High Priests of the Unknown

In New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery, where the dead are far from shy, two Yale chemistry professors are buried side by side.

On the older of the two grave markers, no lifetime detail has been left unchiseled in tight, cursive swirls that scroll its length. It is a stone resume of academic honors seven feet high. The newer tombstone beside it bears a name, particulars of birth, marriage, death, and just two words: “Nobel Laureate*.” The eye follows the asterisk to the bottom of the stone. There a footnote can be found: “*Etc.”

The Nobel Prize trumps all.

This is the 100th year for the world’s most famous award. The oversize 18-karat gold medal, covered in 24-karat gold and presented in a blush-red box, stirs powerful currents of veneration, disdain, and desire. The Nobel Prize is, for much of the public, the undisputed arbiter of greatness.

In a swirl of scholarly pomp and circumstance next week in Stockholm, the centennial Nobel laureates will be formally inducted into this secular sainthood. The new laureates will take their gold medals from the hands of a king and their glasses of Champagne from the nearest silver tray. There will be bows and curtsies, banquets and balls, speeches and special symposia. For the intellectuals whose accomplishments are celebrated by the prize, the attention alone is intoxicating.

“You are overjoyed. You are thrilled. You are scared,” says MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle, who shares the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. “For one week, you’re king of the world,” says physicist Burton Richter, who won a 1976 Nobel Prize for his research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

It all begins with a word from Stockholm. The news came unexpectedly this year, as it has every fall for a century. In 1995, biologist Edward Lewis heard it whispered through the window of a taxicab in Switzerland. Chemist Rudy Marcus in 1992 was tapped on the shoulder in a Toronto hotel corridor. Endocrinologist Roger Guillemin was asleep in 1977 when his telephone rang. So was molecular biologist David Baltimore in 1975.

It was 2:45 a.m. on a Monday this past October when the call woke up geneticist Leland Hartwell in Seattle. It was still too early when the telephone rang again the following Wednesday for chemist K. Barry Sharpless in La Jolla. The hand gropes in the predawn darkness to pick up the telephone’s handset. Allow me to congratulate you, a voice says. You have won the Nobel Prize.

“It struck like a thunderbolt,” says Hartwell, a Los Angeles native who is director of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Memorial Cancer Center and shares the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

With its fairy-princess kiss of publicity and cash, the Nobel Prize transforms the most unassuming person into intellectual royalty. It automatically confers remarkable--sometimes undeserved-- moral authority on the men and women singled out for recognition. They are lionized long after most people forget what they did or why their achievement matters. Not everyone can survive the toxic shock of celebrity. One newly minted Nobel laureate died of a heart attack three days after his prize was announced. For any new prize winner, the pace set by lecture invitations and podium appearances is grueling enough. Douglas Osheroff, a Stanford University physicist who won his Nobel Prize in 1996, logged 125,000 miles in the year after his prize was announced. Economics prize laureate Robert Alexander Mundell of Columbia University received 3,000 e-mails in the first two weeks after being notified of his 1999 award. And the demands can be disconcerting.

Recalls Osheroff: “I was asked to donate my sperm.”

In such ways, many people believe that the prize embodies the essence of selfless human achievement. Yet as the award elevates the best in humanity, it creates a cult of genius that warps what it honors, historians and researchers say. The prize can skew personal and professional priorities. In a broader sense, the award shapes the public’s perception of science. It affects the conduct of science itself, prizing some at the expense of others. So lofty are its ideals that even the Nobel Prize itself cannot always live up to them. “It is not just that there are occasionally mistakes,” says University of Oslo historian Robert Marc Friedman, author of “The Politics of Excellence: Behind The Nobel Prize in Science.” “The selection system ultimately can’t deliver what we want: an assessment of what is truly the best.”

the nobel prize is neither the oldest nor the richest of the thousands of achievement awards given every year. It recognizes only a narrow band of human endeavor: physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, economics, peace and literature. Critics say this Olympics of culture can skew public perceptions of what is paramount in human affairs.

Even the prizes that are awarded sometimes draw controversy. The literature medal over the years has prompted as many critical groans as cheers. The peace prize has provoked conflicts. The economics award--added in 1968 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Sweden’s national bank--makes some people sneer that it is not a true Nobel Prize, any more than economics itself is a real science. Even within the natural sciences, the prizes exclude huge areas in a way that affects research priorities, many prominent scientists believe. “There are prizeable fields, and then there are the others, such as the marine sciences and earth sciences and astronomy and mathematics,” says Harriet Zuckerman, senior vice president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, whose book, “Scientific Elite,” studies the interplay between merit and privilege among Nobel laureates in the United States. “All the areas of animal and human behavior are excluded.”

“I think it does affect the way scientists and others view science, especially those in charge of funding research,” she says.

University deans and administrators simply pay more attention to departments that have laureates on the faculty or the possibility of winning the prize. “It is such a big status symbol for universities to have a Nobel laureate or have hopes for one. It adds prestige,” says Lewis, a professor at Caltech, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for medicine.

The impact is particularly noticeable in California, which claims more Nobel laureates within its borders than any country in the world except the United States as a whole--85 since 1923. The four newest California laureates will receive their gold medals next week. The prizes are grist for endless regional debates about excellence: California versus the Eastern Establishment, Northern California versus Southern California, private schools versus publicly funded university settings. Some of the state’s most prominent scientific institutions--Caltech, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and San Diego’s Neurosciences Institute, for example-- were built largely with the money that prize winners attract.

While other prizes exist--some covering areas the Nobels neglect--the Nobels are the only ones that require the world to take notice.

the prizes began with the will of alfred nobel, the swedish-born inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896, leaving his considerable fortune to endow annual awards for progress in science, literature and the spread of peace. He was a brooding workaholic with a love for the poetry of Shelley and a morbid fear of being buried alive.

No one is sure why Nobel conceived his prize, how he decided upon its rules, or if, as it begins its second century, he would recognize what it has become. When he died in 1896, almost everyone hated his testament. One prominent Swedish scientist at the time called it “the stupidest use of a bequest I can imagine.”

After quieting angry heirs, his executors took five years to hammer out the procedures, including a foundation to manage the money and committees--one for each prize--appointed by Sweden’s scientific, medical and literary academies to select the winners. Under Nobel’s will, a committee appointed by Norway’s parliament awards the Peace Prize.

Past winners and other people designated by the committees are allowed to submit nominations, after which the committees screen them for months, announce them in October and then formally present the awards at lavish ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10. Cash adds to the cachet. This year’s prize comes with a check for 10 million Swedish krona, the highest in its history--about $943,000 at today’s exchange rate. In the United States, the winnings are taxed as ordinary income.

More powerful than the money though is the mystique. “It is magical. It tweaks the imagination,” says Daniel Socolow, director of the Fellows program for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation--popularly known as the genius grants. “It encourages a sense of hope.”

The prize lodges in the dreams of the accomplished and the aspiring. “It hovers in the psyche of specially accomplished scientists in a way that no other award does,” says Zuckerman at the Andrew Mellon Foundation. “There is simply nothing like it.”

The Nobel Prize gained that special luster from its association with the 20th century’s coups of scientific discovery, says Yale University historian Daniel Kevles. “They took hold precisely at the time when science was laying claim to the public imagination and the public purse.”

Year after year, Kevles says, the prize reflected the intellectual feats of a century in thrall to the two-edged sword of science, with its power of both creation and destruction. In chosing the prize winners every year, the prize committees have made some notable mistakes--particularly of omission and delay. They sidetepped some of the biggest ideas in modern science, from the Big Bang creation theory and the expanding universe to plate tectonics and evolution. Meant to be an international award, the Nobel Prize selection committees have overlooked much of the world, with the prize going almost exclusively to America and Northern Europe. To catch up, Japan has vowed to win 30 Nobel Prizes in the next 50 years.

New medals are chalked up on national scoreboards in a way that many find unseemly, especially when so many American Nobel Prizes have been won by immigrants. “These prizes were really meant for individuals, not for nations,” says USC Nobel laureate George Olah, who won the 1994 Prize for chemistry.

The selection process consistently shortchanges women and minorities. In its first 50 years, only two women were nominated, says Swedish historian Elizabeth Crawford. Only one won. During the 1940s, for example, a mixture of prejudice against women, anti-Semitism and academic politics caused the prize committees consistently to overlook Lise Meitner, a German Jew who had taken refuge in Sweden. She is widely hailed among physicists as the key person in the discovery of nuclear fission. There also have been missteps. One Nobel Prize was awarded for a discovery about cancer that turned out to be wrong. Another was given for lighthouse design.

“There is a lot of politics that go into it,” says Johns Hopkins University science historian Stuart Leslie. “There is lobbying, subtle and not so subtle.”

Despite the lapses, the research singled out by the Nobel Prize has been influential consistently enough to establish a record of sure-footedness on the uncertain frontiers of science. “The felicity of the choices have been remarkable,” says Guillemin at the Salk Institute, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for medicine. “Every one of those discoveries opened up new fields.”

Conducting their business in extraordinary secrecy, the prize committees speak with the voice of posterity. “The awards seem to issue not from mere Stockholm but from some timeless Realm of Objective Judgment,” says Burton Feldman, a Denver-based scholar who wrote “The Nobel Prize, A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige.”

No one can apply directly. Blatant efforts are self-defeating. “People will write bluntly and say here are my qualifications and I think I deserve a Nobel Prize,” Guillemin says. “Needless to say, it usually falls on deaf ears.”

Nor does the number of nominations seem to matter. Physicist Albert Michelson was nominated just four times before winning in 1907. Marie Curie also was nominated four times--and won twice. By contrast, German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated 73 times, including nominations every year from 1917 to 1937. He never won. George Hale, who founded the Mt. Wilson Observatory, was nominated 33 times and never won.

A long life can help. The prizes are given only to the living, and some of the last century’s most important scientists died before their work could be honored.

The prize certainly helps make some new areas of research seem more legitimate. But it also arbitrarily elevates fields such as chemistry and physics at the expense of others. “A lot of fields brood over the fact they don’t have a prize,” says Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1989.

The prize often favors practical experimenters over theorists. At the same time, the prize committees have disdained the applications of engineering and technology. “But technology is often the most inspired part of the game,” Varmus says. “A technological advance can really open up a field.”

Indeed, some wonder if science itself has not outgrown the Nobel Prize.

Today, the boundaries between chemistry, biology and physics have blurred. So has the role of the 21st century scientist. When Nobel wrote his will, science was a lonely, low-rent endeavor and Nobel’s cash award was enough to fund an entire laboratory for years.

Contemporary science is a sprawling enterprise in which research is conducted with public funds on a scale that only the most well-heeled governments and corporations can afford. So many hundreds of people may be involved in a project that it can be all but impossible to single out those most responsible for a prize-worthy advance. “It is not a few individuals thinking thoughts in isolation,” says Stanford’s Osheroff. “It is a huge community that pushes the frontier of science forward.”

Scientists today also may profit commercially from their discoveries in a way that many in Nobel’s day thought unseemly. In those days, “one did not engage in research for the purpose of making money or seeking fame,” says Friedman in Oslo.

Some suggest that a century of changing attitudes has come between science and the values the prize embodies. “The context has changed so dramatically that there is increasingly a mismatch between the Nobel Prize and the scientific enterprise,” Kevles says. “The Nobel Prizes have seen their heyday. Their moment, in the main, has past. And their moment was the 20th century.”

Others argue that the changes of a century affirm the prize as an anchor for ideals of individual achievement. “Science has become a big enterprise,” says USC’s Olah. “But there is no such thing as a committee coming up with something new. The fundamental breakthroughs come from individuals.”

And for the most gifted of those scientists, the dream of a Nobel Prize is “this little rat gnawing inside their stomach,” Friedman says. Among the ambitious, it whets an already keen appetite for admiration and pestige. “There are scientists who would kill for a Nobel Prize,” says Kevles. Prestige breeds power and the money soon follows. Congress listens when Nobel laureates speak. The world applauds. For all the accolades, though, there are those who find the Nobel Prize troubling, even insidious in its influence. Many scientists are themselves ambivalent.

But the prize does give science priceless publicity, says Caltech president and prize winner David Baltimore. “The prize is the most visible aspect of the whole science process. What the Nobel Prizes do, and will continue to do, is highlight the best of science. They are a reminder that science is an individual enterprise, and that is of paramount importance.”

Even in times of national crisis, the story of the Nobel Prize should still be inspiring, says Dr. Gerald Edelman, director of the Neurosciences Institute at UC San Diego and a 1972 Nobel laureate in medicine. “The Nobel Prize reminds us that progress is possible and that, even at a dark time, we must be doing something right.”

But what the Nobel Prize does best, Varmus says, is to make a public story of science. “It is important to tell stories of science, of moments of discovery, of moments in which things advance.”

Often these are Horatio Alger tales of adversity overcome and visionary breakthroughs, of obscure figures working on exotic problems with far-reaching--but not easily understood--implications. There is the frizzy-haired patent clerk who saw into the heart of time and space; the young French housewife who outsmarted the men and discovered radium; the boyish dons who reasoned their way into the heart of DNA while sipping tea and sherry; the country doctor who found the diabetes treatment that the city slickers could not.

Like all fables of invention and discovery, they are true and not true, and all the better for the telling.