People missed this year’s Nobel Prizes
Winning a Nobel Prize is a matter of great prestige. Winning a Nobel Prize also means that a small number of people get the prize, while a large number of people are left out, even though they really deserved to win.
This is partly due to pricing rules. Alfred Nobel’s will did not say anything about the number of people who could be awarded at one time, but the Nobel Foundation’s statutes limit each prize to no more than three people at the same time and no one who has died at the time the prize is announced. Scholars must also be nominated by nominators who have their own eligibility criteria.
An overall look at the awarding of Nobel Prizes in science throughout history reveals another pattern: a preference for singular breakthroughs rather than lifetime achievements.
Boyden, Bamberg and others
Start with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work in optogenetics. In 2002, the Austrian scientist Gero Miessenböck & co. he first sensitized to light some neurons that were not naturally sensitive to light. Miessenböck is now at the University of Oxford, where his profile page describes him as the ‘inventor’ of optogenetics.
Hegemann and Nagel were fed to identify and characterize the protein channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2). The next step was to show that he could control neurons. The first author of a paper to do this was Edward Boyden, who helped pioneer the application of ChR2 in neuroscience. Boyden is now a professor of neurotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute.
Another author of this paper, Ernst Bamberg, supervised Nagel’s PhD and was part of the team that demonstrated the importance of ChR2. AND page on the website of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Germany, where Bamberg is now professor emeritus, says he was instrumental in translating the ChR2 finding into practical applications.
Another author, Feng Zhang, is now also at MIT and in 2007 was a member of one of two teams that adapted another protein, called halorhodopsin, to silence neurons with light instead of activating them. The other team, consisting of Xue Han and Boyden, demonstrated the same ability.
Together, these contributions—rather than just those led by laureates—turned the ability to control neurons with light into a neuroscience tool with real-world applications, including medicine.
No lone wolf
Then the prize for physics – which this year demonstrated the brokenness of the Nobel Prizes on a completely different level. Francis Halzen won the award all by himself “for his decisive contribution to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”. But IceCube is an international collaboration involving around 450 experts from 58 institutions in 14 countries.
Crucially, the awards committee here was not forced to award the award to one person. The Nobel Foundation’s statutes allow the committee to decide whether its prizes can be awarded to associations or organizations. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards prizes in physics, chemistry and economics, has apparently not accepted this possibility. If that were the case, the Physics Prize could recognize the IceCube collaboration as a whole.
But even if this rule did not exist, it is hard to say why the commission chose Halzen. In 1988, Halzen and (now) University of Hawaii physics and astronomy professor John G. Learned reported on the idea of using the Antarctic ice mass as a target in which neutrinos from space could interact with atoms together. Learned then focused on an underwater neutrino experiment called DUMAND, while Halzen continued the project that eventually became IceCube.
Also in 2012, when scientists searched the IceCube data for neutrinos coming from space with very high energy, they found two candidate events. The data quickly turned into evidence proving that neutrinos can be significantly energized by natural phenomena in space—and the award citation attributes the feat to Halzen himself.
But in the real-life (unlike Nobel) IceCube collaboration, Japanese physicist Aye Ishihara was credited with finding these two candidate events, for which she won the 2013 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Prize. This particular oversight is strangely reminiscent of the infamous story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Ishihara is currently a professor at Chiba University, where she continues to study high-energy neutrinos and develop the next generation of neutrino detectors.
In addition, a 2013 scientific paper reporting high-energy neutrinos also named three scientists named Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn as its corresponding authors.
The physics prize for Halzen is out of place. Halzen was very good – but the thing is, so were many others. In addition to the scientists named here, it also required engineers and technicians who could build it in one of the most hostile places on our planet. And all these people had to work together to make the project and its subsequent successes possible. Halzen could never do it himself.
Drawing difficult lines
Finally, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry illustrates the problem with the rule that it cannot be awarded to people who have died at the time the prize is announced. In 1953, British physicist Frederick Charles Frank came up with a mathematical way to explain how a small chemical imbalance in a certain kind of reaction can force the reaction to become the norm for that imbalance. This method required the reaction to have three properties, called autocatalysis, enantioselective catalysis, and mutual inhibition.
Between 1986 and 1995, Henri Kagan in France and Kenso Soai in Japan reported proof of all conditions of Frank’s model and provided experimental evidence that it could work in the real world. However, Frank died in 1998 at the age of 87.
That means that paper from 1995 by Soai et al. including Takanori Shibata, who made major contributions to this branch of chemistry (and was the second author of this paper). And while Kagan and Soai demonstrated various aspects of Frank’s model, Shibata was the first author of a paper from 1999 who extended the work of Soai et al. demonstrate the reaction that Frank tried to model. Shibata is currently at Waseda University. And again, it is not easy to justify the decision of the awards committee not to include him among this year’s chemistry laureates.
On the other hand, the committee’s decision to exclude American chemical engineer Donna Blackmond sheds light on one possible line of reasoning. A technical report accompanying the chemistry prize credited her with expanding Kagan’s attempts to use mathematics to understand nonlinear effects in chemical reactions. Blackmond and her team later also made great strides in understanding the mechanism of the so-called Soai reaction.
And yet the committee chose to reward the discovery of the validity of Frank’s model rather than the work that explained and further extended it.
Example SN Bose
Ultimately, Nobel Prize citations should not be confused with the history of science. Scientists build on the work of others, and science progresses in these slow but steady increments. When Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for their prediction of the Higgs boson, there was some outcry in India because they did not acknowledge the work of Satyendra Nath Bose. The objection was fair to the extent that you cannot have the fruit without the whole tree, yet petty because it is not reasonable to expect one award to extol the entire history of the field.
This is why each Nobel Prize award can be an opportunity to reflect on your limitations and remember that this is not the final recognition. There is no price.
In that vein, we also shouldn’t confuse the number of winners each year with the number of people it takes to do excellent science—from graduate students who perform simple experiments to senior colleagues with whom they discuss complicated ideas. In fact, depending on where you are in the world and your socioeconomic status, your ability to be a good scientist can turn into something as deceptively simple as having someone help you with your homework.
Perhaps most of all, while the Nobel Prizes recognize good science, not all good science wins Nobel Prizes.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in