Eye on the Prize: The Influence of Awards on Careers

If the resumes of the Science Talent Search (STS) finalists over the past 60 years are any indicator, winning a scientific prize early in one's career certainly can have a positive effect. Over a six-decade time span, STS--formerly called the Westinghouse Awards and now called the Intel Science Talent Search--has given out scholarships to more than 2,200 young researchers. Two have gone on to win Lasker Awards; nine have received MacArthur Fellowships; three the National Medal of Science; two the Fields Medal; and five have been bestowed with the Nobel Prize. Additionally, 31 are members of the National Academy of Sciences, and three have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. What is the personal and professional effect of winning prizes and awards, from STS scholarships for high school students to awards for early career investigators such as the W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research to the Nobel Prize? "Scientists often have a hard time knowing whether their work really matters, and without a response by the relevant scientific community, they can't know whether others think it's worthwhile," says Harriet Zuckerman, senior vice president of the New York-based Andrew Mellon Foundation, professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University, and author of Scientific Elite : Nobel Laureates in the United States. "Prizes and awards are visible, outward symbols that the work scientists have done is thought to be important. Prizes and awards are formal symbols of peer recognition at the other end of the spectrum from informal recognition; for example, the approval that people receive when others say 'this is really terrific work.'" She adds that the influence on scientists' careers of receiving scholarships like STS is quite different from the influence of, for example, a National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The STS awards don't judge contributions to the ongoing development of science, as do the young investigator awards. Instead, they judge how promising a very young scientist is. Likely Impact It's difficult to measure the direct effect of prizes on a researcher's career, most observers say. However, the overall result is positive. "I'm absolutely convinced, personally, although I can't prove it, that prizes and awards are on balance good," says Dudley Herschbach, Baird Professor of Science at Harvard University and corecipient of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1986. "They make a big difference in the lives of many young people. It encourages students and sends a message to many people other than the winners themselves that this is a valuable activity." Frank Wilczek, an STS/Westinghouse finalist in 1967, went on to win a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. Frank Wilczek, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Professor of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., says that being involved in the Intel STS/Westinghouse competition was an "enormous confidence-builder and an eye-opener to the bigger scientific enterprise." He says it also gave him "a taste of what it was like to not learn from a book but actually discover what is true by doing research." Wilczek was an STS/Westinghouse finalist in 1967, when he won fourth prize for a mathematical project. He went on to attain a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 for his theory of the strong interaction, an explanation of what holds subatomic particles within the atomic nucleus. The Intel STS legacy does not stop with Wilczek. His daughter Mira Wilczek, now a freshman studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was a semifinalist in the 1998 Intel Science Talent Search. Her project involved developing a computer program for solving recreational mathematics and logic problems. Positive Overshadows Negative Prizewinners agree that the positive aspects vastly outweigh the possible negative influence of winning awards. "I suppose for younger investigators there might be some problems in that expectations of future contributions can get built up, which they can't fulfill," says Zuckerman. For some, it's too soon to predict any long-term ramifications. "It's hard to really say since I've only had the grant for a year," says Gina M. MacDonald, an assistant professor of chemistry at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. McDonald received an NSF PECASE award in 1998. "I don't really know if it will have an effect on my ability to get the next grant. I think it will come down to what I get done." PECASE awardees are chosen from investigators funded through NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The CAREER grants have a research and education component. MacDonald studies the function of a protein called recA that repairs damaged DNA. For the education component, she is working with high school teachers during the summer to revamp how her undergraduate biochemistry lab is taught. For one Nobelist, celebrity has a lighter side. "I have a lot of medals, so it takes me 25 minutes to transfer them to my pajamas every night, so that's a pain," quips Leon Lederman, corecipient of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988. "But I don't think winning prizes hurts most people." Lederman is now resident scholar at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora, Ill., a residential public high school, and director emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. But he adds that the notoriety that goes with being a Nobelist had an unexpected influence: "Immediately everybody takes everything you say seriously, so it has a big force of distracting you from what you really want to do." "Prizes and awards are formal symbols of peer recognition," says Harriet Zuckerman. Young Investigators Awards Zuckerman, who has studied the proliferation of scientific prizes in the last three decades--in terms of number and increasing honoraria amounts 1 --notes that we don't know whether the number of awards exclusively for young investigators has also increased in the recent past. Obviously, though, such awards facilitate the work of the very best young scientists, especially in times of intense job competition, multiple-year postdocs, and tight funding, she says. Mark Gerstein, an assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., is a 1999 recipient of a Keck Young Scholars award, which includes up to $1 million over five years. Using complex computer programs, he compares the genomes of pathogenic organisms such as tuberculosis and Helicobacter pylori (which causes stomach ulcers) in terms of how their proteins are folded. "I wouldn't have been able to get this amount of money this early in my career otherwise," he says. "This will enable me to hire intelligent computer professionals who can contribute to this project, and pay them a competitive wage." Lederman says that awards like PECASE and Keck are a good way of recognizing talent and giving a leg up to a generation of scientists in hard times. "Investigators are always, in some sense, in a struggle, especially in the last decade or so when funding has been tight, to get what they want done because there's natural resistance all over the place. So when they get an award like this it helps. In a sense, it's cumulative." Resources Intel Science Talent Search www.sciserv.org/sts/index.htm W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research Program www.wmkeck.org/Keck99/dysintr.html National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/pecase/start.htm The Nobel Foundation www.nobel.se Gerstein says that many younger scientists seek out these kinds of awards as a way to enhance their start-up packages. "It's pretty much a given that when you're starting out as a young investigator, on your first day at work, so to speak, you're supposed to apply for all of these grants and awards." Part of the Plan Prizewinners and others agree that in general scientists leave prizewinning to chance. "There are unquestionably some who hunger for prizes and recognition," says Herschbach. "But I don't know whether scientists are more prone to that than other people. If you look around our society, you could argue that a large fraction of the population wants to have some kind of special recognition somewhere in their lives, if not their profession." But do some politic for prizes? Certainly, say researchers. "There are definitely people who are very skillful at campaigns and mobilizing their colleagues or defining interest groups that promote prizes," says Wilczek. "A more benign form is that people write review papers to remind people of their contribution. But there's only so much you can do." Other scientists ask whether getting prizes whets the appetite for more. "When the work is recognized you expect it," says Lederman. "That reinforces one's own perception of the work. But most people just go ahead and do their work and are often totally surprised when something comes their way." According to a 25-year-old survey, most scientists don't even know what prizes are out there. In Social Stratification in Science, 2 Stephen Cole, professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Jonathan R. Cole, provost of Columbia University in New York, surveyed nearly 1,200 physicists, asking them if they knew about a variety of prizes and awards. They found that most scientists didn't know about a great many, and only a few were universally known to those surveyed--the Nobel Prize and election to the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London, for example. "I would guess that scientists today are still not a great deal more knowledgeable about the reward system," says Zuckerman. Karen Young Kreeger (kykreeger@aol.com) is a contributing editor for The Scientist. 1. H. Zuckerman, "The proliferation of prizes--Nobel complements and Nobel surrogates in the reward system of science," Theoretical Medicine, 13:217-31, 1992. 2. J.R. Cole, S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Eye on the Prize: The Influence of Awards on Careers

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Karen Young Kreeger

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November 1999

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