It’s that time of year…next week the winners of the Nobel prizes will be announced next Monday (Physiology/Medicine), Tuesday (Physics) and Wednesday (Chemistry).
Boston has had a pretty good showing recently, with Harvard’s Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), MIT’s Frank Wilczek (Physics, 2004), Robert Horvitz (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) and Wolfgang Ketterle (Physics, 2001) bringing home the glory in recent years.
And this year, local scientists haven’t disappointed, with three among the nominees. They are:
Physics
Alan Guth: physics professor, MITfor his work on a cosmological model called inflation
Chemistry
Stuart Schreiber: chair of the chemistry and chemical biology department at Harvard, also the head of the chemical biology program at the Broad Institutefor his work using small molecules to learn about cell signaling pathways
David Evans: from the same department at Harvard for his work on the synthesis of natural products
Thomson Scientific, the company responsible for, among other things, journal impact factors, is running a poll where you can vote on who you think will be the most likely winners. So far, Schreiber, Evans and Guth are lagging behind their competitors, but we’ll find out next week just how predictive this poll is.
Sorry, I’ve sheepishly just realized that these nominees are Thomson Scientific’s picks for the Nobels according to number of citations and high-impact papers published by authors. They are NOT the actual Nobel nominees. In fact, the Nobel Foundation is quite secretive about the nominees and nominators. Apologies for the error.
We’ll see this week how good of a predictor citations are for the Nobel prize winners. So far, it’s not looking like a very good predictor. We’ve just found out that Craig Mello (UMass Medical School in Worcester) and Andrew Fire (for their discovery of RNA interference) have won the Nobel prize in medicine/physiology and they were not among Thomson’s picks. Does a scientific achievement need to be highly cited to be deemed prize-worthy? Conversely, does a high number of citations means that a discovery is significant enough for an international prize?
Just playing around with NNB! There’s a spirited discussion over at ScienceBlogs about this and I’ll ask you the same question I did them. On occasions, the Peace prize has been awarded to organizations (Médecins Sans Frontières, UN, Red Cross and a couple of others); is there anything in Nobel’s will or the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation which prevent any of the Science ones also being given to an organization? The Human genome project, say, or CERN.
Great question. In this era of “big biology”, maybe we’ll start to see more prize-worthy discoveries made by large groups of people, rather than by a few individuals…although, of course, this is controversial in biology. But I’m all for giving prizes to groups of people, since this is a more accurate reflection of the way modern, technology-intensive science is done.
Anyway, I did a bit of research on the Nobel Prize Foundation website and found its statutes (see http://nobelprize.org/nobelfoundation/statutes.html). Relevant to your question is Article 3, which says:
“A prize amount may be equally divided between two works, each of which is considered to merit a prize. If a work that is being rewarded has been produced by two or three persons, the prize shall be awarded to them jointly. In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons.
Work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented.
Each prize-awarding body shall be competent to decide whether the prize it is entitled to award may be conferred upon an institution or association.”
So it seems to me that the Nobel prize probably can’t be awarded to a group of collaborators consisting of more than 3 individuals, but can be awarded to a group deemed to be an “institution” or “association”. It may be semantics, but it’s not clear whether the Human Genome Project, as an example, would qualify as an institution or association according to the Nobel Foundation’s definitions.
Sorry, I tried to hyperlink Nobel’s will and the statutes (using the html 74)! So you never know…
Ah, I really don’t get the hang of this! Does this work or not?
OK. Many apologies for clogging up your comments! I’ve been trying to use the html hyperlink, but it seems not to work, hence the rather cryptic comments above. As I meant to say, I checked the Statutes as well and came to pretty much the same conclusion. I was then about to make some crack about the Science Prizes being awarded to Institutions when the Literature Prize gets shared, but that’s actually already happened (‘04, ‘66, ‘74)! So, as I said before, you never know…
John, unfortunately, we’re not able to insert links into posted comments (that should be fixed soon). So for now, you’ll have to copy and paste the URL like I did in my earlier comment.