We must modernize the Nobel prizes

Each year, October brings us back its share of Nobel Prizes, which occupy the mainstream media for a few days. The laureates are surrounded by all attentions and they are even asked for their opinion on everything and nothing, as if they were universal geniuses, while they have only done their work in a sector of hyper-specialized knowledge and that they succeeded, after many years of determination, in bringing to light a hitherto unrecognized aspect of the functioning of our world.

Created according to the last wishes of the inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded each year since 1901 in three scientific disciplines of his choice (physics, chemistry as well as physiology and medicine), to which he added, to make shows humanism, literature and peace. And i don’t forget the so-called “Nobel Prize for economics”, which is in fact the “Prize of the Bank of Sweden in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel”, instituted in 1968 on the occasion of the 300^e anniversary of this bank, the reference to Alfred Nobel only aims to associate this not entirely scientific discipline with real Nobel prizes and thus to attract to it the prestige accorded to the natural sciences.

By creating the Nobel Prizes, the inventor of dynamite probably wanted to leave to posterity an image of humanist by transforming an economic capital acquired in large part thanks to a tool of destruction into capital of philanthropic sympathy, each prize being endowed with a strong reward (today around a million dollars), the fruit of the interest accumulated each year by the initial sum of money invested in the stock market.

From individual to group

At the beginning of the XX^e century, when the rules for awarding these prizes were defined, science was still a largely individual and underdeveloped activity. Each year, the committees solicited nominations from recognized institutions and researchers, as well as from those already nobel. Until the 1950s, it was relatively easy to identify the author or – more rarely – the author of a remarkable discovery.

Thus, during the first half of the XX^e century, the majority of scientific prizes have been given to one person. Subsequently, given the massive evolution of science and the fact that research had turned into an essentially collective enterprise, the awarding of a prize to one person for a given discovery became the exception. In physics, for example, 36 of the top 50 prizes were awarded to a single individual, compared to just 13 of 67 during the period 1950-2016.

As science prizes cannot be awarded to more than three people, the choice becomes increasingly difficult over time, which can only disappoint those, and sometimes those, who felt worthy of the coveted award.

Finally, the more frequent presence of women in scientific careers since, roughly speaking, the 1960s means that, taking into account the time lag, analyzed below, between the year of the discovery and that of its recognition by the committee, we can expect more of them to win in the years to come. We can already see it in 2020 with the Nobel in chemistry awarded to two women (Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna) and the Nobel in physics, one of the three crowned heads of which is Andrea Ghez.

Each committee (chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine) always has several options before it. He can select a single find or recognize two or three, then dividing the amount of the prize awarded to each person. Once the discovery has been chosen, it can also reward one, two or three people who have contributed to it.

The multiple possible combinations lead to strategic considerations. First of all, the committees don’t want to make mistakes, which would damage the credibility of the award. For this reason, in general, it is not delivered until one or two decades after the discovery, which ensures that it has been well assimilated by the scientific community and, in the case of technologies news, that the applications have indeed come true. This constraint explains the fact that most of the laureates are very advanced in age at the time of the honor.

Faced with the growing difficulty of choosing among more and more discoveries, the average age of Nobels has even increased over time. While he was about 55 years old during the first half of the XX^e century, he subsequently rose to over 65 years. Since 1975, many laureates have even passed the age of 75, the oldest having won his prize at 97. Since the medal cannot be awarded to deceased persons, we can think that the committees take this aspect into account when deciding their choice, the youngest still having chances of being retained in the future.

How not to award a Nobel Prize

A very good example of a strategic choice probably made to avoid controversy is the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine which in 2008 underlined the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS, which dates back to 1983. Two teams were then in competition: that of Luc Montagnier in France and that of Robert Gallo in the United States. Scientists initially believed in two independent discoveries and the two teams eventually agreed to share equally the benefits of testing for the virus. But it later emerged that the virus isolated by Gallo was in fact the same one discovered at the Institut Pasteur, because Montagnier had provided samples of cells to Gallo. Despite this saga, many were those who, especially in the United States, ultimately considered that the Nobel should all the same go to them jointly, given the important work carried out by Gallo.

However, this did not happen and the prize for the discovery of HIV was awarded to Montagnier and his collaborator Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, 15 years younger than Montagnier and until then in the shadow of this debate. But since three people can be linked to the work, the exclusion of Gallo could have been criticized if only this discovery had been rewarded.

In a probably strategic move, the committee decided to reward two discoveries, thus splitting the prize in two: one half to Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV and the other half to German researcher Harald zur Hausen for his work on human papillomavirus and its role in cervical cancer. We have therefore reached the maximum of three people and Gallo can no longer be associated with the price for HIV …

Make discoveries known more than discoverers …

With the rise of collectivized sciences, the advances of which are in fact only possible thanks to the contributions of numerous researchers, not to mention the many international collaborations, the rules for awarding Nobel Prizes have obviously become anachronistic.

One solution to this problem would be to apply the rules of the Nobel Peace Prize to science prizes, which can be awarded to groups or organizations. Thus, the first prize was awarded in 1901 to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Let us also recall the choice in 2007 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received it jointly with Al Gore. Eliminating the three-person constraint would be recognizing the reality of contemporary science and it might also allow the discoveries themselves and their social and cultural usefulness to be more emphasized, rather than the people who, crowned with a Nobel Prize, sometimes forget that – as Isaac Newton said to his colleague Robert Hooke in 1675 – “if they have seen further, it is by climbing on the shoulders of giants”. However, this giant is in fact formed by the entire scientific community.

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