The “Rule of Three” Problem for the Nobel Prizes – KION546

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(CNN) – Some of the brightest minds in science will emerge from academic obscurity next week, when the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology are announced.

Created by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel more than a century ago, these awards represent the pinnacle of scientific achievement and celebrate transformative advances that often take decades in the making.

In addition to the enormous publicity they receive, the awards also attract criticism, sometimes generating controversy and resentment over who is chosen and who is not, according to Martin Rees, a British cosmologist and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, and the oldest scientific researcher. Society of the world.

For Rees, one of the challenges facing Nobel committees is the increasingly collaborative nature of most scientific research. The image of the lone genius having a eureka moment has long since disappeared, if it ever existed at all. Moreover, discoveries can be made simultaneously by different teams.

However, Nobel Prize selection committees, according to rules established by Alfred Nobel in 1895, can only distinguish a maximum of three people for each award. This requirement can be a real headache, according to Reese.

“It may be a project in which several people carry out work in parallel, and refer to some and not others. “There may be a team, and it may not be clear that those who referred to the team are the dominant figures,” said Rees, a UK astronomer royal and author of If Science is to Save. we.”

Under rules established by founder Alfred Nobel in 1895, Nobel selection committees can only honor a maximum of three people for each award. (Photo credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)

For example, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized the discovery of gravitational waves: “ripples” in space caused by colliding black holes a billion light-years or more away. The main papers reporting the discovery include nearly 1,000 authors, Rees said. However, only three received the award: Rainer Weiss, Barry Parish and Kip Thorne.

Likewise, an oft-discussed candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Chemistry is mapping the human genome, a transformative project that will not be fully completed until 2022 and has involved hundreds of people.

This view is agreed by David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at the Clarivate Institute for Scientific Information, which identifies “Nobel Prize-worthy” people by analyzing the number of times their scientific colleagues cite their key scientific papers over the years. It is the restriction.

“There has already been a huge shift in science, which is becoming more and more a collective science: huge groups tackling harder problems, international networks of collaboration,” says Pendlebury. “This rule of three seems to be a hindrance if they want to get to know the team.”

The rule that the prize can only be awarded to three people comes from the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, which is charged with carrying out the intentions of the Nobel will, according to the Nobel Prize website. Peter Brzezinski, secretary of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry committee, said there were no plans to change the rule. However, he noted that the committee follows a detailed process once nominations are submitted at the end of January.

“We begin the process by asking a number of experts from all over the world to write reports describing the field in which the discovery was made, identifying the main discoveries in that field, as well as mentioning the people who have made the most important contributions. “Important,” he explained via email.

“We read all relevant literature, attend conferences and write reports within the committee as well,” Brzezinski added. “Over time, we are often only able to identify a limited number of scientists who made this discovery. If that is not possible, we cannot propose an award to the Academy.

Too late

Nobel Prize committees often highlight work done decades ago, a retrospective perspective that is often necessary since the importance of some scientific research can take a long time to become clear.

The Nobel Prizes also focus on three scientific disciplines, as specified in Alfred Nobel’s will. Fields such as mathematics, computer science, earth sciences, climate and oceanography are excluded.

Nose hairs, dead spiders and scientists licking rocks are some of the topics of studies winning the 2023 IG Nobel Prizes.

Even in the fields of chemistry, physics, medicine and physiology, just five fields from 114 different subdisciplines account for more than half of the Nobel prizes awarded between 1995 and 2017, according to a 2020 study: particle physics, atomic physics, cell biology, neuroscience and molecular chemistry.

However, Rees noted that taking a long-term view and giving greater recognition to certain fields can sometimes make Nobel committees seem out of touch with the scientific priorities of the moment.

One example is artificial intelligence, or artificial intelligence, which is changing people’s lives at an unprecedented pace.

Two of the trendy names in this field are Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, inventors of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program that decodes the 3D structures of proteins from amino acid sequences. They won the $250,000 Lasker Prize this year and the Breakthrough Prize the year before.

Since his lead article was published just over two years ago, it has been cited more than 8,500 times, according to Pendlebury.

“In my experience, the speed at which citations have accumulated is incredible, so this is clearly a huge and important intellectual discovery,” said Pendlebury, who has compiled his list of “citation winners” since 2002.

Nobel Prize committees have sometimes honored recent advances, as when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna in 2020, less than a decade after their seminal 2012 research on the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9. However, Pendlebury believes that winning the Nobel Prize for AI this year is still a long way off.

He said that Nobel Prize committees, at least when it comes to scientific awards, are “innately conservative.”

diversity

Another criticism of the Nobel Prizes is the lack of diversity among winners. In recent years, more female scientists have received invitations from Stockholm, but it has been a trickle rather than a trickle.

Last year, Caroline Bertozzi, the Nobel laureate in chemistry, was the only woman to receive a science award. There were no female winners in 2021 or 2019, when the Nobel Prize committee asked nominees to consider diversity in gender, geography and field. Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez shared the 2020 Physics Prize, the same year Doudna and Charpentier won the Chemistry Prize.

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Pendlebury believes the lack of diversity on the Nobel scene is primarily a pipeline problem.

“They are analyzing work published 20 or 30 years ago, when the number of women in elite science was not as high as it is now,” she explains. “That’s why I think as time goes on, more and more women are being chosen.”

Others point to the issue as further evidence of systematic bias in science, where women are less likely to be credited or named as lead authors of scientific papers.

“There are many women who have made Nobel Prize-level contributions to science, contributions that would have been awarded to their male colleagues, but have not,” says Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and associate professor of the humanities. Earth and Planets at Harvard University. “These examples show that even when there were qualified women, they were systematically ignored.”

Rees attributes the diversity problem to a lack of transparency. The list of nominees for the Nobel Prize is secret, as are the nominees, and documents revealing details of the selection process remain hidden from public view for 50 years.

Of course, Rees adds, these flaws and gaps only matter because the Nobel Prizes are much more well-known than other scientific prizes. Rees prefers so-called challenge prizes, such as the XPrize, which incentivize future efforts to address an important problem, rather than rewarding past successes.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is scheduled to be announced on Monday, followed by Physics on Tuesday and Chemistry on Wednesday. The Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Thursday and Friday, respectively.

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