The Dark Side Of The Nobel Prizes

Over the next few days the prizes laureate they will attract the attention of the media and, therefore, the press, radio and television will talk about the award-winning scientists and their research. For science buffs, this time of year is like a pre-Christmas, not because they are going to receive anything, but because of the tingling of uncertainty, the doubt of “what will be in those packages under the tree”, “what lines of research will be awarded” and, therefore, “what concepts will be popularized by the media”. There are even those who try to guess the name of the awardeda very difficult task except, perhaps, for how much the name of Katalin Karikó and company sounds for the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for their role in messenger RNA technologywithout which, we would not have gotten the COVID vaccines that we have now.

However, most academics do not pay much attention to Nobel laureates. They don’t follow them or care too much. We could even say that some of them openly criticize them for reasons as diverse as we can imagine. Some point to the lack of diversity among the winners, who historically seem to have underrepresented women and overrepresented Western countries. Others believe that they convey a fanciful image of how science works and make invisible the importance of working in large teams that, in turn, collaborate with other researchers and draw on old work. We can even criticize the motivation original of the awards and the media monopoly they have achieved, but perhaps it is convenient to unravel everything little by little.

The three pillars of an award

Our culture is loaded with consensus. Concepts to which we endow a meaning and some values despite the fact that, intrinsically, they do not have them. What is an award actually? Why are some awards more relevant than others? How do they get their renown? We could say that the key is found in three key points.

On the one hand, and although it may seem strange: the quality of an award depends on the quality of its winners. When an award has already gained importance, it is he who endows the winners with prestige, but the projection of the winners (especially the first) is, in turn, what will give solidity to the award when it is still starting. The second pillar is money, of course. Large prizes, whether in cash or in kind, make the prize more desirable, and that explains why not all prizes can win the fame of the Nobel, even if they magnificently choose their winners.

And finally, in third place, there are the media. If the awards don’t get good media coverage, it’s as if they just don’t exist. Therefore, broadly speaking, these three points must coincide for the award to be relevant. That’s all, it goes without saying that the Nobels are not a divine award independent of our human virtues and defects, they are an institution, artificial and imperfect as they all are.

What is the problem?

No one is bitter about a piece of candy, of course, but if sweets were so scarce that only a handful of people could get them each year, no one would spend their entire lives trying to get them. The goals of a researcher are others, equally competitive, but more accessible, because the future of his research and, therefore, of his team will depend on them. There are many prizes, grants, scholarships and contests. And, although they do not have perfect systems to evaluate the quality of a researcher, they are somewhat more “fair” than a prize as exclusive as the Nobel. And it is that, we could say that any award is unfair in that it is not equally accessible to all and, since they tend to value aspects that are difficult to measure, there are many biases that can alter the result.

Is a better researcher who has received a Nobel Prize? Not necessarily, there are really brilliant figures who have never achieved the award, even having been nominated over and over again. We could say, therefore, that the laureate they are too exclusive and “simplistic” to be representative of the current state of research. On the other hand, as we have already said, year after year it has been noted that the number of women is suspiciously low, even lower than the proportion of women who work in the award-winning areas. The latter means that the imbalance cannot be due solely to the fact that there have been fewer women in senior research positions. To put it in numbers, only 6 out of every 100 winners have been women. And, although we have gone from 4% of winners during the first 20 years of the award to 12% in the last twenty, we are still very far from the 30-odd percent of women who hold high academic positions.

The good side of things

The statistics also show a certain tendency towards researchers from central European countries, northern Europe or North America, despite the fact that some of the most relevant figures in the award-winning disciplines are in universities on other continents. Of course, this also has to do with the communication campaigns carried out by the universities of the great Western powers to make their star researchers visible, a pending issue in our country. On the other hand, those who have dedicated themselves to research know that the results obtained by a team are not only due to the happy idea of the main researcher, but also to daily teamwork where postdocs and doctoral students have a lot to say. Of course the captain of the ship is the figurehead, but rewarding the individual rather than the entire team is far from ideal.

But then does this mean that Nobel prizes are negative? As we said, there is a division of opinions. Because, despite the fact that they still carry socially reprehensible biases and that they do not account for the way in which science really progresses, we must recognize that they have managed to capture the public’s attention like no one else. We need stories, examples and media space to exist in the minds of society. It may be that rewarding a professor and omitting his large team is not fair or representative, but it gives us a protagonist with whom to tell simple stories, the kind that permeate the population. That is the true social importance of the Nobel prizes.

DO NOT SCREW IT:

There are many nominees and, although the more nominations, the more likely it seems that the committee will end up awarding you, there are other factors that play their role.