The downsides of winning a Nobel prize | Ian Sample
The money and kudos are hard to grumble over, so what do Nobel laureates moan about most?
That's it for another year. The calls have gone out from Stockholm and Oslo. The recipients have declared their shock and humility. And the most prestigious club in the world, the Nobel laureates, has embraced its latest members.
The winners of this year's Nobel prizes must all be elated, including, presumably, the entire European Union. The kudos of the awards cannot be matched, and even one third of the 8m Swedish kronor (�744,000) prize money is not to be sniffed at. But does anything taint what Ian McEwan called Stockholm's magic dust? Are there any downsides to receiving a Nobel prize?
"Too many to count," says Andre Geim at Manchester University, who with his colleague, Konstantin Novoselov, won the physics prize in 2010 for work on graphene. Geim, who in the years before the prize made a frog hover, and co-authored a research paper with his pet hamster, expressed a view common among laureates. "Journalists' questions are the obvious downside in the context ;-)" he offers.
Most Nobel prize winners are American. For them the negatives start even before an award is public knowledge. Thanks to the invention of time zones, those on the East coast are woken rudely in their beds before 5am. On the West coast the call comes in the dead of night, when few people answer the phone to good news.
Frank Wilczek, a physics Nobel laureate at MIT, mentions several pitfalls that await the unwary winner. "The main downsides are temptations, that can be resisted ? specifically the temptation to rest on your laurels, and the dual temptation to pontificate on grandiose questions," he says.
Some prize winners may let the award go to their heads, but others are almost paralysed by insecurity after being singled out for doing no more than their day job. In 2001, Tim Hunt at Cancer Research UK shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland Hartwell, for discovering proteins that control cell division. "I found it pretty hard to bear at first, and was extremely nervous that the Swedes would realise their mistake and rescind the prize at the last minute," Hunt says.
Weeks after the 2001 announcement, Hunt ran into Paul Nurse, now President of the Royal Society. The encounter went something like this: "Oh Tim," Nurse said. "I've just had the most ghastly weekend ? I felt so inadequate." Take a long look at those who have received the honour and no other response makes as much sense.
Perhaps more unexpected is how some laureates react when deserving scientists are overlooked for the prize. As Hunt says: "Also hard for me is the disappointment of those not chosen, but who could have been." The point is picked up by Wilczek. "It can be a hard thing, emotionally, for people who think they will, or should, get it, when they don't, year after year. And also for people who have near misses, when the prizes are announced, and the winners are somebody else. This can be painful even to watch, much less experience," he says.
"Frankly, I have no complaints whatsoever," says Martin Veltman, a physics laureate at the Universities of Utrecht and Michigan. Veltman shared the 1999 prize with his former student, Gerard 't Hooft, for work that put the mathematics behind the Higgs boson on sound footing. But Veltman does raise an eyebrow at some of the other members of the Nobel club. "Sometimes I wonder about the other laureates," he says. "In fact I have discovered the truth of a remark by [Enrico] Fermi. Someone asked him: 'What have the Nobel prize winners in common? His answer: 'Nothing, not even intelligence.'"
Time is the greatest casualty for many laureates. Anthony Hewish shared the 1974 physics prize with Martin Ryle, for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics. Like most winners, Hewish was bombarded with invitations to lecture around the globe. "Care is required in making acceptances, and not being drawn into too many committees," he warns.
Nothing much has changed since Hewish's award. Harry Kroto, who shared the chemistry prize in 1996, says he has given 80 lectures this year outside Florida State University, where he is based. The talks, on subjects as varied as antiscience, the birth of natural philosophy, and science and responsibility, leave little time for much else, besides teaching, he says.
Before the prize-winning work, Kroto hoped to devote more time to his twin passions of graphics and art, rather than representing science outside the scientific community. "It's not what I wanted to do, I'm not even sure it's what I want to do, but it's something I feel I have to do," he says. "I sometimes think I would have been happier in my studio if we hadn't made the discovery."
More than anything, the Nobel prize changes people. To the rest of us, the winners can become icons, gurus or voices of authority. Brian Schmidt, who shared the physics prize in 2011 for work on the accelerating expansion of the universe, says that takes some getting used to. "Everyone takes everything I say now so seriously," he says.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/oct/15/downsides-winning-nobel-prize
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