Translation introduction:
Every year, we work in Medan on professional knowledge coverage of the Nobel Prizes, and in particular the science prizes, simply because they are the most important prize in the world, and the Arab reader deserves to learn about it with a degree of simplification and detail, but the prize is not great in all cases, and some researchers believe that it is It offended science and human knowledge in general instead of serving them, especially when it worked to export a catastrophic and baseless idea of the "lone genius", neglecting thousands of researchers who participated in building knowledge, on the other hand, it monitored revealing racist cases in the results of the award over a period of time. decades ago.
This article shows you the dark side of the Nobel Prize;
So your image is as balanced as possible.
Translation material:
In 2017, the three physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Parish were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of gravitational waves, which are distortions in the fabric of space and time.
At the time, the three scientists who led the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observation Project - known for short as "LIGO" - who recorded these waves, shared a prize of nine million Swedish kronor, and perhaps most importantly than sharing the amount among them, they will be awarded the title of "Nobel Prize Laureates". for the rest of their lives.
All good, but what about the other scientists who contributed to this project and were included in the 3-page author list in the research paper describing the discovery?!
Commenting on this, British astrophysicist Martin Rees told BBC News: "The success of this project is due to hundreds of researchers, however the refusal of the committee responsible for awarding the 2017 Nobel Prizes to award a collective award caused further problems. It gave a misleading impression of how much scientific research was done.”
This method of refraining and intransigence against scientists has become familiar. When the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year to the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, critics note that it is an absurd and outdated way to praise the achievements made by these scientists. Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, and restore Writing its history, ignoring the most important scholars who contribute to it.
Certainly, these awards have many positive aspects in their pocket, and the vital role that scientific discoveries play in the human enterprise must be recognized. The Nobel Prize site is an educational treasure trove full of rich historical details, most of which are hidden among published research papers. It is rude to overly cynic about any event that gives science year after year the tantalizing suspense usually associated with Oscar or Emmy nominees, but the fact that the Nobel Prize in science has stirred controversy almost from its inception points to deep-rooted problems.
The first Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to German physician Emil von Behring in 1901 for his discovery of antitoxins, and ironically, it was not awarded to his collaborator, Shibasaburo Kitasato, with whom he collaborated so well.
The same topic was repeated in 1952 when the prize in the field of medicine and physiology was awarded to the American biochemist "Salman Waxman" for his discovery of the antibiotic "streptomycin", at the same time that no one paid attention to the graduate student at the Waxman Institute, "Albert Schatz", the real discoverer of the chemical.
In 2008, the Chemistry Prize was awarded to three researchers for discovering the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a molecule that scientists use to see what goes on inside our cells, but ironically, Douglas Brasher, who was the first to clone the gene for the green fluorescent protein, was not among the winners. with the award.
Douglas Brasher
The mysterious commandment
Not everyone continued this silence, as some scholars protested their neglect and exclusion. In 2003, the American doctor "Ray Damadian" published a series of full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times in protest of his deprivation - unjustly and unjustly - From the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in the invention of magnetic resonance. At this time, the Nobel Committee decided to recognize only Paul Lauterber and Peter Mansfield for this achievement, which Damadian considered an omission and "a shameful error that must be corrected", and in response, he told The Times: "To wake up Monday morning and see that I have been erased from history." It is a torment that I can neither bear nor live with.”
The biggest problem that goes beyond who should get the prize and who shouldn't, is that all Nobel scientific prizes are awarded to a maximum of three people in any given year, and this is what prompted the scientific authors, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, to write about it, saying that modern science It is "the business that needs teamwork the most." It is true that scientists sometimes make individual mutations, but that rarely happens, even one research group will find that it is made up of a large group of Ph.D.s, students, and technicians who all share in the discovery that is ultimately attributed to one researcher.
Often, several groups collaborate to produce a single project. The paper in which the LIGO team announced their discovery includes a three-page list of authors, not to mention another recent paper that accurately estimated the mass of the Higgs boson. Responsible for the material gaining its mass) The number of participants in it reached about 5154 authors.
Defenders of the prize argue that the Nobel Committee is bound by the terms set out in Alfred Nobel's will, the document on which the prizes are based.
But the idea here is that the will stipulates honoring “one person” who made an important discovery in his field during the year preceding his honor, while the Nobel Committee honors a maximum of three people in each field for achievements they may have achieved in previous decades.
If they are already exceeding the original rules, why not go further?
This is what the editors of Scientific American suggested in 2012, asking: Why don't they give scientific prizes to teams and organizations, as happens with the Nobel Peace Prize?!
Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee Berit Reiss Andersen
The price of reform is low, but the cost of ignoring it is high. The biologists, Arturo Casadevall and Ferik Fang, saw in 2013 that the Nobel Prize winners had succeeded in promoting the idea of “individual genius,” the idea summed up by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle by saying: The history of the world is only the biographies of the great.” Although this does not apply to the scientific field, prize givers feed this pernicious myth, and biologists, Cassadeville and Fang, say that this method of awarding prizes “reinforces a flawed and shameful reward system in the scientific field, Where the winner gets everything, while the contributions made by the many are neglected, meaning that in this system they overlook the contributions of the many so that the contributions of the few get all the attention.” Ironically, sometimes the prizes are not about who made the most important contributions, but rather who managed to survive the maze. Perilous academia.
In many cases, prizes are awarded only to the survivors. Nobel prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, so Rosalind Franklin has not been honored for her pivotal role in discovering the double helix structure of DNA.
Because she died four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
Similarly, astronomer Vera Rubin provided evidence for the existence of dark matter (which plays a central role in the formation of the universe and the evolution of galaxies) by studying the way galaxies rotate, an achievement that revolutionized our understanding of the universe, although it did not win a Nobel Prize.
Commenting on this, science writer Rachel Feltman said in October 2016: “Vera Rubin deserves the Nobel Prize, but you probably won’t get it in time.” Indeed, Rubin died two months later.
prejudices and racism
The Robin and Franklin case points to another long-standing issue of the Nobel Prizes. As much as the committee promotes the myth of lone genius, that genius often appears in the form of a white man.
The lone genius promoted by the award committee is always attributed to a white-skinned male scientist, while women have received only 12 out of 214 prizes in physiology or medicine during all these years, and only 4 out of 175 prizes in chemistry, And only two of the 204 prizes are in physics.
American astronomer Andrea Ghez, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics
This is not due to the lack of talented female scientists. There is no doubt that the astronomer Vera Rubin certainly deserves the award, as does Lise Meitner, who contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission with the German chemist Otto Hahn, who won the award. The really strange thing is that between 1937 and 1965, Lise Meitner was nominated 48 times for the prize, but she never won. In regards to this, astrophysicist Katie Mack commented on Twitter last year, writing: "There are great things about the Nobel Prize, but we need to pay close attention to the fact that the statistics for male and female winners reflect clear prejudices and racism based on race and gender."
Perhaps all these problems would not have surfaced if the Nobel Prize had not been so important. Besides the monetary value of the award, the winners are guaranteed a flow of profits and honors, their research is legitimized for citation, and it is even noted that they have a longer life - up to a year or two - Among the scholars who were nominated and did not receive the award, in addition to the trait of greatness and wisdom that accompanies them forever.
As a result, many problems arise when prize winners support pseudo-science or blind fanatic ideas that include racial discrimination, and this is what many did, including - for example - "William Shockley", winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the transistor. Eugenics advocates, declaring that people with low IQs - mostly African Americans - should have their offspring cut off.
William Shockley
It did not stop there, as the American biologist James Watson also stated that Africans are less intelligent than the average. One example of a proponent of pseudoscience is Carey Mullis, the American biochemist who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing PCR, a DNA copying technique used today in every biology laboratory around the world. The climate and the link between HIV and AIDS, not to mention in his autobiography that he met a glowing raccoon (a carnivorous mammal) who claimed to be an alien.
In fairness, regardless of the number of scientists who receive the prize each year, the issue of scientists who go outside the scope of rationality and support racist ideas is a problem that the Nobel Committee cannot solve, but we can solve it by refraining from granting the status of divinity and sanctity to the prize and its winners, because in fact it is It is not, and like any other award, it has flaws and sometimes does not look at things objectively.
The problem from the start is that we overestimate the winners, get arrogant, and destroy those who were unlucky to win it, which prompted science writer Matthew Francis last year to write: “At the end of the day, it is up to us if We wanted to give up the Nobel Prizes because it gets worse year after year that they control our perception of science once we agreed to receive the prize, and now is the time to withdraw that consent.”
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This article was translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily represent the Meydan website.
Translation: Somaya Zaher.