Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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David Oshinsky at the WSJ made a similar argument a few days ago. In part:

The science juries have always favored the individual over the group. It goes back to Nobel’s preference for one winner per category, which made good sense when most scientists toiled alone and the best of them—a Louis Pasteur or a Joseph Lister—might single-handedly pull off a miracle. Times have changed, yet the rules, amended slightly to include three yearly recipients, still project a “winner-take-all” attitude in an increasingly collaborative scientific world.

Complicating this problem is the committee’s preference for “original discoveries” over “practical applications.” In doing so, it has denied the prize in physiology or medicine to some of the most fabled researchers of the past century, including Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. With his file now open for inspection, we can see that Salk was nominated and rejected for the prize on several occasions, the main obstacle being one juror’s repeated charge that his work relied too heavily on the building blocks of others—in short, it provided “nothing new.” ....

<https://www.wsj.com/science/the-nobel-prizes-need-a-makeover...>

Archive/Paywall: <https://archive.ph/tuPr4>

May be of possible interest.

One thing that's always important to consider is that the relevance of anything is not fixed. The Nobel Prize is not seen as a grand achievement because it's the Nobel Prize, but because the scientific community, and society to a lesser degree, implicitly deems it such. When awards change, so does their relevance.

So rather than changing the Nobel Prize, it seems more logical to create a new prize. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard. I'm sure somebody like Bill Gates would just love to have his name attached to the 'Gates Prize for Collaborative Science' and he has the pockets to comfortably prefund it for a century.

I think the prestige of getting the same prize as once awarded to Einstein, Curie and other of the 20th century great scientists is what makes the Nobel prize so hard to beat. Even if Gates created a prize with 10 times the prize money, the press would report about the Nobel prize just the same. But I still think he should go ahead and do it, there are many fields that deserve a prize of this magnitude to be regularily awarded.

That’s interesting. A $1bn prize awarded to teams could turn some heads.

Parent said 10x of the nobel, so it's more like $10M.

In addition to what the other poster said, the actual monetary prize comes out of the inheritance of one the wealthiest persons of the day. The prizes that are fully under control of some scientist's organizations that could change their rules IIRC don't have nearly the same prize amount. Not sure how much the scientists care though.

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