Does the Nobel Prize Understand Modern Science?

The Nobel Foundation's statutes allow a prize to be shared by no more than three people. The limit is simple, and every October it collides with how research actually happens.

Consider a modern structural biology result. It may depend on a detector built by physicists, a database maintained by curators, software written by graduate students, and a training set assembled over decades by crystallographers who deposited their structures in public. The 2024 chemistry prize, for protein design and structure prediction, rested on exactly that kind of commons. AlphaFold was trained on the Protein Data Bank, the product of half a century of shared work.

What a prize is for

A defender would say prizes exist to tell stories, and stories need protagonists. That is a fair point. A public that remembers three names may be better than a public that remembers none, and the prize does draw real attention to science.

The trouble is what the story teaches the people inside the system. Hiring committees, funders and young scientists all absorb the idea that credit goes to whoever stands closest to the last step. Maintaining a database or refining a method starts to look like a poor career move, and those are the jobs that made the last step possible.

There are modest fixes. The statutes leave room for a prize to go to an institution, as the peace prize often does, and the science committees could use that room. Until then, the honest reading of any Nobel citation is as the final sentence of a very long paragraph.