Winning a Nobel Prize is a matter of great prestige. Winning a Nobel Prize also means the award going to a small number of people while a large number are left out, even if they really deserved to win.
This is partly because of the prizes’ rules. Alfred Nobel’s will said nothing about the number of people that can be awarded at one time but the Nobel Foundation’s statutes limit each prize to at most three people at a time, and no one that has died by the time a prize is announced. Also, scientists need to have been nominated by nominators who have their own eligibility criteria.
A big-picture view of the science Nobel Prizes through history brings another pattern into view: a preference for singular breakthroughs rather than lifetime achievements.
Boyden, Bamberg, and beyond
Start with the Nobel Prize this year for physiology/medicine, to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work on optogenetics. In 2002, Austrian scientist Gero Miessenböck & co. had first sensitised to light some neurons that were not naturally light-sensitive. Miessenböck is now at the University of Oxford, where his profile page describes him as an ‘inventor’ of optogenetics.
Hegemann and Nagel have been feted for identifying and characterising the protein channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2). The next step was to show that it could control neurons. The first author of the paper that did was Edward Boyden, who helped pioneer the application of ChR2 to 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, had supervised Nagel’s PhD and was part of the team that established the importance of ChR2. A page on the website of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Germany, where Bamberg is now an emeritus professor, says he was instrumental in translating the ChR2 finding into practical applications.
Yet another author, Feng Zhang, is also at MIT now, and in 2007, he 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, had demonstrated the same capability.
These contributions together — rather than only those that the laureates led — turned the ability to control neurons with light into a tool of neuroscience with real-world applications, including in medicine.
No lone wolf
Next, the physics prize — which this year demonstrated the brokenness of the Nobel Prizes on a whole other level. Francis Halzen won the prize all by himself “for decisive contributions 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 prize-giving committee was not constrained to give the prize to one person here. The Nobel Foundation statutes allow the committee to decide whether its prizes can be awarded to associations or organisations. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the physics, chemistry, and economics prizes, does not seem to have adopted this option. If it had, the physics prize could have recognised the IceCube collaboration as a whole.
But even if this rule did not exist, it is hard to say why the committee picked Halzen alone. In 1988, Halzen and (today) University of Hawai’i physics and astronomy professor John G. Learned reported the idea of using Antarctica’s ice mass as the target in which neutrinos from outer space could interact with atoms together. Learned then focused on an underwater neutrino experiment called DUMAND while Halzen pursued a project that eventually became IceCube.
Also, in 2012, while searching IceCube data for neutrinos coming from outer space with very high energies, scientists found two candidate events. The data quickly snowballed into evidence proving that neutrinos could be energised significantly by natural phenomena in space — and the prize citation credits this feat to Halzen alone.
But in real-life (as opposed to Nobel-life), the IceCube collaboration had credited Japanese physicist Aya Ishihara with finding those two candidate events, and for which she received an International Union of Pure and Applied Physics award in 2013. This particular oversight is oddly reminiscent of the infamous Jocelyn Bell Burnell story. Ishihara is currently a professor at Chiba University, where she continues to study high-energy neutrinos and develop the next generation of neutrino detectors.
Furthermore, the 2013 Science paper that reported the 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 not misplaced. Halzen was very good — but the point is so were very many others. Aside from the scientists named here, it also required engineers and technicians who could build it in one of the most hostile locations on our planet. And all these people had to work together to make the project and its subsequent achievements possible. Halzen alone could never have done it.
Drawing difficult lines
Finally, the chemistry Nobel Prize this year illustrates the problem with the rule that it cannot be given to people who have died by the time the prize is announced. In 1953, the British physicist Frederick Charles Frank came up with a mathematical way to explain how a small chemical imbalance in a specific kind of reaction could force the reaction to make that imbalance the norm. This way 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 had reported evidence of all the conditions of Frank’s model, providing experimental evidence that it could work in the real world. However, Frank died in 1998, aged 87.
That said, the 1995 paper by Soai et al. included Takanori Shibata, who made essential contributions to this branch of chemistry (and was second author on the paper). And whereas Kagan and Soai had demonstrated different aspects of Frank’s model, Shibata was the first author of a 1999 paper that extended the work of Soai et al. to demonstrate the reaction Frank had tried to model. Shibata is currently at Waseda University. And again, it is not easy to rationalise the prize-giving committee’s decision to not include him among this year’s chemistry laureates.
On the other hand, the committee’s decision to exclude U.S. chemical engineer Donna Blackmond throws light on one possible line of reasoning. A technical statement accompanying the chemistry prize credited her with extending Kagan’s attempts to use mathematics to understand non-linear effects in chemical reactions. Blackmond and her team later also took big strides in making sense of the mechanism of the so-called Soai reaction.
And yet, the committee elected to reward the discovery of the validity of Frank’s model rather than work that explained and further extended it.
The S.N. Bose example
In the final analysis, the citations for the Nobel Prizes should not be mistaken for the history of science. Scientists build on the work of others and science advances in these slow but steady increments. When Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013 for predicting the Higgs boson, there was some clamour in India for not recognising the work of Satyendra Nath Bose. The objection was fair to the extent that you can’t have a fruit without the whole tree and yet petty because it is not reasonable to expect one prize to laud the entire history of a field.
This is why each Nobel Prize award can be a chance to reflect on its limitations, and remember that it is not an ultimate recognition. No prize is.
In that vein, we should also not confuse the number of winners every year with the number of people it takes to do excellent science — from grad students who perform simple experiments to senior colleagues to discuss complicated ideas with. In fact, depending on where in the world you are and your socio-economic standing, your ability to be a good scientist may turn on something as deceptively simple as having someone to help with household chores.
Perhaps most of all, while the Nobel Prizes recognise good science, not all good science wins Nobel Prizes.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
