Nobel Prize controversies
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Over their hundred-year history, there have been several Nobel Prize controversies wherein apparently deserving recipients were excluded from the prize, the rules and definitions of the award were not consistenly adhered to, questionable nominations later 'ignominously' retracted or alternately, where a recipient later appeared to be undeserving of the prize. Also controversial is the fact that Nobel Prizes may never be posthumously awarded and therefore that future deserving recipients may be overlooked if they die before receiving the award.
Introduction
The Nobel Prizes are a series of awards, posthumously instituted by bequest of Alfred Nobel, to be awarded to individuals who had served humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. However, for better or worse, Major Important Branches of Human Knowledge and Cognitive Enterprises like Religion, Philosophy, Mathematics and the Soft Social Sciences - due solely to history - happen to be (and continue to be) excluded from considerations. There is also the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel which is itself controversial. The prizes are generally considered to be supreme decoration in the world today.
Some have even questioned the whole idea of "prizes". Alexander Grothendieck wrote a [letter] to the Swedish Academy turning down the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics. He states,
- " .... the ethics of the scientific community (at least among mathematicians) have declined to the point that out-right theft among colleagues (especially at the expense of those who are in no position to defend themselves) has nearly become the general rule, and is in any case tolerated by all, even in the most obvious and iniquitous cases. Under these conditions, agreeing to participate in the game of "prizes" and "rewards" would also mean giving my approval to a spirit and trend in the scientific world that I view as being fundamentally unhealthy, and moreover condemned to disappear soon, so suicidal are this spirit and trend, spiritually and even intellectually and materially."
Controversial exclusions
Leo Tolstoy and Henrik Ibsen were never awarded the prize in literature due both to the former's comments after not receiving the first award and the latter's realism, which was not popular in his native Scandinavia. Tolstoy was a moral philosopher notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.. Ibsen was responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama (dubbed "the father of modern drama"). It is said that Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Despite spending much time in exile, living in Germany and Italy, Ibsen is held to be one of the greatest Norwegian author of all times, being celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and as one of the most important playwrights in world history.
Jorge Luis Borges is another key writer of the 20th Century who was a potential laureate several times but never achieved the prize.
Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Physics Prize mainly recognized him for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and "for his services to Theoretical Physics": due to the concepts and advanced constructs (some ahead of their experimental proofs, e.g. gravitational waves, lenses, black holes, light bending, etc.) of his relativity theory. His contributions in the Annus Mirabilis Papers (4 in total), it is speculated, deserve a Nobel each - by per pure Nobel Definition! In 2005, The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) commemorated the 100th year of the publication of Einstein's extensive work in 1905 - as the 'World Year of Physics 2005'.
Charles Best first isolated insulin, but was excluded from the Nobel Prize in favour of his associate John Macleod. This snub so incensed Best's colleague, Frederick Banting, that he later voluntarily shared half of his 1923 Nobel Prize award money with Best.
Robert Millikan is widely believed to have been denied the 1920 prize for physics owing to Felix Ehrenhaft's claims to have measured charges smaller than Millikan's elementary charge. Ehrenhaft's claims were ultimately dismissed and Millikan was awarded the prize in 1923. Chung-Yao Chao first captured positrons (but did not realise what they were) through electron-positron annihilation in 1930. He died in 1998 without receiving the prize.
Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated for it five times between 1937 and 1948. Decades later however, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. In a sense, however, Gandhi had already received an unofficial posthumous award; in 1948 (the year of Gandhi's death), the Nobel Committee did not make the award, stating "there was no suitable living candidate". Similarly, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". The official Nobel e-museum has an [article] discussing the issue.
Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission (1939) but received no Nobel recognition. In fact, it was she, not Otto Hahn, who first figured out fission. In his defense, Hahn was under strong pressure from the Nazis to minimize Meitner's role since she was Jewish. But he maintained this position even after the war.
The 1956 Nobel Prize For Physics for the Discovery of the transistor in 1947 to Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain. As early as 1928 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types (go [here] for details). Likewise, in 1934. Oskar Heil patented the field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether either built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Similarly, in 1948 Mataré and Walker at Westinghouse Paris applied for a patent on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium duodiodes for German radar equipment during WW2.
Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel. Wu assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development (with Chen Ning Yang) by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. Some consider this very instrumental in the creation of the laws, but she did not share their Nobel Prize - a fact widely blamed on sexism by the selection committee. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists.
The 1962 Nobel Physics Prize award to Lev Landau only - for his work on the theory of liquid helium - bypassing largely, somehow, recognition due Richard Feynman's 1953-58 seminal work on the superfluid behaviour of liquid helium (a Bose-Einstein condensate), a first, successful solved model for the explanation of the phenomenon of superfluidity, introducing the use of Feynman diagrams and path integrals in the process (see ["Renormalised Relations In Condensed Matter"] for a modern-day discussion) - these have now become the indispensible tools-of-the-trade in condensed matter physics (see A Life In Science:Richard Feynman by Mary and John Gribbin): else Feynman would have shared the wonderful distinction with John Bardeen - and deservedly so! - of being the only other scientist to have bagged two Nobel Prizes in the same field, viz., Physics.
Rosalind Franklin contributed significantly, substantively, to the discovery of the structure of DNA (1953), but died before 1963, when her three colleagues in the discovery were awarded the prize. Interested readers can look up an up-to-date account in the humane, well-balanced book Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox.
The 1969 Nobel Prize For Physics sole award to Murray Gell-Mann for his work on the classification of elementary particles and their weak interactions had neglected the equal contribution of Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman. In 1961, working at the University of London, in England, Yuval independently worked out the same 'Eightfold Way' of hadrons arrangement, grouping particles in octets, in accordance with their properties (charges, mass, etc.) - the essential quark model.
George Zweig, a PhD student at Caltech, in two papers circulated in the form of CERN 'preprints', laid the foundation work of theorising, proposing the existence of 'aces' - 'quarks' (term due to Gell-Mann) - independently of Murray Gell-Mann; even though he had to allow for the existence of fractional electron charges and that quarks are real particles, not 'abstract fields' - and that, at a confused time when the general climate then (in the late '60s) was very anti-quark and violently skeptical of any such thing. George Zweig recounted a bitter experience one time when he really looked forward to an appointment in a leading university physics department but was branded as a 'charlatan' by its senior theorist - one of the most respected spokeman for all of theoretical physics! As a result, his appointment there was scuttled, and, career prospects severely damaged. The 1969 citation for Gell-Mann's Nobel Prize pointedly avoided any reference to the quark idea, mentioning instead only his earlier work on the classification of fundamental particles and their weak interactions. The existence of quarks was finally confirmed in the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics award but George Zweig's contribution remained outstandingly - 'left out'.
Jocelyn Bell first noticed the stellar radio source which was ultimately recognised as a pulsar, but she was excluded from the 1974 prize. Instead, her supervisor Antony Hewish was the second name on the prize (he developed the observational technique and designed the array which detected the pulsar). The prize was officially awarded for Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish's pioneering research in radioastrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.
The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously argued that Jocelyn Bell should also have been included as it was she who first detected the pulsar signal in measurements made by the radio array - others who had seen similar signal just relegated it to an insignificant, experimental error blip (see Nobel Prize Women in Science:Their Lives, Struggles and Momentous Discoveries by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne) - though she herself did not believe she should have been included, citing wryly perhaps: that research students don't win nobel prizes. On this latter point, it has been shown that it is not impossible for graduate students to produce Nobel Prize work. Four cases easily came to mind:
- Douglas Osheroff - a doctoral student at the Cornell lab under Robert Coleman Richardson and David Morris Lee who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize with them in physics for the 1971 discovery of the superfluid helium-3, a breakthrough in low-temperature physics which cannot be explained by classical physics.
- Gerard 't Hooft - a graduate student under Martinus J. G. Veltman (his graduate thesis advisor) who successfully showed how to calculate using the unified theory of electromagnetic and weak interactions in 1970-71 - recognised subsequently in the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics for "elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics".
- H. David Politzer - a graduate student of Sidney R. Coleman - whose work (1973) was recognised by the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics, an extremely important development in quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions.
- George Zweig - a PhD student at Caltech, independent inventor of the Quark Theory Model, working against the current of the then strongly anti-quark era (late '60s) and at great cost to himself (out of the quartet mentioned here - he was left out of the Nobel Prize).
Satoshi Mizutani and Howard Temin discovered that the Rous sarcoma virus particle contained the enzyme reverse transcriptase (1970). However it is Satoshi - Temin's Japanese postdoctoral fellow - who was responsible for the well thought-out, significant experiment confirming Temin's provirus hypothesis; which later contributed to Temin winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (1975) - see Viral RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of Rous sarcoma virus (Reviews in Medical Virology, Vol. 8, No. 1, Jan/Mar 1998, pp. 3-11(9) by Weiss R.A).
The other co-winners that year were David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco (who was distantly - if at all - related to the above ground-breaking work). Satoshi Mizutani was thus passed up inexplicably and unjustifiably, and was somewhat forgotten until recently. Interested readers can check a recent case made for this omission conundrum in the book The Great Betrayal : Fraud in Science (2004 1st. Ed.) by Horace Freeland Judson.
Fred Hoyle was denied a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983, although the winner William Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis (1946).
The 1989 Nobel Prize For Medicine Controversy. Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop were the only two winners acknowledged for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogens - a landmark study on how genes are spliced: two worthy others were passed up, viz., (1)Dominique Stehelin - professor at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, who contends as an earlier original contributor to the above said discovery and work, and, (2)Robert Weinberg - Professor of Biology at MIT whom knowledgeable others considered also a worthy contributor who should be in the award.
The 1993 Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing. Philip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts were the only two winners. However, in the opinion of several other scientists in the know, Louise T. Chow, a China-born Taiwanese researcher and accomplished woman scientist (see ["Biography"]), whose collaborator was Roberts, should also have won part of the prize. In 1976, as Staff Investigator, she carried out the studies of the genomic origins and structures of adenovirus transcripts leading directly to the EM discovery of RNA splicing and alternative RNA processing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1977, the year the discovery was made. Norman Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, Emeritus, at Caltech and well-known expert in electron microscopy (under whom Chow apprenticed as a graduate student) affirmed that Chow operated the electron microscope through which the splicing process was observed and was the crucial experiment 's sole designer, using techniques she herself developed in the previous two years at the lab: another classic case of the neglected distinguished woman in science roll (see Behind Nobel, A Struggle for Recognition Some Scientists Say Colleague of Beverly Researcher Deserved A Share of Medical Prize by Anthony Flint, Friday, November 5, 1993, Globe Staff).
The 2000 Chemistry Prize, "For the Discovery and Development of Conductive Organic polymers". recognized passive high-conductivity in oxidized polyacetylenes and related materials, first reported in 1977, as well as determining conduction mechanisms and developing devices, especially batteries. This work was felt to have led to present-day "active" devices, where a voltage or current controls electron flow. This prize ignored equally highly-conductive Charge transfer complex materials previously-reported at Bell Labs and elsewhere (see, e.g. Organic Semiconductors Y. Okamoto and W. Brenner, Reinhold, 1964). Some of these were even superconductive. Similarly, years before, McGinness et al had [reported]an organic-polymer active electronic device in the journal Science. This was a voltage-controlled switch, complete with hallmark negative differential resistance and a very highly-conductive "ON" state. This device used a similar oxidized polyacetylene,melanin. A contemporary [news article in the journal Nature]made much of this materials "strikingly large conductivity", "highly conductive state", etc., in words similar to the eventual Nobel citation. This gadget is now in the Smithsonian collection. Though the Nobel winners were again given credit, McGinness had also previously reported the mechanism of conduction in such materials and also patented batteries. Although in major journals, this work was "lost" until recently. See [organicsemiconductors.com] for details. Ironically, organic electronics is also tainted by the Jan Hendrik Schon science fraud incident, the worst such in recent memory.
The 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. This has two independent controversial exclusions:
- Raymond Damadian discovered that different tissues may exibit slightly-different proton relaxation times in nuclear magnetic resonance. Thus, e.g., NMR could distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues in vitro. This discovery of NMR "contrast" prompted both Damadian and Lauterbur to develop NMR into a method for generating images (MRI). While Damadian's eventual imaging methodology worked, it proved a technical dead-end. However, Lauderbur's "gradient" technology, likely based upon Carr's earlier imaging work, resulted in the presently-used MRI methodology. However, Damadian won large patent awards on the basis of his original idea of using relaxation time differences as NMR "contrast". Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers protesting his exclusion from the award. Critics have suggested that Damadian's creationist views were the reason for the exclusion.
- Herman Y Carr both pioneered the present NMR gradient technique and, using it, had demonstrated rudimentary MRI imaging in the 1950's. The Nobel prize winners had almost certainly seen Carr's work, but did not cite it. Consequently, the prize committee very likely did not know of Carr's discoveries, a situation likely abetted by the distraction of Damadian. See Carr's [letter] to Physics Today. Also see Garfield's discussion of ["Citation Amnesia"].
The 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics controversy involved George Sudarshan's relevant work in quantum optics (1960) - was considered by many to have been given the slight in this award. Roy J. Glauber, who initially derided the former theory representations and later produced the same P-representation under a different name, was the winner instead (see Scientists Question Nobel by Luluzhou, December 06, 2005, Crimson Staff Writer).
In 1957, George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak first proposed a V-A theory for weak interactions: which is essentially the same as that somewhat worked upon later, formally drawn up physics paper by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann - both informed of Sudarshan's results via informal sharings amongst themselves before - without giving the theory originators any mention credits in their joint paper. Now it is popularly known in the west as the latter group's theory only.
Interestingly, the former group's V-A theory formulation was to meet with another fate and dubious 'honour' later on again - of being assessed favourably and preferably as "the more beautiful" by J. Robert Oppenheimer (see Everything's Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology by Tony Rothman); and, suffering a complete reversal, again, like a last, apparent, 'twist', as it were, was given an exactly opposite assessment as "incomplete", "less elegant" by John Gribbin (see A Life In Science:Richard Feynman by Mary and John Gribbin).
