WIKIMEDIA, DAVID MONNIAUXComparing winners from 1950 to 1982 with winners 1983 to 2015, Robert Redelmeier of McMaster University in Ontario and C. David Naylor of the University of Toronto investigated how the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has changed over the years. Among their results, the researchers found that recent laureates were, on average, 7.6 years older than laureates awarded between 1950 and 1982. That could be because the Nobel committee is taking more time to recognize worthy discoveries sooner after they are made, the data suggested.
Their analysis, published today (October 3) in JAMA, coincides with the awarding of this year’s medicine prize to the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Yoshinori Ohsumi for his research on autophagy. “Major awards such as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine may help motivate successive generations of scientists and deepen public awareness and political support for research,” Redelmeier and Naylor wrote. “However, little is known about how decisions of prize-giving bodies have changed as medical science has globalized and biotechnology accelerated.”
Focusing on laureates from 1950 to 2015, Redelmeier and Naylor identified a 154 winners—79 in the older subgroup and 75 that have won in the last 33 years. The duo then identified each laureate’s top five most-cited papers and developed an algorithm to determine ...
