The Human Genome Project is regarded by many as one of the major scientific achievements in recent science history, a large-scale endeavour that is changing the way in which biomedical research is done and expected, moreover, to yield considerable benefit for society. Thus, since the completion of the human genome sequencing effort, a debate has emerged over the question whether this effort merits to be awarded a Nobel Prize and if so, who should be the one to receive it, (...) as no more than three individuals can be selected. In this article, the HGP is taken as a case study to consider the ethical question to what extent it is still possible, in an era of big science, of large-scale consortia and global team work, to acknowledge and reward individual contributions to important breakthroughs in biomedical fields. Is it still viable to single out individuals for their decisive contributions in order to reward them in a fair and convincing way? Whereas the concept of the Nobel prize as such seems to reflect an archetypical view of scientists as solitary researchers who, at a certain point in their careers, make their one decisive discovery, this vision has proven to be problematic from the very outset. Already during the first decade of the Nobel era, Ivan Pavlov was denied the Prize several times before finally receiving it, on the basis of the argument that he had been active as a research manager rather than as a researcher himself. The question then is whether, in the case of the HGP, a research effort that involved the contributions of hundreds or even thousands of researchers worldwide, it is still possible to “individualise” the Prize? The “HGP Nobel Prize problem” is regarded as an exemplary issue in current research ethics, highlighting a number of quandaries and trends involved in contemporary life science research practices more broadly. (shrink)

In 2015, the Chinese pharmacologist, Tu Youyou, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of artemisinin. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was the source of inspiration for Tu's discovery and provides an opportunity for the world to know more about TCM as a source of medical knowledge and practice. In this article, the value of TCM is evaluated from an ethical perspective. The characteristics of ‘jian, bian, yan, lian’ are explored in the way they promote (...) accessibility and economic efficiency for TCM. The article also examines how the increased use and prevalence of TCM reflects the scientific, cultural, and ethical values of TCM and their increasing attraction in meeting major challenges to medicine and health systems currently and in the future. The article discusses safety issues within TCM, which is a controversial area, and also comments on some shortcomings and challenges which pose difficulties for more widespread and greater uptake of TCM‐derived clinical or therapeutic interventions. The article concludes that TCM is generally safe if it is used according to TCM theory and where such applications are cognizant of the strengths and weaknesses of TCM. TCM has important bioethical values which may inform potential measures for meeting challenges facing global health care systems and the article argues that it can have an increasing role in improving human health. (shrink)

This paper raises the question whether the Economic Nobel Prize is ideologically biased. Based on a review of a significant number of the Prize Committee’s award justifications, the article concludes at a persistent bias against private property and the free market and in favour of collectivism and state interventionism. From a methodological point of view, the Prize has contributed to the widespread use by professional economists of formal mathematics within the positivistic approach. With respect to research findings, the Prize (...) has favoured the doctrine that market processes are faulty, while government policies are an appropriate fix. Additionally, the paper casts doubts on the scientific integrity of the Prize, given the Committee’s acknowledged lack of concern for fundamental revisionism and outright dismissal of possible criticisms. (shrink)

This paper assesses possible reasons why Hermann J. Muller avoided peer-review of data that became the basis of his Nobel Prize award for producing gene mutations in male Drosophila by X-rays. Extensive correspondence between Muller and close associates and other materials were obtained from preserved papers to compliment extensive publications by and about Muller in the open literature. These were evaluated for potential historical insights that clarify why he avoided peer-review of his Nobel Prize findings. This paper clarifies (...) the basis of Muller’s (Muller HJ, Sci 66 84-87, 1927c) belief that he produced X-ray induced “gene” mutations in Drosophila. It then shows his belief was contemporaneously challenged by his longtime friend/confidant and Drosophila geneticist, Edgar Altenburg. Altenburg insisted that Muller may have simply poked large holes in chromosomes with massive doses of X-rays, and needed to provide proof of gene “point” mutations. Given the daunting and uncertain task to experimentally address this criticism, especially within the context of trying to become first to produce gene mutations, it is proposed that Muller purposely avoided peer-review while rushing to publish his paper in Science to claim discovery primacy without showing any data. The present paper also explores ethical issues surrounding these actions, including those of the editor of Science, James McKeen Catell and Altenburg, and their subsequent impact on the scientific and regulatory communities. This historical analysis suggests that Muller deliberately avoided peer-review on his most significant findings because he was extremely troubled by the insightful and serious criticism of Altenburg, which suggested he had not produced gene mutations as he claimed. Nonetheless, Muller manipulated this situation (i.e., publishing a discussion within Science with no data, publishing a poorly written non-peer reviewed conference proceedings with no methods and materials, and no references) due to both the widespread euphoria over his claim of gene mutation and confidence that Altenburg would not publically challenge him. This situation permitted Muller to achieve his goal to be the first to produce gene mutations while buying him time to later try to experimentally address Altenburg’s criticisms, and a possible way to avoid discovery of his questionable actions. (shrink)

A particular model of scientific achievement is embedded within the Nobel Prize, one that privileges the scientific `loner', whoachieves a distinct discovery at a particularmoment in time. A common criticism of this`individualistic' story of achievement is thatit obscures the social and cultural factors inscientific discovery. A collective story,highlighting the role of social relations andscientific milieux, may offer more explanatorypower in accounting for scientific discoveriesand inventions. This paper explores the processby which Henry Dale became recognized as thediscoverer of the chemical (...) transmission ofnerve impulses. It compares the explanatorypower of the story of individual creativitywith a story that highlights the interactionbetween a scientist and his environment. (shrink)

Abstract:Russell’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 is one of the best known facts about him. What is less appreciated in the political and intellectual context of that award. This essay examines that context and the evolution of Russell’s public and intellectual reputation in the immediate post-war period.

The paper discusses this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for experiments of entanglement “establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science” in a much wider, including philosophical context legitimizing by the authority of the Nobel Prize a new scientific area out of “classical” quantum mechanics relevant to Pauli’s “particle” paradigm of energy conservation and thus to the Standard model obeying it. One justifies the eventual future theory of quantum gravitation as belonging to the newly established (...) quantum information science. Entanglement, involving non-Hermitian operators for its rigorous description, non-unitarity as well as nonlocal and superluminal physical signals “spookily” (by Einstein’s flowery epithet) synchronizing and transferring some nonzero action at a distance, can be considered to be quantum gravity so that its local counterpart to be Einstein’s gravitation according to general relativity therefore pioneering an alternative pathway to quantum gravitation different from the “secondary quantization” of the Standard model. So, the experiments of entanglement once they have been awarded by the Nobel Prize launch particularly the relevant theory of quantum gravitation grounded on “quantum information science” thus granted to be nonclassical quantum mechanics in the shared framework of the generalized quantum mechanics obeying rather quantum-information conservation than only energy conservation. The concept of “dark phase” of the universe naturally linked to the very well confirmed “dark matter” and “dark energy” and opposed to its “light phase” inherent to classical quantum mechanics and the Standard model obeys quantum-information conservation, after which reversible causality or the mutual transformation of energy and information are valid. The mythical Big Bang after which energy conservation holds universally is to be replaced by an omnipresent and omnitemporal medium of decoherence of the dark and nonlocal phase into the light and local phase. The former is only an integral image of the latter and borrowed in fact rather from religion than from science. Physical, methodological and proper philosophical conclusions follow from that paradigm shift heralded by this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. For example, the scientific theory of thinking should originate from the dark phase of the universe, as well: probably only approximately modeled by neural networks physically belonging to the light phase thoroughly. A few crucial philosophical sequences follow from the break of Pauli’s paradigm: (1) the establishment of the “dark” phase of the universe as opposed to its “light” phase, only to which the Cartesian dichotomy of “body” and “mind” is valid; (2) quantum information conservation as relevant to the dark phase, furthermore generalizing energy conservation as to its light phase, productively allowing for physical entities to appear “ex nihilo”, i.e., from the dark phase, in which energy and time are yet inseparable from each other; (3) reversible causality as inherent to the dark phase; (4) the interpretation of gravitation only mathematically: as an interpretation of the incompleteness of finiteness to infinity, for example, following the Gödel dichotomy (“either contradiction or incompleteness”) about the relation of arithmetic to set theory; (5) the restriction of the concept of hierarchy only to the light phase; (6) the commensurability of both physical extremes of a quantum and the universe as a whole in the dark phase obeying quantum information conservation and akin to Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical and theological worldview. (shrink)

There have been two Japanese Nobel laureates in chemistry, three in physics, and one in the category of medicine or physiology. This relatively small number has been attributed to shortcomings in Japanese science. The award of the Physics Prize in 1949 to Hideki Yukawa and to his colleague Sin'itirô Tomonaga in 1965 gave public evidence of how Japanese could make outstanding individual contributions to science. Paradoxically, the Prize also reinforced a belief that such men formed part of a traditional (...) hierarchical system. This essay examines how the Nobel Prize has been represented in Japan. (shrink)

Dennis Gabor devised a new concept for optical imaging in 1947 that went by a variety of names over the following decade: holoscopy, wavefront reconstruction, interference microscopy, diffraction microscopy and Gaboroscopy. A well-connected and creative research engineer, Gabor worked actively to publicize and exploit his concept, but the scheme failed to capture the interest of many researchers. Gabor’s theory was repeatedly deemed unintuitive and baffling; the technique was appraised by his contemporaries to be of dubious practicality and, at best, constrained (...) to a narrow branch of science. By the late 1950s, Gabor’s subject had been assessed by its handful of practitioners to be a white elephant. Nevertheless, the concept was later rehabilitated by the research of Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan, and Yury Denisyuk at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad. What had been judged a failure was recast as a success: evaluations of Gabor’s work were transformed during the 1960s, when it was represented as the foundation on which to construct the new and distinctly different subject of holography, a re-evaluation that gained the Nobel Prize for Physics for Gabor alone in 1971. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced in constructing a meaningful subject, a practical application and a viable technical community from Gabor’s ideas during the decade 1947-1957. (shrink)

The original innovation talents and their achievements promote the development of natural science and are regarded as a symbol of the national comprehensive power. This study explores the process that causes original innovation talents’ personality, uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, and explores the linkage between configurations made up of early growth experiences and personality. We took Nobel Prize winners as samples and discovered that high responsibility was inspired by high family democracy driving, high family size driving, high family function (...) driving, and high teaching democracy driving; high extroversion was inspired by high family size driving, high family democracy driving, and high family status driving; high openness was inspired by high family status driving, high family democracy driving, high family size driving, both high open teaching and educational level driving, as well as high peer support driving; high or non-high family status brought high extroversion or openness; non-high teacher accomplishments and teacher-student relationships produced high openness; non-high extroversion came with non-high teacher-student relationship. We proposed strategies for strengthening the positive effects or avoiding the negative effects of early growing-up experiences on personality. (shrink)

There is arguably no award more recognized in the academic and professional worlds than the Nobel Prize. The public pays attention to the prizes in the fields of economics, literature, and peace because their recipients are identified with particular ideas, concepts, or actions that often resonate with or sometimes surprise a global audience. The Nobel Prize in Economic Science established by the Bank of Sweden in 1969 has been granted to 64 individuals. Thomas Karier explores the core (...) ideas of the economic theorists whose work led to their being awarded the Nobel in its first forty years. He also discusses the assumptions and values that underlie their economic theories, revealing different and controversial features of the content and methods of the discipline. The Nobelists include Keynesians, monetarists, financial economists, behaviorists, historians, statisticians, mathematicians, game theorists, and other innovators. (shrink)

This study forms part of a larger research project examining the election process for the Nobel prizes for Physiology or Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and the role and function of the prizes in early 20th century Swedish and international medicine. The purpose of the study is to clarify the decision-making process which led to the Nobel prize for Paul Ehrlich in 1908, for work on immunity. His award was preceded by the most dramatic (...) conflict within the prize authority concerning any prizewinner prior to World War I, and thus is apt to illuminate both the implicit and explicit criteria and the strategies used in the prize deliberations.Ehrlich's chemical ideas on the immune response were criticized by the physical chemist Svante Arrhenius who recommended the application of his disciplines's methods and principles on immunological problems. This criticisms were brought into the Nobel prize debate by J.E. Johansson, a physiologist who asserted that Ehrlich's research was of little scientific value and therefore not worthy of a prize. Yet the majority of the Institute, led by its chairmam, the chemist K.A.H. Mörner, succeeded in awarding Ehrlich. (shrink)

Penicillin is a serendipitous discovery par excellence. But, what does this say about Alexander Fleming’s praiseworthiness? Clearly, Fleming would not have received the Nobel Prize, had not a mould accidently entered his laboratory. This seems paradoxical, since it was beyond his control. The present article will first discuss Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin as an example of moral luck in science and technology and critically assess some common responses to this problem. Second, the Control Principle that says that people are (...) not responsible for things beyond their control will be defended. An implication of this principle is that Alexander Fleming’s desert, which is based on his epistemic skills, remains untouched by luck. Third, by distinguishing different notions of praiseworthiness, a way to resolve the paradox of moral luck will be elaborated. Desert provides only a pro tanto reason to determine whether someone is an appropriate addressee of reward. Here, luck can make a difference. Forth, it will be argued that stimulating the quest for socially beneficial science provides a compelling reason to treat scientists with equal desert differently. Penicillin provides striking evidence for the importance of this quest and showcasing it incentivizes the making of socially beneficial science. Ultimately, it will be justified why Fleming deserved the Nobel Prize in at least one sense of the concept. (shrink)

When, how, and by whom scientific knowledge is recognized with highest honors is illustrated by this avowedly atypical episode involving the Nobel Prize awarded to Walther Nernst for 1920. Mine is not a postmortem “wie es eigentlich gewesen” evaluation of the cognitive legitimation of his 1905 third law of thermodynamics, of whether the debates surrounding his work were justified, or whether the prize was merited. Rather, it is an admittedly close reading of many new and some old sources, an (...) intrusive scrutiny of human imperfection and an excursion into the cultural symbolism of the Nobel Prize, the twentieth century’s emblematic arbiter in matters scientific. (shrink)

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, (...) and other awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees. (shrink)

Paul Boyer shared a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on the mechanism of ATP synthase. His earlier work, though (which contributed indirectly to his triumph), included major errors, both experimental and theoretical. Two benchmark cases offer insight into how scientists err and how they deal with error. Boyer's work also parallels and illustrates the emergence of bioenergetics in the second half of the twentieth century, rivaling achievements in evolution and molecular biology.

An examination of the early history of Nobel Committee deliberations, coupled with a survey of discoveries for which prizes have been awarded to date – and, equally revealing, discoveries for which prizes have not been awarded – reveals a pattern. This pattern suggests that Committee members may have internalized the received, biomedical model and conferred awards in accord with the physicalistic premises that ground this model. I consider the prospect of a paradigm change in medical science and (...) the possible repercussions of such a change on the distribution of Nobel prizes within the domain of physiology or medicine. For expository purposes, I contrast a model based on a science of pathophysiology with one based on a science of pathopsychophysiology. I propose a means whereby members might minimize the potentially blinding effects of model-dependence and come to evaluate medical discoveries from an inter-model rather than an exclusively intra-model perspective. By bringing to light questions rarely asked and proposing answers, I seek to open a dialogue and furnish a vehicle by which the putative delimiting effects of model-dependence might be overcome. (shrink)

This paper presents an empirical study on the frequency of discoveries and inventions that were awarded with the. More than 70 per cent of all Nobel Prizes were given to discoveries. The majority of inventions were awarded at the beginning of the twentieth century and only three inventions had a direct application for society. The emphasis on discoveries moves the Nobel Prize further away from its original intention to reward the greatest contribution to society in the preceding (...) year. We propose to strengthen the role of inventions for the Nobel Prize, which would encourage inventors to tackle important problems, such as global warming or the gap between the first and the third worlds. (shrink)

This compilation brings together 20 essays of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), the neuroscientist par excellence and 1906 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, on topics beyond neuroanatomy, most appearing in English for the first time. The annotated collection makes available in one handy volume Cajal's ideas on psychology, art and education, still current and still relevant, derived from his books La Psicología de los Artistas, Charlas de Café, El Mundo Visto a los Ochenta Años, Pensamientos Pedagógicos and Escritos Inéditos. An (...) acute observer of the intellectual and social scene of the avant-garde, Cajal emerged in 20th-century Spain in a further role as a philosopher and educator. The contents bespeak Cajal's inquiry into the varieties of human experience and shed new light on the breadth of his genius, imagination and passion, helping us to rethink what we thought we already understood about Don Santiago's own mind. (shrink)

The “story behind the story” of the genesis of this book is an involved and fascinating one. In May the Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation decided to give a grant to Ulf Lagerqvist to permit publication of his manuscript titled The Bewildered Nobel Committee by the World Scientific Publishing Company . This decision was based on a thorough review by Torbjörn Norin, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Royal School of Technology in Stockholm and a member of the board (...) of the foundation. Unfortunately, Lagerqvist, a Professor of Biochemistry and Chairman of Medical and Physiological Chemistry at Gothenburg University, Sweden , member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, influential researcher on the metabolism of the components of the nucleic acids in the rapidly developing field of molecular biology, and an outstanding writer popularizing the history of science since his retirement , di .. (shrink)

The award of the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics jointly to William Henry Bragg and his elder son, William Lawrence Bragg – `for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of Röntgen rays' – seems to have been largely uncontroversial at the time, butthere are a number of questions that surround the award and the events that followed it that deserve exploration. This paper attempts to address these questions.

The 1984 Nobel Prize for physics wasawarded to two European scientists for theircontributions to the `large project' that ledto the identification of two importantfundamental particles. The citation recognizedthat major discoveries in high-energy physicsdemanded more than intellectual achievement andtechnical innovation. Such qualities had to beembedded in a technological, managerial,institutional and political infrastructure.This paper aims to capture the salient featuresof that infrastructure by insisting that atleast one of the laureates should be viewed,not only as a physicist, but also as a`heterogeneous engineer', (...) who succeeded inmobilizing the human and material resourcesneeded to attain his objectives. As such, hisproject was similar to the Manhattan project,and was typical of the transformation in thepractice of physics that came about during theSecond World War. (shrink)

Mendeleev’s failure to represent the periodic system as a continuum may have hidden from him the space for the noble gases. A spiral format might have revealed the significance of the wide gaps in atomic mass between his rows. Tables overemphasize the division of the sequence into ‘periods’ and blocks. Not only do spirals express the continuity; in addition they are more attractive visually. They also facilitate a new placing for hydrogen and the introduction of an ‘element of atomic number (...) zero’. (shrink)

Using an original approach, Mauro Dardo recounts the major achievements of twentieth-century physics--including relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, the invention of the transistor and the laser, superconductivity, binary pulsars, and the Bose-Einstein condensate--as each emerged. His year-by-year chronicle, biographies and revealing personal anecdotes help bring to life the main events since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901. The work of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century--including the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Gell-Mann, (...) Rutherford, and Schrödinger--is presented, often in the words and imagery of the prize-winners themselves. Mauro Dardo is Professor of Experimental Physics at Amedeo Avogadro University. He has served as Dean of the new Faculty of Sciences at the University of Turin in Alessandria, Piedmont, and has also served as Director of the university's new department of Sciences and Advanced Technologies. (shrink)