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This is an interesting piece discussing how modern scientific work is making it harder to choose only a maximum of three people per prize...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/29/world/nobel-prize-rule-of-three-diversity-scn/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/29/world/nobel-prize-rule-of-three-diversity-scn/index.html
CNN —
Some of the most brilliant minds in science will be catapulted from academic obscurity next week when the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine or physiology are announced.
The honors, established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel more than a century ago, represent the pinnacle of scientific achievement, celebrating transformative breakthroughs that are often decades in the making.
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Rees said one challenge for the Nobel committees is the increasingly collaborative nature of most scientific research. The image of the lone genius having a eureka moment is long gone, if it ever truly existed. Additionally, discoveries can be made simultaneously by different teams.
However, the Nobel selection committees, according to the rules laid down by Alfred Nobel in 1895, can only honor up to three people per prize. This requirement can prove to be a headache, Rees said.
“It may be a project where several people have done work in parallel, and they single out some and not others. It may be that there’s a team, and it’s not obvious that the ones they’ve singled from the team are the dominant figures,” said Rees, who is the UK’s astronomer royal and author of “If Science Is to Save Us.”
For example, the 2017 Nobel in physics recognized the detection of gravitational waves — “ripples” in space generated by colliding black holes 1 billion or more light-years away. The key papers reporting this discovery had almost 1,000 authors, Rees noted. However, only three were rewarded the prize — Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne.
Similarly, one often discussed candidate for the medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize is the mapping of the human genome, a transformative project that was only fully completed in 2022 and involved hundreds of people.
David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, who identifies “Nobel worthy” individuals by analyzing how often fellow scientists cite their key scientific papers throughout the years, agrees that the three-person rule is a constraint.
“It really has become a huge transformation in science that it’s more and more team science — huge groups tackling more difficult problems, international collaborative networks,” Pendlebury said. “This rule of three does seem to be an impediment if they wanted to recognize a team.”