Winning a Nobel Prize is a matter of great prestige.
asserted
Winning → win → prestige
Winning a Nobel Prize also means the award going to a small number of people while a large number are left out, even if they really deserved to win.
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they → win → people
Alfred Nobel’s will said nothing about the number of people that can be awarded at one time but the Nobel Foundation’s statutes limit each prize to at most three people at a time, and no one that has died by the time a prize is announced.
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prize → say → time
Also, scientists need to have been nominated by nominators who have their own eligibility criteria.
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who → need → criteria
A big-picture view of the science Nobel Prizes through history brings another pattern into view: a preference for singular breakthroughs rather than lifetime achievements.
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view → bring → achievements
Boyden, Bamberg, and beyond
Start with the Nobel Prize this year for physiology/medicine, to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work on optogenetics.
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Boyden → start → optogenetics
In 2002, Austrian scientist Gero Miessenböck & co. had first sensitised to light some neurons that were not naturally light-sensitive.
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that → sensitise → neurons
Miessenböck is now at the University of Oxford, where his profile page describes him as an ‘inventor’ of optogenetics.
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page → describe → optogenetics
Hegemann and Nagel have been feted for identifying and characterising the protein channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2).
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Hegemann → fete → channelrhodopsin-2
The next step was to show that it could control neurons.
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it → show → neurons
The first author of the paper that did was Edward Boyden, who helped pioneer the application of ChR2 to neuroscience.
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who → do → neuroscience
Another author of this paper, Ernst Bamberg, had supervised Nagel’s PhD and was part of the team that established the importance of ChR2.
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that → supervise → ChR2
A page on the website of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Germany, where Bamberg is now an emeritus professor, says he was instrumental in translating the ChR2 finding into practical applications.
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he → say → applications
Yet another author, Feng Zhang, is also at MIT now, and in 2007, he was a member of one of two teams that adapted another protein, called halorhodopsin, to silence neurons with light instead of activating them.
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that → adapt → them
The other team, consisting of Xue Han and Boyden, had demonstrated the same capability.
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team → consist → capability
These contributions together — rather than only those that the laureates led — turned the ability to control neurons with light into a tool of neuroscience with real-world applications, including in medicine.
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laureates → lead → medicine
No lone wolf
Next, the physics prize — which this year demonstrated the brokenness of the Nobel Prizes on a whole other level.
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which → demonstrate → level
Francis Halzen won the prize all by himself “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”.
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Halzen → win → origin
But IceCube is an international collaboration involving around 450 experts from 58 institutions in 14 countries.
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IceCube → involve → countries
Crucially, the prize-giving committee was not constrained to give the prize to one person here.
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committee → give → person
The Nobel Foundation statutes allow the committee to decide whether its prizes can be awarded to associations or organisations.
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prizes → allow → associations
But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the physics, chemistry, and economics prizes, does not seem to have adopted this option.
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which → award → option
If it had, the physics prize could have recognised the IceCube collaboration as a whole.
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prize → have → whole
But even if this rule did not exist, it is hard to say why the committee picked Halzen alone.
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committee → exist → Halzen
In 1988, Halzen and (today) University of Hawai’i physics and astronomy professor John G. Learned reported the idea of using Antarctica’s ice mass as the target in which neutrinos from outer space could interact with atoms together.
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neutrinos → report → atoms
Learned then focused on an underwater neutrino experiment called DUMAND while Halzen pursued a project that eventually became IceCube.
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that → focus → project
Also, in 2012, while searching IceCube data for neutrinos coming from outer space with very high energies, scientists found two candidate events.
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scientists → search → events
The data quickly snowballed into evidence proving that neutrinos could be energised significantly by natural phenomena in space — and the prize citation credits this feat to Halzen alone.
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citation → snowball → Halzen
But in real-life (as opposed to Nobel-life), the IceCube collaboration had credited Japanese physicist Aya Ishihara with finding those two candidate events, and for which she received an International Union of Pure and Applied Physics award in 2013.
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she → oppose → 2013
Ishihara is currently a professor at Chiba University, where she continues to study high-energy neutrinos and develop the next generation of neutrino detectors.
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she → continue → detectors
Furthermore, the 2013 Science paper that reported the high-energy neutrinos also named three scientists named Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn as its corresponding authors.
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that → report → authors
The physics prize for Halzen is not misplaced.
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prize → misplace → Halzen
Aside from the scientists named here, it also required engineers and technicians who could build it in one of the most hostile locations on our planet.
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who → name → planet
And all these people had to work together to make the project and its subsequent achievements possible.
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project → have → ?
Halzen alone could never have done it.
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Halzen → do → it
Finally, the chemistry Nobel Prize this year illustrates the problem with the rule that it cannot be given to people who have died by the time the prize is announced.
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prize → illustrate → time
In 1953, the British physicist Frederick Charles Frank came up with a mathematical way to explain how a small chemical imbalance in a specific kind of reaction could force the reaction to make that imbalance the norm.
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imbalance → come → reaction
This way required the reaction to have three properties, called autocatalysis, enantioselective catalysis, and mutual inhibition.
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reaction → require → properties
Between 1986 and 1995, Henri Kagan in France and Kenso Soai in Japan had reported evidence of all the conditions of Frank’s model, providing experimental evidence that it could work in the real world.
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it → report → world
However, Frank died in 1998, aged 87.
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Frank → die → 1998
…and 15 more, not listed.
The Aporia
