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Is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Still Relevant? Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay
Every October, three to nine startled scientists pick up the phone and hear that they have been awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, physics, or physiology/medicine. They participate in an award ceremony full of royal pomp and glamour, their home institutions fete them, and their names become forever linked with a man who died in 1896 and left behind an extraordinary will: Alfred Nobel. But are these prizes, first awarded in 1901, still significant today? The Nobel Prizes in the sciences were designed so that one to three individuals in physics, chemistry, and physiology/ medicine were recognized for a profound discovery. But science these days operates very differently than it did more than 100 years ago. The days of gentleman scientists are over, and collaborations among groups of researchers have become the norm. The lines between the disciplines have become blurred to the extent that it’s very difficult to pigeonhole some lines of research into the three traditional fields. So, are the Nobel Prizes still relevant? Many experts say yes, because the Nobel Prizes continue to play an important role in science and society by providing a dependable platform for the mass media to discuss basic science. The prizes “give you a news peg,” says Joe Palca of National Public Radio. “A lot of times, science stories don’t have the urgency of breaking news, because usually they aren’t [breaking news]. The Nobel Prizes give you a guaranteed chemistry story once a year.” Each chemistry prize, in turn, brings a subdiscipline within the field to the attention of all chemists. Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University, a 1981 chemistry laureate, points to analytical chemistry as an example. This subdiscipline, he says, “has a little bit of an image problem because it sometimes looks rather applied, even if it’s tremendously useful. The powers that be in organic, inorganic, and physical chemistries, chemical physics, and biochemistry don’t recognize analytical chemistry sufficiently.” But with the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry that went to John Fenn 7866
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© ® THE NOBEL FOUNDATION
No other prize in science matches the iconic stature of the Nobels. But they only recognize individuals in the categories of physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. In the modern era of multidisciplinary, multipleteam endeavors, are the Nobel Prizes outdated?
at Virginia Commonwealth University, Koichi Tanaka of Shimadzu Corp., and Kurt Wu¨thrich at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, analytical chemistry got its due recognition. Science historians who have studied the history of the Nobel Prizes take a less rosy view. But they say criticism is almost hopeless in the face of the power the prizes hold over the public imagination. “Given the total secrecy on matters related to the Nobels until after 1976, when the Nobel Foundation opened archives on materials over 50 years old, there has been no fulcrum for critical reflection or debate over the meaning of the prizes,” states Robert Marc Friedman at the University of Oslo, who researched the first 50 years of the Nobel Prizes for his book The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science. “Even when historical scholarship reveals the less-than-godlike behavior of evaluating and selecting winners, the cultural momentum of belief in the prize and of regarding the prize as a goal for ultimate success will remain with us for many decades to come.” Experts agree that the awards are not infallible, and sometimes even downright unfair. But they counter: really, aren’t all awards like that? Prizes are “part of a complex social network involving people, not something in which there is objective fact,” says George Whitesides of Harvard University. “There may be flaws 10.1021/ac9018457 CCC: $40.75 2009 American Chemical Society Published on Web 09/09/2009
in the [Nobel] modelsand there are many other modelssbut what is a better structure for doing whatever it is that prizes do?” THE DREAM MACHINE Scientists interviewed for this story say that the most important thing the Nobel Prizes do is produce role models for younger generations of scientists. “Society likes to recognize its heroes or heroines,” says Fenn. “It wasn’t Sony who invented the Dream Machine,” a cleverly named clock radio/stereo, says Hoffmann. “It was the Nobel Foundation who invented the ultimate Dream Machine. The dream, especially motivating for young people, is: do good for humanity and do something great that extends our knowledge of the world.” The prizes act like a catalyst for achievement. “The existence of the Nobel Prize makes some people work hard and try to get it. It’s a motivation, and I don’t see any harm in that,” says Fenn. “On the other hand, I don’t think it should be taken too seriously. A person who gets a Nobel Prize in Chemistry shouldn’t count himself to be the best chemist in the world.” Often, though, the recipients are put on a pedestal. “Most of us can relate to some degree to hero-worship,” notes Purnendu (Sandy) Dasgupta at the University of Texas Arlington. The small number of people chosen each year is one reason for this effect. “It’s very difficult to hero-worship a group of IBM scientists,” Dasgupta adds. (To make the people behind the discoveries more tangible and human, the Nobel Foundation goes to great lengths to document the biographies of its laureates.) NOBEL IN A NUTSHELL The story of Alfred Nobel, his will, and the controversy that ensued once the will surfaced have been documented at length in books and on the Nobel Foundation’s website. Briefly, Nobel, a skilled entrepreneur and businessman, made his fortune in explosives. He developed nitroglycerine and dynamite and established factories to produce them. The market for explosives grew quickly, as did Nobel’s wealth. After he died on December 10, 1896, his will was opened and revealed, much to the horror of his relatives (he had no direct descendents), that the bulk of his fortune was to be devoted to prizes in five areas that were of personal interest to him: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The executors of his will were two young engineers, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, who established the Nobel Foundation. The foundation was entrusted with taking care of the financial assets left by Nobel and coordinating the work of the institutions charged with awarding the prizes, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Karolinska Institute for the science prizes. All this was easier said than done, because the will was contested by Nobel’s relatives and questioned by authorities in various countries. These days, the process for selecting individuals for the Nobel Prizes is etched in stone. For the chemistry prize, for example, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry solicits, by invitation only, recommendations of candidates from members of academies, academic scientists, previous Nobel laureates, and others. The committee has five members but also includes adjunct members with the same voting rights as members. Once the committee
gathers the nominations, selects a list of candidates, and hands over its final list of candidates to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the academy selects the laureates for the year from the list. READING THE NOBEL WILL Nobel wrote in his will that for prizes in the sciences, the distribution of the money was to be “one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine.” The Nobel Committees take the words of the will and statutes laid down by the Nobel Foundation literally. “From the point of view of the committee and the Academy of Sciences, our main task is to execute what is set down in the will of Alfred Nobel. That is really our guiding principle,” explains Gunnar von Heijne of Stockholm University, who is the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “It is not to think about what the larger role of [the prizes] are in society and sciencesthat, of course, develops historically. Everything we do is based on our reading of the will of Alfred Nobel and the statutes of the Nobel Foundation.” With the literal interpretation of the will’s words, von Heijne says, the Nobel Prizes stand apart from most other scientific awards because Nobel insisted on recognizing “a particular discovery, not lifetime achievement.” The emphasis in the will on a single discovery “has been the guiding principle ever since the first prizes,” says von Heijne. “That’s why, if you look back in the history, prizes are generally tied to clearly identifiable discoveriessmaybe not one paper but a small number of papers that have opened up a new field or had huge consequences for chemistry or a big field of chemistry.” And a crucial nuance in the wording of the will leads to a subtle difference among the science prizes that’s often not appreciatedsor even known. As von Heijne explains, the prize in physiology/ medicine must be awarded for a discovery and the prize in physics for a discovery or invention. But Nobel’s will stipulates that the prize in chemistry can be awarded for a notable “chemical discovery or improvement” (emphasis added). The word “improvement” means that the prize “is more open to methods development in chemistry than it is in medicine, physiology, or physics,” says von Heijne. This nuance came into play, he says, for the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry that went to Fenn, Tanaka, and Wu¨thrich for developingsrather than discoveringsanalytical methods in MS and NMR. IS IT CHEMISTRY? Chemistry reaches so far and wide that the Nobel Prize often sets off soul-searching introspection about what chemistry really is. This happened when Roger Kornberg of Stanford University won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on RNA transcription. A news story in Nature after the announcement of the prize questioned whether the work, embedded in biology, qualified as chemistry (2006, DOI 10.1038/443615a). But “10 years from now, no one will ask this question,” states Dasgupta. “Both biochemistry and analytical chemistry are essentially gravitating towards chemistry of large molecules.” As a Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 81, No. 19, October 1, 2009
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counterpoint, he brings up Lars Onsager and Manfred Eigen, who received Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1968 and 1967, respectively, and argues that their contributions, though important for chemistry, were actually hard-core mathematics. If mathematical work can win a chemistry prize, Dasgupta asks, “what’s wrong with Kornberg?” Concerns over the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a scientist who doesn’t appear to be a chemist are nothing new. In fact, they date back to the early 1900s. “Chemistry was already in 1901 a fragmented science with many semiautonomous subdisciplines and hybrid disciplines,” explains Friedman. The field “often lacked a central core of a specialty or two that dominated in terms of excitement and prestige, as was the case with atomic and nuclear research in physics between the wars. In some respects, the pre-World War II chemistry committee had to deal with a situation that all Nobel Prize Committees must confront nowadayssan overabundance of vital subspecialties as well as the development of numerous multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary hybrid fields.” Biological research dominated the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for decades, according to Istva´n Hargittai of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary), who wrote The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists. Both he and Friedman say that Sweden’s historically strong base in biochemistry probably has had something to do with biology’s forays into the chemistry prizes. Friedman can trace the impact of biology in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the late 1920s, when Theodor Svedberg of Uppsala University (Sweden) and Hans von Euler-Chelpin of Stockholm University College (which, in 1960, became Stockholm University) joined the committee. (Both men won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in the 1920s.) “They provided authoritative leadership but promoted their own research agendas. They pulled chemistry’s boundaries deeper and deeper into the world of biomedical research,” says Friedman. Svedberg, he adds, “also sought to legitimize and support his own interest in nuclear research and its uses in biomedicine as being part of chemistry.” The chemistry prizes that were awarded to physicists Ire`ne Joliot-Curie and Fre´de´ric Joliot in 1935 and Edwin McMillan in 1951 (shared with Glenn Seaborg) are the result of Svedberg’s agenda, says Friedman. Biology’s dominance reached such heights in the middle of the last century that a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Ludwig Ramberg, “who sought to reward contributions to chemistry’s fundamental principles, found himself often outmaneuvered and forced finally to raise a formal protest to the academy,” says Friedman. “Ramberg reacted to what he considered a colonization of chemistry by medically oriented biochemistry, and a neglect of advances to fundamental chemical principles. Although his intervention in the [Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences] resulted in getting Peter Debye awarded in 1936, prizes to biologically oriented chemistry continued.” Biology’s strong grip hasn’t loosened over time. “Lars Ernster, a former longtime member of the Chemistry Nobel Committee, estimated sometime in the 1990s that about 40% of all chemistry prizes and about 40% of all physiology or medicine prizes go for discoveries that can be considered as biochemistry,” states Hargittai. 7868
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Von Heijne says that some areas of science clearly overlap and that certain subdisciplines might gain in strength over time. For instance, biochemistry didn’t exist as a field in Nobel’s time, but von Heijne says it’s definitely a subdiscipline of chemistry these days. “I’m not surprised or even worried that the spectrum of subject areas that were awarded 50 or 100 years ago only partially overlap with themselves or the ones that are awarded nowadays,” he says. “This is a reflection of the development of science in general.” IS THREE ENOUGH? In his will, Nobel had wanted only a single person to be recognized for a single discovery. But the Nobel Foundation amended the statutes to read: “In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons.” But what if more than three scientists were instrumental in discovering a phenomenon? At times, researchers in a particular field have felt that a deserving scientist has gone unrecognized because of the limit of three Nobel laureates per award. And there is the concern that crediting one to three scientists with a monumental discovery diminishes the input of their colleagues, graduate students, and postdocs in the eyes of the general public. “It gives a skewed view of how the world of science operates,” says Friedman. “A major development, and even discovery, rarely occurs in a scientific vacuum.” Von Heijne is resigned to the rule of three. “This is a rule we just have to live with,” he says. “It wouldn’t be any easier if the limit was four or five people. If there is a fixed number, there is always going to be a line drawn somewhere.” He compares it to having a fixed number of awardees for research-grant funding. “You always have to draw a line somewhere, and it’s always grants close to the line that are the ones which are difficult to decide on.” But most scientists don’t think that the rule of three is particularly unfair. Despite the current era of collaborative, multiple-principal-investigator types of projects, a few individuals can legitimately be credited with an idea. For example, Whitesides points to the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry that Roger Tsien at the University of California San Diego received, along with Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, for their work on GFP. “Yes, other people made important contributions, but usually there is a single person, or a small number of people, who originate the idea,” says Whitesides. Palca agrees, saying, “An individual, or a small group of individuals, can be credited with an intellectual insight and is responsible for the prizeworthy discovery. Not every author on a paper contributes equally even though they are all on the paper.” Von Heijne says that although it has never happened, it is possible to award a Nobel Prize in the sciences to a group of researchers. The Nobel Peace Prize, he points out, “is sometimes awarded to organizations, not individuals. There is always an individual representing the organization that is awarded the prize. It is possible, I think, also for science prizes to be awarded to an organization....That would be one way, I suppose, to award [a prize to] a large team of scientists.” WHEN INJUSTICE IS FELT An article in AC about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the controversy that broke out
in 2002 when the Nobel Prize went to Fenn, Tanaka, and Wu¨thrich. Fenn and Tanaka got the prize for developing soft desorption/ionization methods for MS. No one disputed the prize to Fenn, but many felt that Franz Hillenkamp at the University of Mu¨nster (Germany) was unfairly left out when Tanaka’s work was recognized (see the “Who invented MALDI?” sidebar in the AC feature on the history of MS, 2008, DOI 10.1021/ac8013065). Some also argue that the contributions of Fred McLafferty of Cornell University went unrecognized. “Every year, there is a discussion: ‘Are the right people selected?’ Different people have different opinions on whether it was a good choice or there could have been a better choice,” says von Heijne. “That’s just the nature of the beast. I think it would be next to impossible to come up with a selection of three laureates that everyone would agree was the perfect choice.” He adds, “The decision to propose a particular prize is not taken lightly. It’s been mulled over, discussed over and over again for a long period of time, usually many years.” Despite the wounded feelings of those who are excluded and their supporters, in the long run such controversies are not what most people remember. “A cracking good fight over credit is a good news story, but it really doesn’t matter to the average individual which person did or didn’t get the prize,” says Palca. He cites the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was given to Franc¸oise Barre´-Sinoussi at the Institut Pasteur and Luc Montagnier at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention (both in France), for discovering HIV. Many experts felt outrage that Robert Gallo at the University of Maryland School of Medicine wasn’t a co-recipient of the prize (Nat. Med. 2008, DOI 10.1038/nm1108-1132b; Chem. Eng. News 2008, 86, 5). But those feelings of outrage and unfairness stay within the confines of the community involved because, as Palca explains, “in the end, what’s important is the discovery, not the person who made it.” WHAT THE PRIZES ACHIEVE AND DON’T ACHIEVE Experts say that the Nobel Prizes provide a platform to get science broadcast to a larger audience. “Probably the single most important aspect of the Nobel Prize is that twice a year, the prizes turn the attention of society to science: the announcements in October and the award ceremonies in December,” says Hargittai. Hoffmann says his Nobel Prize was probably partly the reason why he got the opportunity to host the well-known PBS television
series The World of Chemistry, which premiered in 1990. The series is now available at most high schools in the U.S., and at least two generations of school-aged children have gotten their introduction to the science through Hoffmann, Donald Showalter of the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, and four other scientists on-screen. “I still get emails every week from students who see The World of Chemistry,” says Hoffmann. (In fact, a cursory glance through Facebook reveals several fan pages of the series.) Some scientists say that the documentation of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry builds up a history of the science, showing how the field has shifted over time, what the important discoveries were, and who the important players were. The Nobel Prize “gives people something to measure future and past people by and sets a permanent record of those who’ve made, most of the time, lasting contributions in their particular field,” explains Fenn. But the science historians take a more jaundiced view. “The Nobel Prize institution helps [in] popularizing science, but we should never attempt compiling science history on the basis of the Nobel Prizes,” says Hargittai. “It would be a sure recipe for rewriting, if not outright falsifying, reality.” Friedman is more blunt. “Publishing houses churn out encyclopedias of alleged Nobel geniuses and help spread the illusion that the history of 20th-century science can be written as the history of Nobel discoveries,” he states. “This is intellectual nonsense.” The prizes leave the work of too many stellar scientists unnoted to be considered a complete record of a field. As Palca explains, “There are a lot of really excellent scientists who are never going to win the Nobel Prize because they didn’t make a discovery in the sense that Alfred Nobel wanted the prize to honor. It’s a shame, because I don’t think the ‘Aha!’ moment is so important.” But the Nobel Foundation and the prizes have become too much of an icon in science and society to be dismissed as a relic of yesteryear. And who knows? Maybe the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will someday shake up the status quo in academic science. Hoffmann offers a wager. “I am willing to bet $100 that the Nobel Foundation will give a Nobel Prize in green chemistry before Harvard University appoints a professor of green chemistry,” he says. “Academia is stodgy and stuck in disciplines. I think the Nobel Foundation is progressive in its own ways and has a broader outlook for what is important for the world.” AC9018457
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