Prize-winning problems

October 5, 2020 8:21 AM

Nobel Prizes and the sharing of credit: The 2020 Nobel Prize week kicks off with the announcement of the Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to the virologists Harvey Alter (NIH), Michael Houghton (Alberta), and Charles M Rice (Rockefeller) for their discovery of Hepatitis C. But like most science, this discovery was made possible by many more than three people... and laureate Michael Houghton has drawn attention to this by declining prestigious awards when his co-workers were not recognized.

Per the Guardian,

The [Nobel] award may prove controversial as Houghton recently turned down a major prize because it excluded two co-workers at the pharmaceutical firm Chiron who helped him identify the virus. In 2013, he refused the Canada Gairdner international award sometimes known as the “baby Nobel” because it did not recognise the work of his former colleagues George Quo and Qui-Lim Choo.

After reluctantly accepting the prestigious Lasker award in 2000, Houghton, who received his PhD from King’s College London in 1977, said his co-workers did not get the recognition they deserved and decided “I really shouldn’t do this any more.”

David Pendlebury, a citation analyst at Clarivate, a scientific data firm, said he was surprised the Nobel committee made the award knowing it would be problematic. [...] The difficulty, he said, threw into high relief the perennial issue of the Nobel’s rule of three, where no more than three researchers can be named for discoveries that have often been team efforts.

At this time, it remains to be seen what Houghton will do regarding the Nobel.

The rule of three has historically led to women and minority scientists being deprived of Nobel recognition, including Lise Meitner, Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Vera Rubin, and Rosalind Franklin, amongst many others.

posted by Westringia F. (17 comments total)

Movies and video games have credit rolls that subjectively go on for hours, surely other fields can manage a handful more people.
posted by one for the books at 9:32 AM on October 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

The Guardian article says Dr. Houghton accepted the award:

Houghton accepted the Nobel but said he hoped future award committees would recognise larger groups of scientists. “Great science, often, is a group of people and I think going forward we somehow need to acknowledge that,” he said.

Which is obviously fair all the way around. It is also notable that Houghton's institution, the University of Alberta, is currently being brutally defunded by our provincial government. All the current mentions in the news are about the Nobel, but here's literally yesterday's headline regarding the U of A. Having a Nobel Prize-winner can only be a good thing for an institution that really needs help and public support.
posted by ZaphodB at 9:36 AM on October 5, 2020 [17 favorites]

Thanks for the update, ZaphodB!
posted by Westringia F. at 9:39 AM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I ran across this visual explainer within ten minutes of seeing this FPP.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 9:55 AM on October 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

It should also be noted the George Kuo was born in Taiwan, and Qui-Lim Choo was born in Singapore. I think that makes more of a difference than the fact that they worked for a corporation, not a university. The Nobels (and most other "great men of science" awards) are biased in favor of white men and against everyone else.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:47 AM on October 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

The rule of 3 is such bullshit. Whenever it comes up, it's good to point out that the Nobel committees are fine with ignoring other rules of the prize. For example, the prizes are supposed to be awarded for discoveries made within the last year. If that rule can be ignored, why not ignore the rule of 3?
posted by medusa at 11:36 AM on October 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

If you want that kind of attention to the rules, you probably have to stick to the Ig Nobels.
posted by clawsoon at 11:45 AM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the update, ZaphodB!
posted by Westringia F. at 12:39 PM on October 5

Thank you for an interesting and well-framed post! This kind of discussion is a lot more meaningful than just a quick news headline.
posted by ZaphodB at 2:22 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

The 'visual explainer' linked above is a great little read on its own. It's a comic (I was expecting an infographic).
posted by kaibutsu at 3:09 PM on October 5, 2020

He did accept it. Now he should divide the prize money among those that worked with him doing the research. Maybe melt it down and refashion the trophy into little statuettes?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:09 PM on October 5, 2020

I work with people who were heavily involved in HCV research. The e-mail chain this morning displayed strong opinions about who was left out, with Bartenschlager high on the list if you're keeping score at home. One colleague argued that not only were his contributions equal to Rice's, but his generosity in helping other researchers set up his in vtiro systems in their own labs was impressive.

* * *

I'm sure I've posted this story before, but can't find my comment so I'll share a short version.

I went to UCSD and an early recruit to our faculty was a woman who did win a Nobel prize, Maria Goeppert-Mayer. She was awarded it shortly after joining our faculty, so it was obviously not for what she accomplished in San Diego. It was for work at the University of Chicago.

How did UCSD recruit this world class professor? They offered her a salary. Chicago had never bothered, since her husband was on the faculty already. No need to pay her since her husband was the breadwinner.

Also: Headline in local papers when she won? San Diego Mother Wins Nobel Prize.
posted by mark k at 10:55 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

O Canada!? There is a precedent for prize sharing there. Nobel 1923 was for the discovery of insulin by Banting and Best but awarded to Banting and his boss/lab-landlord MacLeod. Banting shared his cash with Best whc induced MacLeod to share his with Collip another professor who had helped tidy up the loose ends. Banting at 32 is still the youngest NobPhysMed and it was inconceivable to the Nobel patriarchy that Best, a mere boy of 22, could get the gong. Best was the only one in the story who could drive a tank, however, having served during WWI in 2nd Canadian Tank Battalion.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:43 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

The sharing of credit vs. the Great Man myth of prizes ties in with what Eugenia Cheng wrote about congressive and ingressive behaviours in the sciences and society x + y. A move away from winner-takes-all competition and towards the sharing of credit, more in line with the massively parallel and networked nature of science today is overdue.
posted by acb at 3:06 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Today's Nobel news: Andrea Ghez (UCLA) becomes the fourth woman in history to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. She shares half the award (ie, 1/4 of the whole) with Reinhard Genzel (Max Planck; formerly Berkeley) for their discovery of supermassive black holes at the center of the galaxy. The other half of the prize was awarded to British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (whose name you may already know from his beautiful aperiodic Penrose tilings) for his (even more beautiful!) proof that black holes form as consequence of the general theory of relativity. The mathematical prediction from Penrose's (and Hawking's) theoretical work, coupled with the observation of black holes, shows that the speculations that followed Einstein's theories were correct.

For more about the link between relativity and black holes, and the history of how physicists came to understand it, I recommend cosmologist Sabine Hossenfelder's video A Brief History of Black Holes.
posted by Westringia F. at 5:16 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

More Nobel news: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have been jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing mechanism. The ability to make highly precise changes to the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms has revolutionized molecular biology and genetics.

Charpentier and Doudna are the 6 & 7th women to win the Chemistry prize (out of 186 chemistry laureates total), and the first to win the chemistry prize without a male collaborator. They're also young (51 and 56, respectively) and still highly active in their fields.

With this award (which notably omits Feng Zhang/Broad Institute), the Nobel committed has waded into the CRISPR credit controversy.
posted by Westringia F. at 7:36 AM on October 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

With this award (which notably omits Feng Zhang/Broad Institute)

The award also leaves out lesser-known Virginijus Siksnys. Looking into the details, it's kind of disappointing to see that happen, too.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:56 AM on October 7, 2020

With this award (which notably omits Feng Zhang/Broad Institute), the Nobel committed has waded into the CRISPR credit controversy.

Of course that is literally their (self-appointed) job--to award prizes based on who they think deserve credit. Given the press Broad got themselves the Nobel committee is clearly making a statement by leaving them off. I'm extremely biased but agree with them; it always seemed to me that aggressive patent strategy had as much to do with their claim of co-equal or even superior contribution relative to other researchers who few people pay attention to.

Derek Lowe has a nice writeup that includes a lot of the other contributors and the vagaries of publication schedules, which isn't a bad read to go along with the main theme of this thread.
posted by mark k at 5:19 PM on October 7, 2020