.

The prize for physiology or medicine will be announced on Monday, physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, peace on Friday and economics on the following Monday. Most laureates will learn of their good fortune in a quick phone call just minutes before the world is informed. A few, given human error and different time zones, may find out only after the formal announcement. In one notorious incident in 1987, a call meant for UCLA chemist Donald J. Cram was directed to a sleepy Los Angeles rug shampooer named Donald O. Cram, who could barely understand the heavily accented caller. "Now, I do a good job on carpets," he remarked, "but this seemed a little excessive."

The Nobels have long been this way -- steeped in tradition, resistant to major change. Historically, most complaints have centered on the carefully shielded selection process -- the nominations are kept secret for 50 years -- as well as on the honorees themselves. The prizes for peace and literature have borne the brunt of criticism because their laureates are far better known to the public. What can one say of a peace prize that consistently rejected Mahatma Gandhi while honoring the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat? Or that selected Barack Obama in the early months of his presidency? "Why not give him the literature prize?" one observer quipped. "At least he's actually written a couple of books."

Why not, indeed? The famously Eurocentric literature prize has gone to just two Americans in the past 30 years -- one of them being Bob Dylan, whose award raised suspicions that the Nobel Committee, fearing a loss of relevance, was actively courting publicity, as it most likely had done with Obama. If true, it proved a losing gamble. Dylan skipped the ceremony, citing a previous commitment.

The latest wave of criticism, however, has focused on the awards for physics, chemistry and, especially, physiology or medicine. A 2017 article by Ed Yong in the Atlantic was titled "The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science." The criticism has less to do with the judgments of the selection committees than with the clash between the changing needs of these disciplines and the archaic rules imposed by founder Alfred Nobel more than a century ago. To informed observers, it has been clear for some time that the Nobels are in desperate need of a makeover.

Nobel, the Swedish-born inventor of dynamite, left most of his substantial fortune to the establishment of the five annual prizes that bear his name. (Economics was added in 1969.) His motive remains a mystery. Some historians cite Nobel's genuine love for the arts and sciences. Others point to his brother Ludvig's obituary, published several years before Alfred's death in 1895, which mixed up the two men and described the mistakenly deceased Alfred as "a merchant of death." He became "so obsessed with [his] posthumous reputation," said one biographer, "that he rewrote his last will" to ensure a safe send-off.

The document laid out Nobel's plan in meticulous detail. The prize money, "divided into five equal parts," would go to "those who during the preceding year shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The prizes would be open to all comers -- though the words "whether he be Scandinavian or not" certainly implied male dominance -- and there could be but one winner in each category.

A few grudging improvements have been made since the first prizes were announced in 1901. Three nominees may now share the award in each category, and their prize-winning contributions can occur at any point in their lives, not simply "during the preceding year." But the governing committee has also tightened the screws by ruling that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously -- or revoked.

Each change, however small, has been magnified by the Nobel mystique. Take revocation, for example. It's no secret that prizes in science have been awarded to Nazis, racists and misogynists, all of whom made vital discoveries benefiting humankind. There have been no serious public campaigns to revoke these prizes, and rightly so. The discoveries speak for themselves. But what should be done when the reverse situation arises -- when the work itself is later found to be flawed or even dangerous?

It's not an abstract question. In 1949, the prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to a Portuguese neurologist named Antonio Egas Moniz for introducing the lobotomy, a procedure designed to treat various mental disorders by severing the connection between the frontal cortex and the rest of the brain. News of his Nobel almost single-handedly turned this ghastly, irreversible procedure into a routine medical treatment, which 20,000 Americans -- most in state asylums -- received over the next four years. To this day, there are periodic calls for the revocation of Moniz's prize, which the Nobel Committee routinely ignores.

The science juries have always favored the individual over the group. It goes back to Nobel's preference for one winner per category, which made good sense when most scientists toiled alone and the best of them -- a Louis Pasteur or a Joseph Lister -- might single-handedly pull off a miracle. Times have changed, yet the rules, amended slightly to include three yearly recipients, still project a "winner-take-all" attitude in an increasingly collaborative scientific world.

Complicating this problem is the committee's preference for "original discoveries" over "practical applications." In doing so, it has denied the prize in physiology or medicine to some of the most fabled researchers of the past century, including Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. With his file now open for inspection, we can see that Salk was nominated and rejected for the prize on several occasions, the main obstacle being one juror's repeated charge that his work relied too heavily on the building blocks of others -- in short, it provided "nothing new."

Many scientists today consider this to be a serious misreading of Salk's research. His discovery not only saved countless children from paralysis and death, they note; it also proved that a killed-virus vaccine can provide a level of immunity equal to that of a natural infection -- something previously thought unlikely, if not impossible. Asked years later about the snub, Salk, beloved by the public, joked that it hardly mattered because "most people think I did win the Nobel Prize."

If one were to make a composite of the typical Nobel Prize winner in science, it would be a middle-aged American man, nurtured in elite surroundings, whose eureka moment occurred about 15 years or so before winning the prize. 

The U.S. has dominated these competitions, winning close to half the science Nobels since 1901, and the reasons are clear. The federal government pours billions of dollars into basic scientific research, supplemented by NGOs and academic institutions. Nine of the world's top 10 universities boasting the most Nobel laureates in science are in the U.S.: Harvard, MIT, Caltech, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Princeton and Rockefeller. The only outlier is the University of Cambridge.

There have been some notable exceptions. Between 1930 and 1943, the City Colleges of New York graduated 10 future Nobel Prize winners -- nine in the sciences. It's a stunning achievement, surpassing the combined undergraduate total of Harvard, Yale and Princeton in this period. These fiercely competitive children of immigrants faced religious prejudices that limited their access to the nation's top private institutions. All 10 were Jewish -- an ironic twist given the vitriolic antisemitism found in Alfred Nobel's private correspondence.

America's dominance can be partly attributed, in fact, to its role as a haven for scientists seeking freedom and opportunity. What began as a trickle in the 1930s with the arrival of refugees from Nazism became a steady stream by the 1960s, as the U.S. liberalized its more restrictive immigration laws. Since then, the number of Nobels in science won by Americans born elsewhere has skyrocketed. 

Immigrants have accounted for close to 40% of the prizes awarded to Americans in the 21st century. 

"The U.S. has built a phenomenal culture of welcoming," says Stefano Bertuzzi, an Italian emigre who heads the American Society for Microbiology.

The U.S. and much of Europe, including Scandinavia, now hold a virtual monopoly in these fields. There are a few exceptions -- Australia, Israel and Japan have won multiple awards in the new century -- but the world's two most populous countries, India and China, have been shut out almost entirely. India simply lacks the infrastructure to be competitive at this point, and China is plagued by a state-run scientific system short on creativity and mired in corruption.

The most serious inequity plaguing the science awards is the dearth of women laureates. It began with great promise when Marie Curie shared the physics prize with her husband, Pierre, in 1903, and won the chemistry prize outright eight years later, making her the only person to receive a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. But then the bottom dropped out. No woman would win another Nobel in chemistry until 1935 or in physics until 1963. The prize in physiology or medicine would not be awarded to a female researcher until 1947.

It wasn't for lack of deserving candidates. The record includes such luminaries as Lise Meitner, who discovered the phenomenon of nuclear fission with her colleague, Otto Hahn. Described by Albert Einstein as the "Marie Curie of Germany," Meitner would be nominated 48 times for a Nobel Prize, without success. Hahn alone received the chemistry prize in 1944.

Women have won just 61 of the 989 awards in all Nobel categories since the inception of the prizes, faring somewhat better in peace and literature than in the sciences, where the percentage of laureates hovers at around 3%. Even in modern times, the disdain for women scientists is on public display. 

At a conference in 2015, Tim Hunt, winner of the 2001 Nobel in physiology and medicine, declared: "Three things can happen when [women] are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry."

But the landscape in science is improving, with the number of female science laureates since 2000 equaling the total of the previous century. Last year, Carolyn Bertozzi won the prize for her work on bioorthogonal chemistry, which enables scientists to more easily build complex molecules and map how cells function. The 2020 prize in chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna in recognition of their breakthrough work in gene editing, and the 2020 prize in physics was shared by Andrea Mia Ghez for the discovery of a "supermassive compact object" at the center of our galaxy.

And women are rapidly entering fields once dominated by men. According to the National Science Foundation, the percentage of academic doctoral positions held by American women in engineering and the sciences has increased from 26.4% in 1991 to 38.5% in 2019. This may not translate into immediate gains, since the average age of a Nobel Prize winner in the sciences is close to 60. But change is on the way.

The problems with the Nobel Prizes in science today rest not with the winners, who represent the cream of their professions, but rather with the process that rewards them -- the obsolete rules, the lack of interest in collaboration, the limited categories, the yawning gender gap, the focus on academic pedigree. Few critics want to do away with the prizes, which provide an opportunity to celebrate scientific achievements on the grandest scale. The goal is to modernize the Nobels by getting them to better represent how cutting-edge research is now conducted.

That would require, in the first place, increasing the number of winners in each category. The "lone wolf" of scientific discovery is a disappearing species; collaboration is now the norm. Some have suggested that the science juries follow the lead of the peace prize jury, which has selected entire organizations in the past, such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and the 2022 winner, the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. Why not give the prize to a laboratory in which a groundbreaking discovery occurs, or at least to its major contributors, rather than to a single star?

Increasing the range of prize categories would also help. The Nobels simply have not kept up with a rapidly changing world. "The environmental sciences -- oceans and ecology -- aren't covered," writes the distinguished astronomer Martin Rees. "Nor are computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence." Given the prestige of the Nobel Prizes, he adds, "these exclusions distort the public perception of what sciences are important."

Nobel officials must also find a mechanism for reexamining the past. They could start by forming a committee to scour the files for cases where a truly deserving candidate was denied the prize for reasons of obvious prejudice -- a move that might require amending the rule regarding posthumous awards. Lise Meitner, for example. Or Jonas Salk. Or Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose invaluable contributions to discovering the molecular structure of DNA were exploited, but barely recognized, by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, the three men who went on to win the Nobel Prize and worldwide acclaim.

Alfred Nobel might have rejected some of these changes, but the prizes he endowed have already evolved beyond his original instructions and 19th-century social views. What remains, and should guide the prizes into the future, is the noble goal of his bequest: to honestly recognize those among us whose work has "conferred the greatest benefit" on humankind.

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David Oshinsky directs the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU Langone Health. His books include "Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital" and "Polio: An American Story," which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history." [1]

1. REVIEW --- The Nobel Prizes Need A Makeover --- The world's most prestigious prize no longer reflects how science is done or what fields matter, and it has been notably biased against women. It's time for reform. Oshinsky, David.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Sep 2023: C.1.