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A bit like Christmas, Nobel prize week seems to come earlier every year. This year’s gongs honoured the discovery of
micro-RNAs,
tiny scraps of gene-regulating code;
two pioneers
of the neural networks used in most modern AI; and advances in using that sort of AI to
predict the structure of proteins.
Also like Christmas, the Nobels are an old tradition that can feel out of step with the modern world. And since every Christmas needs its Scrooge, this newsletter is going to muse grumpily on some of the oddities and anachronisms of science’s most prestigious prize.
Start with the things the prizes are given for. The Nobels were set up in 1895 by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish dynamite magnate worried about his legacy, with the first prizes given in 1901. There are three science prizes: in chemistry; medicine or physiology; and physics, plus two others for literature and “peace”. (Contrary to popular belief, there is technically no Nobel prize for economics: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founded in 1968, is a Johnny-come-lately that is not mentioned in Nobel’s will.)
Some of the prizes the committee dishes out fit only awkwardly into the categories Nobel established. The chemistry prize is a frequent offender. This year’s award is a good example: proteins are the domain of biology, not chemistry, and AI is an application of computer science. The 2015 and 2020 prizes—given for showing how cells repair damage to their DNA, and the discovery of CRISPR, a gene-editing method, respectively—both looked like physiology or medicine prizes in disguise.
This year’s physics prize looks like a category error, too. No one doubts that AI is an important advance—least of all the Nobel committee, which has effectively given AI two gongs this year. But is it physics? Computer science is usually considered a branch of mathematics, and it has its own prestigious prize in the form of the Turing Award, which Geoffrey Hinton, one of this year’s physics laureates, won in 2018.
Perhaps the biggest structural oddity is that the Nobels do not, strictly speaking, have a prize for biology at all. “Medicine or physiology” certainly covers a good deal of biology. But it does not cover everything. The study of evolution, without which very little about the living world makes sense, is neither medicine nor physiology, and thus would not be eligible without bending the rules.
There are other problems. By convention, a Nobel can be awarded to three people at most, a holdover from the days when individuals could still make big breakthroughs. In these days of big labs and research institutes, papers with a dozen or more authors are common. A 2012 paper reporting the detection of a Higgs boson from one team at CERN, a giant particle-physics lab buried beneath the Swiss countryside, had nearly 3,000 authors, 21 of whom were dead by the time the paper was published. The Nobel for the discovery of the Higgs was, as usual, given to just two people.
But what are the Nobel committees to do? The rules are laid down in the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, and therefore very difficult to change. And even if you could tweak them, it is hard to think of three categories capacious enough to cover all the interesting science out there. If I were in charge, I might be tempted to abolish the categories altogether, and simply task the judges with giving out three prizes a year to whatever bit of science they considered important.
Or maybe all this is to miss the point. Most scientists are perfectly aware of the limitations of the Nobels, but they still hope, nevertheless, to one day get the coveted call from Sweden. After all, to return to the analogy we started with, modern Christmas is a semi-pagan festival of commerce that sits very awkwardly indeed with its original Christian meaning. But people enjoy it anyway. Perhaps cultural institutions do not have to make sense to be fun—or prestigious.
Elsewhere in The Economist:
Thank you for reading. Is there anyone you believe is overdue for a Nobel prize? Send your thoughts to sciencenewsletter@economist.com. |
