Laureate Roulette
Want to see the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work? try picking the winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and physiology/medicine.
Sure, Werner Karl Heisenberg himself got one for his discoveries concerning the hard-to-predict movement of atomic particles. So did Albert Einstein--16 years after E=mc2 (and not for his seminal theory of relativity). At least he did better than fellow physicist Ernst Ruska, who had to wait 53 years for his prize. Then again, Jonas Salk never rated a Nobel. Neither did Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table. Freud came up empty-handed while obscure Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz was honored for inventing the since-disgraced lobotomy.
The Nobel committees have laid some eggs over the years, but with very few exceptions the Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences have been richly merited. In fact, the real problem is that there aren’t enough prizes to go around. “For everybody who gets a Nobel Prize,” says 1996 physics laureate Douglas Osheroff, chairman of the physics department at Stanford University, “there are probably a dozen others who deserve it and who end up on their deathbeds as bitter old men.” Adds Nicholas Spitzer, chairman of the neurobiology department at UC San Diego, “There’s a certain random element to the Nobel Prize. Picking the winners isn’t a science. It’s more like a casino game.”
Feel like gambling? There are several techniques to choose from. You can try predicting who’s going to produce one of science’s holy grails--a cure for cancer, for example. Yeah, good luck. Alternatively, you can put your money on the top scientists in fields of emerging research that seem likely to generate discoveries worthy of Nobels. Genomics is one. Nanotechnology is another. Meanwhile, biochemists are working on cell regeneration and astrophysicists are puzzling over time travel. But breakthroughs by nature come without warning, and it’s hard to predict who’s going to make them.
Some prognosticators bet on prominent scientists who have done admirable work but who haven’t, for one reason or another, been honored with a Nobel. Unfortunately, this comes down to politics, and politics is always a crap-shoot. A good way to improve your odds is to identify overlooked or underrated candidates--scientists involved in important research that hasn’t been recognized by the gang back in Sweden.
Another handicapping tip involves charting the performances of Nobel horses in lesser-stakes races. Just as the Wood Memorial is regarded as a good dress-rehearsal for the Kentucky Derby, so is the Lasker Award considered a reliable indicator of future Nobel laureates in physiology/medicine.
On that basis, Caltech biochemist Alexander Varshavsky has to be considered a Nobel front-runner. Not only did he win the Lasker in 2000, but he’s also picked up the Wolf Prize, a prestigious Israeli arts and sciences award, and been honored by the Gairdner Foundation, a Canadian organization that rewards influential biomedical research. Varshavsky has done groundbreaking work in the study of the ubiquitin system, which plays a role in the prevention of diseases of the nervous system.
Unfortunately, the Nobel selection process and deliberations are closely guarded. Is this the year for experimental or theoretical physics? (There’s fierce infighting between scientific disciplines.) Which nominee has more influential sponsors? (Hundreds of scientists are nominated each year.) Has the discovery in question been generally accepted by the scientific community? (See “Lobotomies and Other Blunders.”) How large was the research team? (A prize can be given to no more than three people. Four or more and some poor schmoe is out of luck.)
Scientists are wary of broadcasting their picks for fear of alienating their colleagues. It’s also considered a faux pas of intergalactic proportions to suggest that you might be in the running yourself. (Francis Crick was furious about former partner and fellow Nobel laureate James Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” which chronicled their discovery of the structure of DNA.) Still, for a variety of highly pragmatic reasons, playing “Who Wants to Be a Laureate?” remains a popular pastime in science departments around the world.
During the past century, the Nobels have honored the great advances of modern technology, from conquering infectious diseases to harnessing the power of the atom to unlocking the mysteries of our genetic code. In the next century, we can expect even more wondrous developments, which means there will be plenty of Nobels won in increasingly specialized fields that didn’t exist a generation ago--bioinformatics, pharmacogenomics, glycobiology, proteomics and so on.
To date, the face of Nobel laureates in the sciences has been remarkable homogeneous. No, not nerdy, but white and male. Women have been making progress in the sciences, especially medicine, but ethnic diversity remains an elusive goal. The roster of Nobel leaureates in the hard sciences features a handful of Chinese Americans, one Mexican American and not a single African American, and with precious few scientists of color coming through the pipeline, nobody expects these numbers to increase appreciably any time soon.
If you’re looking for fundamental change on the Nobel landscape, try physics. In the beginning, physics was the king of the Nobel categories. In fact, it was the between-the-world-wars triumphs of giants such as Max Planck, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Enrico Fermi and Californian Edward O. Lawrence that cemented the Nobel’s reputation.
But particle physics, for decades the big man on the Nobel campus, is a mature science. “We’ve done all the easy experiments,” says Christopher McKee, chairman of the UC Berkeley physics department. “So all that’s left are extremely difficult experiments.” Most of them involve gargantuan particle accelerators and commensurately swollen teams of researchers. Although there are still important discoveries to be made, the Nobel committee has been uncomfortable with crowds.
Smaller groups of theoretical physicists continue to work on what’s felicitously--and controversially--called a Theory of Everything, which seeks to explain the behavior of all matter and reconcile the conflicts between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Don’t try this one at home, folks; even Nobel laureates have a tough time understanding it. But if the theory is confirmed, David Gross of UC Santa Barbara, one of its most tireless boosters, may garner Nobel consideration.
Experimental physicists, meanwhile, are busy playing Mr. Wizard with a new generation of superconductors--materials through which an electrical current flows without resistance. Eventually, superconductivity could be the source of scads of gee-whiz gizmos. Levitating cars, anybody? At the moment, though, superconductivity can be achieved only at extremely cold temperatures, which limits its utility.
With classical physics seemingly pausing for breath, astrophysics is poised to get some respect from the Nobel committee. Steven Hawking, the British author of “A Brief History of Time,” is often tabbed as a potential laureate. A top local rival is his friend Kip Thorne, once described by Caltech president (and 1975 physiology laureate) David Baltimore as “Caltech’s Number One strange scientist.” Like Hawking, Thorne has investigated black holes, and he’s achieved some popular notoriety for his prognostications regarding time travel.
Within astrophysics, the biggest growth area--literally--is cosmology, which is the study of our expanding universe. This is a field populated by bizarre, mind-boggling notions that make even the most speculative science fiction seem positively prosaic. The latest thinking, for example, is that 95% of the universe--or is that universes?--is made up of so-called dark matter and dark energy, neither of which has ever been directly observed or measured.
Among cosmologists, one potential California laureate is George Smoot, who led a team at UC Berkeley that studied the cosmic microwave background--the thermal radiation that fills the entire universe and is thought to be the remnant of the Big Bang that marked the moment of creation. Other top California cosmologists include Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paul Richards of UC Berkeley, who believe the universe is flat, and Andrei Linde of Stanford and Saul Perlmutter of UC Berkeley, who say the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Then again, the Nobel committee may not have much time or use for cosmological arcana. Last year’s physics prize went to Jack Kilby for creating the integrated circuit--a feat that seems perilously and, to classical physicists, scandalously close to engineering. The surprise award suggests that future physics Nobels may be more firmly rooted in real-world applications. As John Benditt, editor-in-chief of Technology Review, puts it: “The 20th century was the golden age of science. But these days, the most exciting developments are in technology.”
If computer science ever lands a spot on the Nobel gravy train, there will be plenty of prizes awarded to Californians. Some fascinating advances have been made at IBM’s Almaden Research Center by Stuart Parkin (miniaturizing disc drives) and Hiroshi Ito (etching circuitry onto a chip). More speculative Nobel possibilities are James Heath at UCLA and Stan Williams at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, who have been leaders in the drive to create a working nanocomputer--a computer no bigger than a grain of sand.
The larger--or rather smaller-- concept of nanotechnology, first articulated by Caltech Nobelist Richard Feynman in 1959, is the perfect emblem for our brave new century. Images of microscopic machines assembled atom by atom dance like sugarplum fairies in the minds of leading futurists. How exactly can we do that? Well, unfortunately, we can’t. At least not yet. But hope--and hype--springs eternal.
As it is, the smaller-is-better philosophy is finding new converts throughout the sciences. Biology, for example, used to be studied at the organ level and, later, at the cellular level. Now molecular biology is the rage, and researchers such as W.E. Moerner of Stanford and Carlos Bustamante of UC Berkeley are examining proteins one molecule at a time. But potentially the most powerful development of the 21st century--with the accent on potentially--is deciphering our genetic code. After Herculean labors, the Human Genome Project identified more than 30,000 genes in human DNA and charted the sequences of the 3 billion chemical pair bases composing our genetic material. Sequencing the human genome will undoubtedly produce Nobels. But that’s when the real work begins. “We’re at a turning point,” says Dr. Daniel Masys, director of biomedical informatics at UCSD. “We have the book of man in hand, if you will, but we don’t have any idea what it means.”
Some researchers are looking for structural solutions by striving to determine the immensely complex three-dimensional folded structures of the proteins produced by our DNA. Once the structure is known, drugs could be designed, molecule by molecule, to treat specific genetic disorders. Much of this work is being done at universities and start-ups in Southern California. Whoever solves the protein-folding problem may become not only a Nobel laureate but a gazillionaire.
The flip side of structural genomics is functional genomics, which involves trying to isolate the role played by specific genes in causing, say, obesity or leukemia. The ultimate goal is to treat the defective gene or insert a healthy gene to replace it. Dr. W. French Anderson, now at USC, pioneered this form of gene therapy. But despite its obvious promise, gene therapy hasn’t yet lived up to expectations.
The genome is so complicated that it has spawned a new field of computer-intensive computational biology known as bioinformatics. This sort of interdisciplinary approach is clearly the future of science. Already it’s helped generate huge strides in the neurosciences, where there’s a cross-pollination of scientists working with individual neurons and others working the macro end of the spectrum with imaging technology such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and positron emission tomography scans.
Are there any Nobels to be won here? One would think. Then again, even if, as Einstein insisted, God doesn’t play dice with the universe, He clearly has no control over the Nobel committee.
