Winning a Nobel Prize does not imply being the best scientist in your field : the award rewards someone who has made a great discovery, even if it is a fluke. Rather, a great discovery as judged by members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the case of Physics and Chemistry, or the Karolinska Institute, in the case of Medicine or Physiology.
It is already known that nothing is written about tastes and the members of the Nobel Committee have their own. For example, in physics. For them it is more important to understand the workings of the interior of stars than that of our planet . That is why the geophysicist Inge Lehmann, who determined the structure of the Earth’s core in 1936, was left without it. More resounding was the cornering of those who formulated plate tectonics: the Americans Jason Morgan, Dan McKenzie and the Frenchman Xavier Le Pichon. The central theory of modern geophysics is not worthy of a Nobel.
These awards are also notorious for their delays in awarding the coveted accolade . Barbara McClintock discovered the existence of transposons, genes that jump from one side of the genome to the other, in 1948. She was not rewarded until 35 years later, when she was 81 years old. In 1986 Ernest Ruska was honored for designing the first truly efficient electron microscope 53 years after it was built . He was lucky and died two years after going to Stockholm, because the Nobels are not awarded posthumously. In 1983, the Hindu Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had done while traveling from India to Great Britain in July 1930.
This delay can be understood because, despite the fact that Alfred Nobel’s purpose was that each year those scientists who had made an important discovery the previous year be honored, it is difficult to know. Sometimes even something that seems magnificent is later revealed to be totally worthless. For example, in 1903 a Danish doctor named Miels Finsen received the Nobel Prize for a light treatment for skin diseases: it turned out that it did not do much good . The same thing happened in 1908 with the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Gabriel Lippmann for a new color photography process.
Of course, the delay does not prevent screwing up, as in 1926 when the Danish doctor Johannes Fibiger was awarded for discovering in 1913 that certain types of cancer could be caused by a parasitic worm. Later it was found that the poor worm was not the real cause of the disease. The one who did prove that external influences can cause cancer was the Japanese Katsusaburo Yamagiwa. In 1915 he had empirically shown that coal tar could induce cancer in rabbits and the Nobel committee literally went Swedish. Indeed, Yamagiwa’s work is cited as truly groundbreaking in oncology and Fibiger’s sleeps the sleep of the (un)just. Perhaps the Karolinska Institute had more appreciation for neighboring Denmark than for distant Japan? Eurovision is not the only test of friendships between countries.
Women have also suffered discrimination from the Nobel Prize winners. Much is often mentioned to Marie Curie , the only person who has received two Nobel Prizes in two different disciplines. But few know that he was on the verge of not receiving the first one . In 1901 the French Academy of Sciences nominated Henry Becquerel and Pierre Curie for the Nobel Prize. And so it would have been if a Swedish mathematician, member of the Nobel Committee and defender of women scientists, Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, who warned Pierre of the situation, did not intervene. He, outraged, demanded the inclusion of his collaborator and wife and in the end, after pulling a few strings, his nomination was accepted.
But the case of Marie Curie has been more the exception than the norm in the course of the prizes. The discovery of parity violation in elementary particles – that is, that they can distinguish between left and right – by Chien-Shiung Wu, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang was rewarded with the prize for Lee and Yang (men ) but not for Wu (female). The same thing happened with Lise Meitner, in one of the most bloody oblivions in the history of the awards . In 1944 Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission . Consciously or unconsciously, they left out Meitner, who collaborated with Hahn in the discovery of fission and, more importantly, gave the first theoretical interpretation of what was happening there. Machismo on the part of the committee? Who knows, but it is worth remembering that when Meitner fled Germany and settled in Stockholm, the Manne Siegbahn research institute where she was admitted maintained an institutional animosity towards women scientists. There the only thing he received was a place to sit: no collaborators, no equipment, not even a set of keys.
And what about the discovery of pulsars ? These extremely compact stars (imagine two suns squeezed into a sphere the size of an average city and rotating on its axis a thousand times per second) were made in 1967 by a doctoral student, Jocelyn Bell. She and her thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, determined that what she had discovered was a neutron star, whose existence had been theoretically predicted nearly 30 years ago. It was an important discovery, worthy of the Nobel Prize. And they gave it to him. But not to the discoverer, but to its director. Perhaps those on the committee thought it a disrepute to give it to a Ph.D. student .
This fact caused one of the great astrophysicists of the time, Fred Hoyle, to harshly criticize this decision. Possibly, this caused him to stay without the prize. Hoyle, together with the Burbridge couple and William Fowler, published in 1957 one of the most important articles in physics of the 20th century: the origin of chemical elements. In it they determined that all chemical elements, except hydrogen and part of the helium, were created inside stars. Hoyle had the original idea and had done most of the calculations, so he was the best candidate for the Nobel. But they didn’t give it to him. Neither him nor the Burbridge couple: only Fowler was awarded.
References:
Hargittai , I. (2003) The Road to Stockholm, Oxford University Press
