What is the point of a Nobel Prize?

Every October, a handful of scientists get woken up by a phone call to find out they’ve won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Physics or Chemistry.
Startled and bleary-eyed, they throw a shirt on over their pajamas, join a video call to Stockholm and try to explain a life-time’s worth of research to the world’s media in a few short minutes.
Journalists then desperately try to understand what “quantum dots,” or “entangled photons” are, file their reports, then breathe a sigh of relief that it’s all over until next year. By the following week everyone’s forgotten — what was another a flash in an endless news cycle.
Be honest, who really cares about Nobel Prizes? Are these prizes, first awarded in 1901, with all their high-class pomp and ceremony, still relevant today?
The Nobel Prizes do help to popularize scientific discoveries. But do they also give a false impression of how discoveries are made? Are they too biased in favoring science from the US, Europe, and men?
The Nobel Prizes originated from one guilt-ridden scientist’s final will and testament — Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite.
Nobel’s goal was to reward outstanding science to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
Nobel Prizes are meaningful milestones for scientific advances. They credit how millions of people were protected from severe COVID-19 infections from rapid vaccine development , the invention of energy-saving LED lights, and gene editing technologies which have cured previously untreatable diseases.
“Doubtless they’re the Mount Everest of science. The Nobel Prizes show the pinnacle of scientific discoveries, and there’s an emotive attachment to them,” said Rajib Dasgupta, a physician and professor of public health based in New Delhi, India.
If anything, the prizes help remind us that we’re fortunate to live in an age of new scientific advances: After DNA, after vaccinations, after theories of the big bang and sub-atomic particles.
The Nobel Prizes are certainly a useful way to capture people’s imagination about science when they are elevated to the platform of mass media.
The extent to which media outlets cover the Nobel Prizes varies by country, but Dasgupta said the Prizes were closely followed by the Indian media — and that in detail, rather than just for the news.
“The interest comes from an educational tilt towards STEM subjects in India, particularly among the middle class,” Dasgupta told DW.
Teaching children about the Nobel Prizes is embedded in the Indian school curriculum to get people interested in science, as it is around the world.
Lily Green, a biology teacher at a high school for 11-to-18-year-olds in Newbury, UK, said she taught a historical perspective of the Nobel Prizes in her science classes, but didn’t follow the prize announcements every October.
“We use them to teach the more fundamental concepts of science. The best discoveries are those that capture kids’ imagination with scandals or great stories — like [Barry Marshall] who infected himself with bacteria to show how they cause ulcers,” said Green.
But Green doubted whether the Nobel Prizes played much of a role in inspiring students to study science at university.
“They’re generally captivated and interested in science, not because they want to win a Nobel Prize,” she told DW.
In the first years of the Nobel Prizes, they were mostly awarded to individual gentlemen scientists, such as Albert Einstein or Rutherford.
Marie Curie’s gender — in terms of the ratio between male and female scientists — was, and still is, an exception. But Curie was also awarded two Nobel Prizes, so she was a double exception.
The prizes helped build the idea of the genius scientist — one who single-handedly drove science forward with their sheer brilliance.
But in reality, scientific progress operates very differently, especially in contemporary research.
Scientific discoveries are born from collaborations between hundreds of researchers around the world from different research fields. Science is a community — it is multi-disciplinary and diverse.
Now, Nobel Prizes are commonly split between groups of scientists. But for every Nobel Laureate, there are thousands of other scientists, PhD students, and technicians who were part of the research — and did the experiments — but remain uncredited, at least among the general public.
Green agreed there was a tendency to overplay the work of individual scientist at the Nobel Prizes, but also felt that the idea of the solo genius scientist is waning.
“We’re teaching more and more that science is a collaborative effort. It helps the kids to see the amount of work that goes into scientific discoveries,” she said.
The biggest criticisms of the Nobel Prizes relate to their lack of diversity and bias towards western scientific institutions.
In the sciences, less than 15% of Nobel Laureates are women.
And very few people from countries outside Europe and the US have won a Nobel Prize. The US, UK and Germany dominate the rankings for the number of Nobel Laureates, totaling 663 among them. China has 8 and India has 12 Nobel Laureates.
“Most prizes are very deserving, but they’re not without politics. Institutions in many countries are being overlooked, including India. And certainly, Nobel Prize committees are not as inclusive as they need to be,” said Dasgupta.
Nobel Prizes can also exacerbate this inequality by diverting more funding to institutions which have already won prizes and the recognition that follows.
But Dasgupta said the reality was that institutions in India and elsewhere had to get stronger to compete with the US or Europe — only then would those countries be able to hold onto the talent they have created.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany