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It's 1888, the obituary reads "Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite,
the Merchant of Death, is dead."
Except that Alfred Nobel was very much alive.
He had just read his own mistaken obituary.
And it wasn't exactly flattering.
So he decided that day that he would leave a different legacy.
And so, the Nobel Prizes were born.
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So after realizing that pretty much everyone hated him, Alfred Nobel set aside money in
his will to fund the prizes that still bear his name today.
But with each year they get a bit more controversial.
Do the Nobel Prizes still make sense in the 21st century?
The Nobel Prizes have been awarded pretty much annually since 1901, according to Alfred's
will, to "men and women who have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind" in the subjects
of chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine, literature and peace.
Win one, and you're known for life as a "laureate", a nod to the Greek custom of placing a crown
of laurels upon a hero's head.
Except today, instead of a shrub hat you get a nice pile of money and a big shiny medal.
But that's pretty much all his will says about it, like "here's some coin, you guys put it
in the bank, take the interest, give it to some talented people each year."
That's not a whole lot to go on.
So the Nobel Prize Foundation in Sweden has established a few more rules that Al didn't
lay out specifically in his will.
First you have to be nominated by the experts in your field, and you can't nominate yourself.
Second, you have to be alive when they award it to you, because no one likes those award
shows where somebody shows up to accept it on your behalf, because you're like, too busy
or something.
And third, the prize can go to a maximum of three people, and it has to be individuals
and not institutions, although they fudged with that one a little bit.
I'm looking at you here, Peace Prize.
There's a few more rules than that but the rest are pretty boring.
For the most part those rules have worked pretty well.
Nobel laureates in science are some of the greatest minds who have ever lived, and they
deserve to be recognized.
Except for you, Johannes Fibiger in 1926.
You were just flat-out wrong, dude.
So how do you win a Nobel Prize?
Well, you do something AWESOME.
Like, discover antibiotics, like Fleming, or quantum physics, like Heisenberg.
Not that Heisenberg.
And make yourself a white male, age 59, preferably from the United States or Western Europe working
at Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Caltech, Stanford or Berkeley.
Check out this infographic by Giorgia Lupi, link in the description, it uncovers some
pretty eyebrow-raising consistency in who gets Nobel prizes.
Now I'm not saying that these people don't deserve the Nobel Prize, those universities
are some of the best in the world, and I'm not saying people are getting the Nobel because
they are white and male, but . . .
You only have to look at this year's winners in science to see that there's, well, kind
of a pattern.
Since their inception, only 15 women have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences, with Marie
Curie winning twice, because she's just that bad-ass.
Women are underrepresented among Nobel Laureates in the sciences, plain and simple.
Do I even need to say the name?
Do I?!
Rosalind Franklin!
Of course they got her on a technicality, she had passed away when Watson, Crick and
Wilkins won for the double helix.
But what about Jocelyn Bell Burnell, or Lise Meitner?!
We've got some 'splainin to do.
Except for the size of the pile of Swedish Krona that you get, not much has changed about
the awarding of Nobel Prizes since well, ever.
It begs the question.
Or questions: Is it time to overhaul the Nobel prizes?
Do they really represent how science is done?
What are they for, exactly?
In the early days of the Nobel Prizes theywere often given to lone researchers working on
"Big Questions" with little money or equipment at their disposal.
Because most science at the time was done by lone researchers working on "Big Questions"
with little money or equipment at their disposal.
This is also the era that gave birth to the myth of the "lone genius".
Science is not done by people sitting around, going "hmmm", coming up with great ideas,
and then just dusting their hands off and walking away.
Science is a deliberate and painstakingly slow process that's not just about creativity,
but about collaboration and combination of ideas.
Steve Jobs knew that "Creativity was just connecting things."
and Thomas Edison knew that his success was not magical genius but "the product of the
severest kind of mental and physical application."
In 2009 an open letter leading scientists sent a letter to the Nobel Foundation urging
them to get with the times and expand their categories because it turns out that 1901
is not actually that much like today.
I mean airplanes, anybody?
Take computers, something that did not even exist in Nobel's time.
They're kind of important to science today.
And so much of what we do is part of large multinational projects involving thousands
of individual scientists, like the Human Genome Project.
I mean, how do you give a Nobel Prize for that?
Like really, I'd like to know.
Because they deserve one.
Nowhere is this controversy more obvious than in the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics.
More than 5,000 authors were listed on the papers announcing the confirmation of the
Higgs boson last year.
Yet just two of the perhaps six theorists were given the prize.
That is at least 5,004 people left out in the cold.
I mean, I don't like having to tell the world that Jonas Salk never got the Nobel Prize
because we couldn't find the right category for him?
I mean, he only helped you not get polio.
It's not like we can't add new categories.
The Nobel for Economics is not actually a Nobel prize at all, but is awarded at the
same ceremony.
Why not Nobels, or almost-Nobels for math, the environment, or computing?
The myth of the lone genius doesn't aid our pursuit of science, it fools us into thinking
that there's something different about the handful of people who win, like they were
born on Krypton or something.
I've had the honor of meeting a half dozen Nobel prize winners, and they are stunningly,
perhaps alarmingly normal people.
One of them was actually really weird and mean, but I won't name names.
There's plenty of OTHER awards for individual subjects , but the Nobels are King.
And as King they should represent the best of the world they reward.
Nobel Prizes are chosen by people, and that means they reflect the community that awards
them.
And in the case of women, since they are underrepresented in science in general, their Nobel snubbings
are really a symptom of a greater problem.
To the Nobel Prize folks, you've done great work over the past century, but consider this
your mistaken obituary . . . what legacy do you want to leave behind you?
I want to know what you think: Are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?
What do you think the Nobel Prizes of the future should look like?
And should we have a Nobel Prize for YouTube videos?
Maybe I could win one.
If you want to know more about the history of the Nobel prizes, check out Molly Oldfield's
book "The Secret Museum".
There's a link in the description below.