Nobel has a habit of ignoring women. Rosalind Lee didn’t even stand a chance

Crunch the numbers in any direction. Cherry-pick the years. The answer will always be the same: if the Nobel Committee has to snub somebody, it will be a woman.

Victor Ambros, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine, with his wife and co-researcher Rosalind Lee | Photo: X/@@NobelPrize

Rosalind Lee. Remember her name. The Nobel Committee certainly didn’t.

But that’s no surprise. The world’s most prestigious award committee has a woman-sized hole in its hall of fame. It prefers white men, especially in STEM.

Of the 973 Nobel laureates since the inception of the prize in 1901, only 64 have been women. Rosalind Lee should have been number 65. She is the first author of the Cell paper on microRNA that was cited by the Nobel Committee. She is also the co-researcher and wife of geneticist Victor Ambros, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Gary Ruvkun.

“For us, it was mostly that we said, well, we’ve accomplished something,” she said in an interview after the announcement. “We’ve added to the scientific knowledge. I think that’s all scientists want to do, to have their work be something that people can build on and discover things, and the things that people have been able to do in the microRNA field is just astounding.”

It could be argued that Lee was a “junior first author” at the time Ambros published his groundbreaking paper back in 1993. It  could also be argued that the first author is rarely the lead researcher—who is typically recognised as the research group leader. But she did contribute substantially. Her body of work since then speaks for itself. She has co-authored multiple papers with Ambros, and is currently senior researcher at the University of Massachusetts in her husband’s group.

And there’s precedent for this kind of oversight. The Nobel Committee has a dismal track record in acknowledging women scientists in medicine. Only 13 women have been anointed Nobel medicine laureates of the 115 prizes and 229 winners.

The Nobel Committee’s congratulatory post on X with the winner—and the wife—leaves a bitter taste. And she is not the first Rosalind that the Nobel Committee has snubbed.

 

Another missing Rosalind

Remember Rosalind Franklin.

In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the very same Nobel for their work on the molecular structure of DNA. The double helix remains the most important scientific discovery of our times.

But it was Rosalind Franklin who first captured the image of the two rods— Photo 51. Before Franklin’s Photo 51 was published, it ended up with Watson and Crick. Long story short—they used it to base their model of the DNA, the now famous and ubiquitous double helix with its two twisted strands.

In 1953, Nature magazine published three papers on DNA back-to-back. The first by Crick and Watson was a theoretical one. The second was a data heavy-paper by Wilkins and his colleagues. And the third was by Franklin and PhD student Ray Gosling. It was the most important paper, and till today, there’s controversy over  whether Crick and Waston stole from Franklin or if it was ‘collaborative’.

There’s a long list of women forgotten. Lise Meitner, who discovered how atoms as large as uranium can be split into two back in 1939. Esther Lederberg, who discovered the lambda phage, the first virus characterised as lysogenic—meaning that when it enters a host cell, it does not immediately begin the replication process and kill it. Her husband, the American biologist Joshua Lederberg, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1958 for his discovery of genetic material transfer in bacteria.

And what about Jocelyn Bell Burnell? She discovered pulsars through her telescope—cores of collapsed stars whose magnetic fields emit flashes of radiation across the sky. But in 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her advisor, Antony Hewish, for the discovery of pulsars. It was only in 2018 that she received a $3 million Breakthrough Prize for her work.

Rosalind Franklin did not live long enough for such a ‘correction’. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, five years after the three papers were published.  The Nobel Committee cited this as a reason for why she was left out. There’s a rule against awarding posthumous awards.

Lesson received. Women should live for as long as they can in the distant hope of their work being acknowledged.

 

Give credit where it’s due

The controversy around Rosalind Lee is not white noise. Not only are there a disproportionate number of men in STEM, the few women who are there are more often than not ignored.

In 2021, Göran Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, argued against gender or ethnicity quotas.  “It’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past but still existing. And there’s so much more to do,” he added as a token.

It’s an argument everyone uses. Women are ‘poorly represented’. This is stale. It’s a cop out. Yes, India and the world need more women in STEM, but let’s give credit where credit is due.

Marie Curie had to fight for her first Nobel back in 1903. The committee wanted to honour only her husband Pierre Curie along with Henri Becquerel for their work on radioactivity. Curie refused to accept it. Pierre had to complain to the committee, and her name was grudgingly added to the winners’ list.

Crunch the numbers in any direction. Cherry-pick the years. Skew the data in every way possible. But the answer will always be the same: if somebody has to be snubbed, it will be a woman.

And it’s not just the Norwegian Nobel Committee that’s blinkered. India’s selection committees are guilty of gender bias as well. The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize of Science and Technology for 2022 was given to 12 men. In its new avatar as the  Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, four women were acknowledged this year.

It’s one small step for women, one giant leap for humankind.

Views are personal. 

(Edited by Asavari Singh)