The Nobel Prize controversy: Why key scientists are left out of major awards

It is that time of year again, when the Twitter crowd erupts about “Who is going to win the Nobel Prize this year?” Unfortunately, there seems to be a real disconnect between the process, the winner, what was achieved, and who helped. You would think everyone who contributed to the achievement would be named, but that is rarely the case. 

Ask yourself, if a team wrote a paper, did the lab tests, and announced results that made a major contribution to the field, do they all receive the prize? The answer is no. The scientific prizes can be shared by at most three people. That is the crux of the issue. The work may require more people than the award allows, and somebody has to be left out regardless of how necessary their contribution was. 

Not surprisingly, this shortcoming has already come up this year. This year’s medicine prize went to Dr. Karl Deisseroth, Dr. Peter Hegemann, and Dr. Georg Nagel for discoveries leading to optogenetics. One criticism on Twitter concerns the exclusion of Dr. Ed Boyden, arguing that the prize rewarded a senior collaborator while overlooking the graduate student who performed a key experiment.

Dr. Boyden is the first listed author on the 2005 paper demonstrating precise control of neuronal activity with light. In his published account of the work, he describes pursuing the idea years earlier and performing the successful experiment in August 2004. Whether academic hierarchy explains his exclusion is not established. But his contribution is documented, and that is why people are questioning his absence. 

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