From sexism to racism, the Nobel Prize has been facing a lot of criticism even as it hands out awards in the fields of Medicine, Physics and Chemistry.
Bengaluru: The 2018 Nobel Prize winners in the fields of Physiology or Medicine, Physics and Chemistry have been announced, but enthusiasm for the recognition isn’t the same today as compared to even a decade ago.
Started in 1901, the Nobel Prize — often considered to be the pinnacle of a scientist’s recognition for their work — has faced a lot of criticism in recent years, especially regarding discrimination against women and people of colour.
ThePrint takes you through this year’s winners as well the criticisms the award faces today.
Also read: Blockchain startups tap economics Nobel winners as cryptocurrency fanfare wanes
2018 winners
Medicine
The Nobel for Physiology or Medicine and the accompanying cash reward was announced Monday for James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo.
Both of them worked independently on the same problem — disabling proteins that act as inhibitors and ‘brake’ our immune system when attacked by cancer cells to unleash the full strength of our natural immunity.
The scientists discovered two different proteins that inhibit the immune system by two different mechanisms. Their discoveries have contributed greatly to the advancement of cancer research, most notably in the form of a new class of drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors that help increase chances of survival.
Allison is currently chair of the department of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Honjo is a distinguished professor at the Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study and a professor in the department of immunology and genomic medicine at Kyoto University in Japan.
Physics
On Tuesday, the Nobel for Physics was announced for Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland. The cash award was split into half between Ashkin and Mourou & Strickland.
Ashkin’s work deals with ‘optical tweezers’, where light can be manipulated into picking up, pushing, and moving around other molecules, including virus and bacteria. Mourou and Strickland worked on a phenomenon called chirped pulse amplification, where laser pulses can be stretched and shrunk again to produce the most intense pulses known to humans. Both have various applications in medicine, especially in surgery.
Ashkin is an affiliate of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Mourou is a professor at Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique. Strickland is an associate professor at University of Waterloo.
Chemistry
The Nobel for Chemistry was announced Wednesday for evolutionary scientists Frances Arnold, George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter. The cash award was divided into half, between Arnold and Smith & Winter.
All of them were recognised for their work on proteins. Arnold conducted the first evolution of enzymes by adding a random mutation and filtering for those which improve catalyzation of chemical reactions. Smith and Winter worked on bacteriophage — virus introduced into a bacteria to infect it — and extracted antibodies that help fight autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. Smith is the distinguished professor emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Winter is the head of the division of protein and nucleic acids chemistry in Trinity College, Cambridge.
Growing criticism
In 2018, it’s a little hard to care too much for the Nobel Prize due to the growing list of concerns, seen to be addressed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences only marginally.
Sexism remains the biggest issue plaguing the Nobel Prize.
Between its inception and 2017, a total of 892 individuals received Nobel Prizes. Out of these, 844 were men and 48 were women.
In sciences, the number is abysmally low. Only three women (against 206 men) have received a Nobel in Physics (including the 2018 winner), and that too shared with male scientists. Twelve women (against 204 men) have received the Nobel for Medicine while five women (against 175 men) have received the Nobel for Chemistry.
Several notable women — Jocelyn Bell, Vera Rubin, Rosalind Franklin, Katharine Burr Blodgett — who’ve made massive contributions to the sciences have been omitted even as their male supervisors or teammates received the award. Revelations of nominations of scientists have consistently revealed that female nominees have been shunned, despite male scientists assisting or even stealing their work being rewarded.
The problem is quite representative of the larger perception of women in science. The Nobel committee has openly admitted and addressed the issue only this year.
Strickland, this year’s Physics winner, didn’t even have a Wikipedia page until her win and had also not been promoted to a full professorship yet.
Among its other issues, the Academy refuses to make the Nobel a group prize, awarding it only to a maximum of three individuals per field. Science is now very much a collaborative effort, with contributions from tens to hundreds of people for a discovery.
While Alfred Nobel’s will originally tasked the committee with awarding “the person” who made an important discovery in their field, the rules have been bent now. The prizes are now awarded to three persons instead of one. The Peace Prize is even awarded to organisations.
But when physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish received the Nobel Prize for Physics last year, it was awarded only to the three of them and not to the entire team responsible for the LIGO discovery — author names that ran up to three pages.
The issue of racism also figures prominently. The Nobel Prize is seen to favour white men of European descent over all others, with over 90% of laureates being older white men.
Also read: Schizophrenia to oceans: The mysteries winners of big-ticket CSIR prize are trying to solve
Several notable Indians too have been omitted in the past despite being consistently nominated.
The committee especially drew a lot of criticism for not awarding Mahatma Gandhi the Nobel Peace Prize for which he was nominated six times, or the Physics Nobel to Satyendra Nath Bose even as Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle received it for advancement of his eponymous Bose-Einstein condensate.
Litterateur R.K. Narayan too was nominated at least twice for the Literature Nobel but never won.
To make matters worse, the Nobel cannot be awarded posthumously, a reason often cited in defence of notable omissions.
It is often said that once a person wins a Nobel, they do not win anything else. Considering the host of impressive scientific awards given out each year, not winning a Nobel may not be a bad thing, but perhaps, its growing irrelevance might be good.