Tim Radford
It is lunchtime in Europe or breakfast in New England and you are probably in middle life, maybe a great deal older. You are also a chemist, a physicist or a researcher who did something unequivocally important in medicine and physiology. Or you could be an economist, a politician or perhaps a writer, comfortably off after a long period in a limited obscurity.
Either way you have just had a phone call from Stockholm or Oslo, and you still can’t quite believe it. You have won the Nobel prize. A sum – or a share in that sum – worth about 600 000 is heading your way. You have a date in December with a King of Sweden. Your life is about to change for ever. Too bad.
How much it changes depends on what you did. If you won the peace prize, prepare for hosts of huzzas and brickbats and some well-founded cynicism. Yasser Arafat got the Nobel Peace Prize and look what hasn’t happened in the Middle East. Henry Kissinger got one and look what happened in Vietnam. FW de Klerk got one near the end of a lifetime of support for white power in South Africa. On the other hand, Nelson Mandela got the same prize. So did Joseph Rotblat who helped make the atomic bomb and then spent the rest of his life trying to defuse it.
If you won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you get the same huzzas and brickbats. Most of the time, most of the world will pretend never to have heard of you. In some cases, years after the announcement two- thirds of the world will still not have heard of you. If people have heard of you, it may not be to your advantage. Or people may have wondered if you got the wrong award.
Winston Churchill, yes, but for literature? But if you get the big one for chemistry, physics or physiology and medicine, you step straight into a different kind of life. Great, says the public, but what is phosphorylation? Partition chromotography? A tau particle?
You might not – at the time in question – get the message at all. In 1995, the poet Seamus Heaney was practically the last person to hear he had won: he was holidaying in Greece. Professor Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex knew, when he and Robert Curl and Richard Smalley of Rice University, Houston, discovered fullerenes, the third form of carbon, that they were in with a chance. But he wasn’t there to take the call.
Some scientists step into bafflement of a different sort. Stanley Prusiner was awarded the Nobel prize last year for his work on prions. Prions are proteinaceous particles. But nobody has yet actually worked out what a prion does, or how it replicates, or how it works its way from digestive tract to brain to cause a spongiform encephalopathy. Prusiner got an award for what many people still called a hypothesis.
He had no comment to make. Carleton Gadjusek on the other hand, got his name in the papers for non-Nobel activities. He shared an award in 1976 for “new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases”. He went on to become chief of the US National Institutes of Health laboratory of central nervous systems, and then from there to jail after pleading guilty to sexually abusing a teenage boy. He was released in May, with invitations to work in Norway, Finland, France, Germany and Israel.
Others start with almost intractably difficult and arcane bits of science and find themselves catapulted into the public arena. Sherwood Rowland was one of the atmospheric chemists who identified the erosion of the ozone layer by man-made chlorofluorocarbons: the international community agreed a protocol more than 10 years ago, but Rowland still gets a hard time from contrarians.
People might listen to them. “So much of our activity – any scientist’s activity – is so highly focused that it is not at all uncommon for a scientist not to know very much about other things, so you probably ought not to listen to them on any subject they don’t know anything about.” But that hasn’t stopped people listening to the colourful surfing sperm donor and man-about-science Kary Mullis, who shared the Nobel prize in 1993 for inventing the polymerase chain reaction method of amplifying DNA.
The much-married Mullis listed his interests as cosmology, artificial intelligence, hallucogenics, photography and women who are 10 000 days old.
Some scientists change direction; others don’t. Britain’s Frederick Sanger won the Nobel prize in 1958 for work on the structure of insulin. He went back to his laboratory at Cambridge and won a share in a second Nobel award in 1980 for the structure of nucleic acids.
Other scientists get caught up in a kind of subdued controversy. Richard Roberts, the British geneticist who now works in Massachusetts, shared the prize in 1993 for the discovery that human DNA was organised quite differently from bacterial DNA. He immediately found himself embroiled in a familiar challenge: why not also this other scientist, whose work played a powerful part?
Ironically, Roberts’s chief supporter was James Watson, who with Francis Crick also shared an award in 1962 for unravelling the structure of DNA. Crick and Watson were attacked for exploiting the work of the British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who might have shared the prize. But Franklin died in 1958: the prizes are never posthumous. And the award is never shared by more than three people. In fact, almost all Nobel award- winning science depends on something vital discovered by somebody else.
l The latest Ig Nobel awards ceremony has been held at Harvard University. The Igs are an annual exercise in irreverence timed to coincide with the Nobel prize announcements.
The Ig ceremony is staged by a journal called Annals of Improbable Research.
The Ig medicine prize went to Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewellyn, David Kelly and Peter Holt for their Lancet paper titled: “A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for Five Years.”
The patient had indeed pricked his finger. Bacteria under the skin had started a decompositional process that embarrassed him. His doctors had to arrange for him to be seen separately, because of the smell that accompanied him.
This year, other Ig awards went to a zoologist at Gettysburg College for “contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac”, and to a safety engineer from Ontario who developed a suit of armour impervious to grizzly bears.
The Ig literature prize went to a paper by Mara Sidoli published in The Journal of Analytical Psychology. It was entitled: “Farting as a Defence against Unspeakable Dread.”