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Some of science’s most brilliant minds will be catapulted from academic obscurity next week when the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Medicine or Physiology are announced.
Established more than a century ago by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the awards represent the pinnacle of scientific achievement and recognize transformative breakthroughs that often take decades to emerge.
In addition to the enormous publicity, the prizes also attract some criticism, sometimes leading to controversy and resentment over who is selected and who is excluded, said Martin Rees, a British cosmologist and physicist and former president of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific society Company.
Rees said a challenge for the Nobel committees is the increasingly collaborative nature of most scientific research. The image of the lone genius having a Eureka moment is long gone, if it ever really existed. Additionally, discoveries can be made simultaneously by different teams.
However, according to the rules set by Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel selection committees can only honor up to three people per prize. That requirement could prove to be a headache, Rees said.
“It may be a project where several people have worked in parallel and they single out some and not others. It may be that there is a team, and it is not obvious that those they have singled out from the team are the dominant figures,” said Rees, the Royal Astronomer of the United Kingdom and author of “If Science Is to Save Us.”
Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
According to the rules set by the founder Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Prize selection committees can only award up to three people per prize.
For example, in 2017, the Nobel Prize winner in physics recognized the discovery of gravitational waves – “waves” in space generated by colliding black holes at a distance of a billion or more light-years. The major papers reporting this discovery had nearly 1,000 authors, Rees noted. However, only three were awarded the prize – Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne.
Another oft-discussed candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Chemistry is the mapping of the human genome, a transformative project that was only fully completed in 2022 and involved hundreds of people.
David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at the Clarivate Institute for Scientific Information, who identifies “Nobel-worthy” people by analyzing how often colleagues cite their most important scientific papers over the years, agrees that the three-person rule is a represents a limitation.
“It’s really become a big shift in science that there’s more and more team science – huge groups tackling harder problems, international collaborative networks,” Pendlebury said. “This rule of three seems to be an obstacle if they want to recognize a team.”
The regulation that a prize can only be awarded to three people comes from the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, which is responsible for fulfilling the intentions of Nobel’s will, according to the Nobel Prize website. Peter Brzezinski, secretary of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Committee, said there were no plans to change the rule. However, he said the committee follows a detailed process once nominations are made by the end of January.
“We begin the process by asking a number of experts from around the world to write reports describing the area in which the discovery was made, outlining the key discoveries in the field, and also mentioning people who have made the most important contributions,” he explained via email.
“We all read relevant literature, attend conferences and write reports even within the committee,” Brzezinski added. “Over time, we often manage to identify a limited number of scientists who made the discovery. If this is not possible, we cannot propose a prize to the Academy.”
The Nobel committees typically highlight work that took place decades earlier – a look back that is often necessary because it can take time for the significance of some scientific research to become clear.
The Nobel Prize winners also focus on three scientific disciplines as laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will. Areas such as mathematics, computer science, earth and climate sciences and oceanography are excluded.
Even within the areas of chemistry, physics and medicine and physiology, there are only five areas out of 114 different scientific sub-disciplines According to a 2020 study, they account for more than half of the Nobel Prizes awarded between 1995 and 2017. These are particle physics, atomic physics, cell biology, neuroscience and molecular chemistry.
However, Rees noted that a long-term view and greater recognition of certain areas can sometimes leave Nobel committees out of touch with current scientific priorities.
One example is artificial intelligence, or AI, which is changing people’s lives at an unprecedented pace.
Two hot names in the field are Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, the Google DeepMind creators of AlphaFold – an AI program that decodes the 3D structures of proteins from amino acid sequences. They won the $250,000 Lasker Prize this year and the Breakthrough Prize a year earlier.
Since her key paper was published just over two years ago, it has been cited more than 8,500 times, Pendlebury said.
“This is just incredible, in my experience, given how quickly the citations have accumulated, so it’s obviously a huge, important intellectual discovery,” said Pendlebury, who has been compiling his list of “prize winners” since 2002.
The Nobel committees have occasionally handed out awards for recent breakthroughs – such as when the 2020 chemistry prize went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, less than 10 years after their important 2012 work on the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique – but Pendlebury says a Der Nobel Prize for AI this year is still a long way off.
He said that Nobel committees, at least for science prizes, were “inherently conservative.”
Another point of criticism of the Nobel Prizes is the lack of diversity among the winners. In recent years, more and more female scientists have received the call from Stockholm, but it has been more of a trickle than a stream.
Last year, chemistry prize winner Carolyn Bertozzi was the only female winner of a science prize. There were no female science recipients in either 2021 or 2019, when the Nobel Committee asked nominators to consider diversity in gender, geography and field. Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez shared the physics prize in 2020, the same year as Doudna and Charpentier’s chemistry win.
Pendlebury said he believes a lack of diversity on the Nobel stage is essentially a pipeline problem.
“You’re looking at papers that were typically published 20 or 30 years ago, when the number of women in science at the elite level was not as high as it is today,” he said. “I think as time goes on, more and more women will be chosen.”
Others point out that the problem is further evidence of systemic bias in science, since women are already less likely to be mentioned or credited as lead authors in scientific papers.
“There are several women who have made Nobel-level contributions to science, contributions for which male colleagues have been recognized but they have not,” said Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Harvard University. “These examples prove that even qualified women were systematically ignored.”
Rees attributes the diversity problem to a lack of transparency. The nomination list of Nobel Prize winners is secret, as are the nominators, and documents revealing the details of the selection process are secret from the public for 50 years.
Of course, these flaws and gaps only matter because the Nobel Prizes are far better known than other science prizes, Rees added. He prefers so-called challenge prizes like the XPrize, which incentivize future efforts to solve an important problem rather than rewarding past successes.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be announced on Monday, followed by the Physics Prize on Tuesday and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday. The Nobel Prize for Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Thursday and Friday, respectively.