Proliferation Of Scientific Prizes Reinforces Nobel's Distinguished Honor

Prizes in science-especially those with large honoraria-are proliferating. In North America alone, some 3,000 prizes are available in the sciences-five times as many as 20 years ago. In the same interval, the population of working scientists has grown, but at nothing like that clip. Like their predecessors, most new prizes are designed to honor those who have done significant research and, as a byproduct, to honor those who award them. Unlike most of their predecessors, many new prizes are rich. More than two dozen of them bring recipients $100,000 or more. Both the Japan Prize for Science and the Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention recently had honoraria of $500,000. Other such awards include the Kyoto Prize for basic science of $430,000, the Charles Stark Draper Prize for engineering of $400,000, the Crafoord prizes of $340,000 each, and the Bower Prize for science of $250,000. Illustration: John Overmyer An additional half-dozen new awards provide support for future research. Thus, the prix Louis-Jeantet has involved a $60,000 award outright and $1.6 million for research, while the Donald Bren Fellowships at the University of California, Irvine, provide $1 million. And, of course, there are the MacArthur Fellowships, which range from $160,000 to $375,000. Taken together, these rich awards appear to have set an entirely new standard for prizes in the sciences, excepting, of course, the Nobel prizes. These have had their ups and downs but amounted this year to more than $1 million each. The proliferation of such rich prizes raises three questions: First, why have they multiplied? Second, do they signal major changes in the reward system of science? And third, what effects will they have on science and scientists? A little history may shed light on these questions. Awarding prizes for scientific achievement has ample historical precedent. The first prizes appeared Europe in the early 18th century. The French Academy introduced annual competitions in 1719 to encourage scientists to work on problems of navigation and astronomy. In Britain in 1736, the Royal Society used its Copley fund for a medal to honor "men of genius . . . who in all probability may never be moved for the sake of lucre." These first awards proved to be models for all that would follow-the French model provides incentives for new scientific work and the British rewards for past accomplishment. The French awards were fairly substantial; the British ones, far more modest. It was not until the turn of this century that the scale of awards changed dramatically with Alfred Nobel's prizes. First awarded in 1901, each amounted to $42,000-which then was 18 to 20 times the average United States professor's salary and lavish enough to make the front pages of major newspapers. It says much about inflation that the current award has risen to more than $1 million yet remains about 15 times the average professor's salary. The Nobel prizes have come to occupy a unique place in the public mind and the reward system of science. They have also been appropriated by individuals and organizations seeking to enhance their own prestige by publicly calling attention to their association with the prizes and the prize winners. Even so, the Nobels remain the gold standard for gauging the prestige, visibility, and affluence of all other prizes. Indeed, I suggest that the lofty standing of the Nobel prizes and their limitations-have helped generate the proliferation of prizes designed to fill gaps left by their limited numbers and scope. In the sciences, none of the new prizes is manifestly intended to outdo the Nobels. Rather, such prizes are meant to be Nobel surrogates. They are designed to honor scientists whose contributions could not win Nobels-owing to their scarcity and the array of constraining rules that govern the prizes. Scarcity is critical. Each year, more scientists are qualified for Nobels than can win them. At any given time, there is an accumulation of uncrowned laureates who are the peers of the prize winners in every sense except that of having the award. Scarcity derives not only from there being just three prizes in the sciences awarded each year, but also from the further constraining rule that limits each award to no more than three recipients. This rule arbitrarily eliminates deserving coworkers of laureates and deprives them of credit due. The rules also call for recognition of "recent" work or work whose significance has not become apparent until recently. This has led to a lengthening queue of candidates and, ultimately, to passing over work no longer recent enough. Further, since the prize cannot be given posthumously and research judged "controversial" often takes time to become accepted, scientists who have done such work had better be long-lived. But the most consequential source of exclusion-and the one that most often spurs the establishment of Nobel surrogate prizes-is the unchanging rule that limits the Nobels to physics, chemistry, and the biological composite, physiology or medicine. This eliminates in one fell swoop: mathematics, earth science, marine science, astronomy (in spite of a few physics prizes going for astrophysics), plant science, zoology and its successor fields, and all the behavioral and social sciences. The addition in 1969 of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics did not go very far toward making the prizes more ecumenical. The constraint on prizable fields leaves much room for Nobel surrogates to provide peer recognition to worthy scientific work in fields excluded by Nobel rules. Here, the most striking examples are the Crafoord prizes, which were explicitly designed to honor research in fields ineligible for Nobel awards. These include astronomy, mathematics, geosciences and ecology, and related science and, on occasion, the distinctly limited field of research on arthritis-a disease that plagues Holger Crafoord, the Swedish businessman who with his wife, Anna-Greta, founded the awards in 1980. Kinship with the Nobels is emphasized by the Crafoords' arranging to have the awards administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the institution responsible for the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. Another example is the Draper Prize with its $400,000 hororarium. Awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Draper Prize honors great achievement in that field. On its founding, Robert White, the academy's president, observed, "We hope that in years to come the . . . Draper Prize will be just as well known and respected . . . as the Nobel prizes are today." In one sense, new awards have decidedly changed the reward system of science: There are more rich awards available than ever before, yet the overall number of such awards is small and few scientists can win them. Nor do the new awards differ much from older ones in selection criteria, procedures of choice, and the composition of prize juries. This is no surprise, since the founders of such prizes seek prestige and emulate the objectives and allocation procedures of earlier prestigious prizes. Further, the rosters of winners of many of the new prizes are much like the rosters of older ones and for the same reasons. New awards acquire luster from the luster of those who agree to accept them. Thus, there is much about the new awards that mirrors the older ones. If the upper reaches of the reward system in science have changed, it is mainly in scale and affluence. Otherwise, it remains much the same. This brings us to the effects the new rich prizes may have on scientists and on science. The trouble, it appears, is that big-money awards suggest that scientists are motivated by prizes and money and not by the satisfaction of acquiring new knowledge. Yet, it is an open question whether the existence of high honorific and monetary stakes has the posited corrupting effects, or whether such prizes intensify competition for priority-at all costs-so as to produce increasing departures from the mores of science. These effects are not easily investigated. Yet the conviction that they exist seems to account for mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck's declining his share of the 1988 Crafoord prize. In a letter that explained his reasoning, he wrote, "The ethics of the scientific profession (at least among mathematicians) have become so degraded that wholesale plundering of ideas . . . has become almost the general rule. . . . It is at any rate tolerated by all. Under the circumstances, agreeing to play along with the practice of granting prizes . . . would also be endorsing a . . . development in the scientific world that I see as . . . suicidal spiritually, . . . intellectually and materially" (Manchester Guardian Weekly, 138[20]:17, 1988). Presumably, what Grothendieck means by "suicidal" is that science is being degraded as increasing misbehavior breaches the community's mores and that awards like the Crafoords, if not the cause, contribute to the outcome. The less benign aspects of prizes are also thought to affect would-be candidates. Prizes are apt to reinforce competitiveness, encourage "sharp elbows," heighten disappointment and envy, and encourage excessive claims to credit. Yet the institutionalized competition for priority and recognition in science is as old as modern science itself. These new awards may reinforce this pattern, but they introduce nothing new into the reward system of science. Photo: The Rockefellar University Although awards are often intended to stimulate discovery, this effect has not been established. It may be that prizes divert scientists' energies from difficult and unfashionable problems to those whose solutions will come more readily and will attract prize-givers' attention. Thus, prizes may focus collective research attention on a limited range of tractable problems. However, the reward system of science tends to have this same effect, since recognition is conferred for problems solved, not solutions attempted and for solutions deemed central, not peripheral. Prizes also affect public images of science. Drawing on the model of the Nobel prizes, the new awards provide occasions for celebrating scientific excellence and confer on it an aura of social importance and prestige. Paradoxically, the proliferation of prizes seems only to have had modest effects on science and scientists. This conclusion does not mean that I am cynical about prizes or their recipients. What I am cynical about are the distortions and exaggerations that accompany prizes, and I am skeptical about the motives of prize donors-especially donors of eponymous prizes who seek to enhance their own prestige by association with great scientists. But motives are one thing and consequences another. Such motives in no way detract from the distinction of prizes or their recipients, as the century-long history of the Nobel prizes so amply demonstrates. Harriet Zuckerman is vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a professor, emerita, of sociology at Columbia University in New York. This article is adapted from an address she gave at The Rockefeller University on April 23, 1996.

Proliferation Of Scientific Prizes Reinforces Nobel's Distinguished Honor

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