In an era of team science, are Nobels out of step?
With the 2020 Nobel prizes this week comes a recurrent question: gets the world's most prestigious awards for physics, chemistry and medicine -- first conferred in 1901 -- lost touch with just how modern science is conducted?
A century ago, landmark discoveries occurred mostly in the mind or laboratory of a single individual.
More recently, big breakthroughs in the hard sciences are usually collaborations involving dozens, sometimes a huge selection of researchers employed in separate but interlocking fields.
Two teams totalling 1,500 scientists, for instance, were behind the landmark detection earlier this season of a so-called intermediate mass black hole.
Major advances in science also have become hugely reliant on technology, which is sometimes used -- especially in physics -- to find phenomena theorised to exist before today's scientists were even born.
"The Nobel Committee's refusal to create an award to a lot more than three people had led to manifest injustices," Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal since 1995 and former president of the Royal Society, told AFP.
Indeed, the recent history of the Nobels is full of what some have called "deserving losers", a fourth male or female who have likely shared in the prize without that limitation.
Rees cited the late Tom Kibble for his focus on the elusive sub-atomic particle that came to be referred to as the Higgs boson.
Others lament the failure to discover American virologist Robert Gallo for his contribution to the discovery of HIV, Rosalind Franklin on her behalf pioneering focus on DNA, and Italian physicist Adalberto Giazotto for his role in detecting gravitational waves.
Giazotto died per month following the prize for that discovery was passed out in 2017.
"It has also given a misleading impression of how 'big science' actually advances," added Rees, who notes the prize has excluded "large tracts of science," including mathematics and environmentally friendly sciences.
Even the most ardent defenders of Nobel Prize and its own arguably archaic rules acknowledge that science has shifted significantly because the era of Einstein, Monsieur and Madame Curie, and Karl Landsteiner, the Austrian biologist who determined in the 1920s that we have blood types.
"There has been a massive change because the early 1900s," Erling Norrby, a Swedish virologist and long-time pillar of the Nobel establishment, told AFP by phone.
"It is true that in modern science you often have very large groups of people interacting," added Norrby, who helped confer Nobels in medicine for 25 years, and has cast votes for the prizes in physics and chemistry because the early 1980s. "But the question is whether we can identify the one or two leaders. I believe we are able to see who has taken the initiative."
Somewhat, faculty from the Karolinska Institute, which grants the Nobel for medicine, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which does the same for physics and chemistry, have shifted with the changing times.
From 1920 to 1930, 23 of 30 awards received to a person scientist, and in the decade after World War II solo winners numbered 19.
In the first two decades of this century, which has only happened on four occasions, with three-way awards provided 41 times.
In medicine, the quantity of possible recipients was expanded to three in 1934 (for the discovery of the B12 vitamin), with the first three-way prizes for chemistry and physics in 1946 and 1956, respectively.
However the rules have evolved no more, this means the Nobels cannot directly recompense the large, international experiments that contain end up being the backbone of so much modern science.
Norrby conceded that Europe's CERN -- which runs the world's particle physics laboratory and conducted the experiments to identify the Higgs boson -- may possibly have shared for the reason that Nobel if the guidelines had allowed, because they do for the Peace Prize.
More recent science awards did an improved job in highlighting these large collaborations, said Rees.
"The Breakthrough and Gruber prizes -- which honored the discovery of gravitational waves prior to the Nobel Committee did -- took a fairer approach in highlighting the leaders but explicitly recognizing the whole team," including monetarily, he noted.
"Their approach also gave a much better impression of how this project actually achieved it amazing success."
Stavros Katsanevas, director of the European Gravitational Observatory, whose Virgo gravitational wave antenna played a key role in the science behind the 2017 physics prize, is of two minds about the Nobels.
"It is difficult to recognize key contributors in such global networks, that is true," he told AFP.
"But I'm afraid that if you just supply the prize to an experiment and the person leading it right now, you will dilute the impact."
For Katsanevas, 21st century science stems not just from pure intellect but from having the vision, courage and organizational skills to pursue a fresh goal, or carve out a new discipline.
"When you try to take action new, you are believed a deserter by one camp, and an intruder by the other," he said, noting that his has spent his career astride particle physics and astrophysics. "The actual fact that someone dared to take a step that other didn't -- this still must be recognized."
Source: japantoday.com
