How the Prize Changed Their Lives
Immediately after UCLA professor Louis Ignarro won the Nobel prize for medicine, he thought of his mother. How would she handle it? Of course, she’d be proud that her son had been anointed one of the smartest men in the world, thanks to his work uncovering the role nitric oxide plays in regulating the cardiovascular system. But how would the 85-year-old Italian immigrant explain to her friends that her son’s scientific breakthrough led to the invention of Viagra?
“She was afraid she wouldn’t know what to say to the neighbors,” Ignarro says. And what on earth would she say when her son drove up in his $50,000 millennium yellow Corvette Z06--top speed 220 mph, zero to 60 in four seconds, with the license plate NOBEL--that he bought with the proceeds from his prize, a car he wanted so badly that he searched until he found the only model left in the United States at a New York dealer? Or when she explained to friends that her son had moved from an apartment in Westwood to a three-bedroom house in Beverly Hills?
“I’ve been a poor professor all my life,” Ignarro says. “I’m not an MD. I’m a PhD.”
Those poor professor days ended early one morning in October 1998, when Ignarro was awakened by a call from Stockholm letting him know that he had just joined a club of 712 people who had won the award since it was established in 1901. And it is a venerable club; the winners are the year’s Most Valuable Brains, the people you’d want as lifelines on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Overnight they find themselves the Madonnas and Brad Pitts of the intellectual set. They testify before Congress, throw out the ball before baseball games and are implored to sign political petitions where the words “Nobel Prize winner” will be displayed prominently. They receive requests in the mail for their autographs. Their lives are changed forever.
“Once you have a Nobel Prize, people ask questions on all kinds of topics, believing you are a universal oracle or fountain of wisdom for everything,” says George Olah, a USC professor who won the Nobel for chemistry in 1994.
Others look at Nobelists with a sense of godliness, although a Korean group took that a bit far when it asked the late UCLA chemist Donald Cram to revise the 10 Commandments. He declined, figuring the author had done well enough.
Stanford physics professor Douglas Osheroff once received a call from an aide to a state legislator who wanted his views on K-12 science education. “I’m not an expert in that,” Osheroff told the aide. “Certainly you must be,” he replied. “You’re a Nobel laureate.” Which is not to say that Osheroff is averse to using the prestige of the award when it is useful, like mentioning it when he writes to a congressman.
“It doesn’t make any sense not to, does it?” he says.
if there is advice nobel laureates would give to future winners, it would be, “Just say no.” No to the banquets and the award ceremonies they are asked to attend. No to the organizers of scientific conferences who hope a Nobelist will draw a crowd.
“It becomes possible to spend all your time traveling around, giving talks,” says Robert Curl, a Rice University professor who won the prize in chemistry in 1996. “I don’t want to sound too cynical, but there’s a tendency for people to say we need something to dress up this occasion, so let’s see if we can get a Nobel laureate. Anyone will do. I guess that’s life as a show pony.”
While the sudden celebrity and the opportunity to be fawned over by presidents and kings can be enticing, the sudden fame can be overwhelming. “The peace prize in some people’s minds seems to confer some kind of Mother Teresa thing,” says Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 award. “That’s very difficult because it’s quite far from the truth.”
Shortly after she received her prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Williams attended a conference in Vienna with other peace prize winners. One laureate told Williams, “It will take you a couple years to learn how much has affected you, and put added stresses on you you didn’t realize were there.” “I thought she was nuts,” Williams says.
Czeslaw Milosz, the poet who won the literature prize in 1980, was accustomed to his quiet routine, teaching classes at UC Berkeley and writing in solitude. He found the sudden fame of the prize unbearable. “Winning the Nobel introduced enormous, indescribable turmoil,” he has said, sounding as if he wanted to crawl under his desk and hide. “All the pieces of my life were destroyed for a long time. To be a celebrity is a very hard thing to withstand.”
Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel for literature in 1976, wrote in a letter to UCLA Yiddish professor Janet Hadda, “The Stockholm prize elicited kinky reactions from everyone. Before the year was out, I was ready to trade my gold medal for a beautiful house in the Canary Islands.”
The question that confronts all Nobel winners is, “What do I do next?” One thing is certain: Once you win a Nobel, all your subsequent work will be seen through the prism of the award. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the U.S.,” says some prize winners are so reluctant to publish work that might not measure up that they take their names off some of their papers.
Physicist Burton Richter won the award at age 45, young for a Nobel laureate. The day he received the phone call from Stockholm, his wife told him no one should win the award before they are 60. “It took me until 60 to understand what she meant,” Richter says.
“One of the big problems that comes up is, what more mountains are there to climb?” Some winners change fields or head into business. Others continue their research unabated, often with bigger grants and more money from their universities. Richter solved the problem by going into administration and becoming director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where two members of his staff received the prize.
One theory is that once you’ve won a Nobel, you won’t complete any more meaningful work. Ernest Hemingway said that “no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterward.” After he won the award in 1954, he proved himself right. Zuckerman finds support for Hemingway and says the number of papers Nobel winners write in the following five and 10 years drops precipitously when measured against their non-laureate peers.
The award also can exacerbate underlying tensions and jealousies. The singling out of Jody Williams for the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize among the members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which also won, fueled resentment. Williams was fired from her job as coordinator of the campaign, and she and another leader of the coalition stopped talking. Still, Williams says the prize was a boon to the campaign, leading 122 countries to sign an international treaty banning land mines.
Certainly the money--now about $1 million split among the winners in each category--can make a difference in a Nobelist’s life, but there’s more than the prize money. Lecture fees jump, salaries are bumped and outrageous job offers are made.
Four hours after V.S. Naipaul was announced as this year’s Nobel winner for literature on Oct. 11, Alfred E. Knopf already had designed the “winner’s sticker” to be placed on his latest book, “Half a Life.” Within three weeks, the initial printing of 20,000 copies was quadrupled. Along with the leap in sales of his previous novels and the increased interest when the paperback is released, the award will put several hundred thousand dollars in Naipaul’s pocket.
After Ignarro won the Nobel in 1998, the job offers started rolling in. Did he want to be considered for director of the National Institutes of Health? Would he like $2.5 million a year to direct research at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country?
But he’s satisfied with his UCLA salary, and he loves training students. He keeps his Nobel Prize medal in a Plexiglas case in his office. The university is building him a mini institute for cardiovascular research, and he talks with a bit of envy about the tens of millions of dollars other universities have spent on facilities for their Nobel winners. He’ll be satisfied if only he can get UCLA to guarantee him $20 million to $25 million in the next decade for research he’s convinced will lead to life-saving heart drugs.
Oh, there’s one other thing. At the cramped UC Berkeley campus, Nobel laureates are the only people with reserved parking spaces. Not even the chancellor gets one. “It’s considered to be slightly more important than the prize itself,” jokes economics laureate Dan McFadden.
No such luck at UCLA. Ignarro plans to use his Nobel-earned muscle to discuss the situation with UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale. He’s got a spot picked out in an underground garage reserved for deans and department chairs. It’s close to the door, so he won’t have to go outside in the rain. And the $50,000 Corvette won’t get wet.
