Why Do Societies Take The Trouble To Give Science Prizes?

Doing good science may be its own reward, but every year another scientific society or institution endeavors to honor successful researchers more tangibly by establishing a new scientific prize. This has created an accumulation of awards so vast that it's almost impossible to get a full picture of the laurels being distributed. In his office at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, Larry Tise looks ruefully around him at the piles of books and papers dealing with scientific awards: pamphlets, ring binders, and volume after volume of lists and descriptions cover shelves, his desk, and even chairs and boxes throughout the room. After a moment he brings to his desk a massive two-volume, blue-bound set. "The number of organizations giving international awards is 4,779," he says, hefting one of the volumes of the reference book Awards, Honors, and Prizes (9th ed., Detroit, Gale Research Inc., 1990), "and that's just in the United States and Canada." He sticks his thumb into the volume arbitrarily and looks at the entry on the page. "For example, there's the Society of American Military Engineers. They give 21 awards." More commonly, though, an organization will give only four or five prizes. Says Tise, "That's about 25,000 awards," just in North America. In fact, the world of scientific prizes is changing so rapidly that even those most involved cannot keep up with the number of awarding organizations, let alone the number of prizes devoted specifically to science. Certainly, though, they number in the thousands. Tise, the executive director of the Philadelphia science museum's Benjamin Franklin National Memorial, has good reason to be interested in prizes. He has spent the past few years organizing the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, an international award first given by the institute in 1990 to honor a scientific achievement benefiting humanity (The Scientist, March 5, 1990, page 26). It carries with it not only the honor and prestige of a major scientific award, but also a cash prize stipulated to be "in excess of $250,000," ranking it among the richest U.S. science prizes. For Tise, the process of instituting the prize has been enlightening. "It was not until I came here--specifically to establish a new international award and prize in science--that I discovered how complex, disorganized, and, in some ways, perfunctory the whole world of awards and prizes is." Complex, certainly; advertising for and screening nominations requires a huge amount of effort, as does choosing winners. And disorganized, perhaps; busy scientists may have difficulty finding the time it takes to manage awards programs. Many awards, in fact, are biennial simply because they are too much work to do annually. Individuals or organizations must find the time to assemble the voluminous materials required for a nomination; referees must write letters of recommendation; advisory board members must wade through dozens of lengthy applications; and boards must meet, argue, and finally choose winners. But the labor that goes into picking the recipient of virtually every prize, major and minor, in the sciences belies Tise's belief that the process can be perfunctory. In fact, choosing recipients, for awards large or small, for prizes old and new, is a very serious business. The reasons organizations undertake this business range from honor and support for the recipient on one end to publicity for the awarding organization and its goals on the other. "Of course, the primary reason is to honor a scientist," says Jordan Gutterman, executive vice president of the New York-based Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which sponsors the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards. The Lasker awards, which are accompanied by a $15,000 honorarium, are considered by many to be the most prestigious honor in the American medical community. But the awards also serve a second function: "to inform the public," Gutterman says. "The only way we're going to get science to continue in this country is to get support, to work with the media." Tise breaks down the world of scientific awards into two categories: those given by professional organizations to honor people making advances in specific areas, and those given by companies or broader organizations to encourage and commemorate more humanistic goals--and, often, to represent the company or organization in a positive light. "Most of the awards are given by a self-contained professional organization," Gutterman says of the first category: "historians, chemists," and so forth. That is, the prizes are given by a group to honor a member of its own profession; the Lasker awards, for example, are chosen by an advisory board consisting of medical researchers. "When all is said and done," says Tise, "you have professionals giving awards to professionals. There's a standard system of etiquette." In these prizes, honoring the recipient is the primary goal; as a consequence, publicity for the awarding organization is often almost nonexistent. The V.D. Mattia Award is an example. The award, which includes a $5,000 prize and is given for outstanding contributions to biomedical research, was established by the Nutley, N.J.-based Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in 1971 to honor Mattia, president of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. when the institute was founded in 1967. And though the award has become highly respected and even looked to as a Nobel predictor, with a 50 percent success rate, institute director Herbert Weissbach says, "to be honest, many scientists are not familiar with the Mattia Award" because it receives so little publicity. Still, the Mattia Award follows the protocol standard for almost all scientific awards, and a description of its procedures functions as an example of the average scientific awards selection process. "We have a board of advisers" preeminent in the field, Weissbach says. "Each year nominations come in from all over the country after our announcement of the prize is sent out to the scientific community." The board initially works through the mail, reading nominations and narrowing the number down to three. During an annual site visit to the institute, the members choose a winner. "We get about 20 to 30 new [nominees] a year," says Weissbach, "but previously nominated scientists may be carried over for a couple of years." In this way the work of a scientist, though overlooked in a particularly competitive year, need not miss out on the award completely. In discussing why busy researchers find the time to serve on advisory boards, Weissbach makes a point echoed by virtually every scientist associated with an award: "It's an honor to be asked to serve on the board of an institution." Or, as Tise says, "In the realm of science, there is a code of ethics that if your opinion is asked about the contribution of a person, there is almost a necessity to respond." The objective behind giving most professional prizes is merely to honor the recipient. When asked about possible goals of increasing the name recognition of the Roche Institute or providing a public relations coup for molecular biology, Weissbach says, "If we wanted to do that, we would most likely increase the amount [of the Mattia Award's cash prize] by a factor of ten." Sometimes, though, less is more: Some awards gain prestige independently of their cash value simply because they are given to highly regarded scientists. The American Institute of Chemists' Ethics Award, whose cash value is only $500, is an example. First given in 1991, the AIC Ethics Award was based on an award given by AIC's North Jersey section to James Burke, CEO of Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, N.J., who pulled Tylenol from the shelves during the tampering scare (The Scientist, Feb. 4, 1991, page 22). Feeling that professional ethics was getting little national attention, AIC decided to create a national award, funded by organic chemist Joseph B. Hyman. And though Hyman put $2,000 into a fund for the award, no money has yet changed hands. "They [AIC] felt anybody accepting an award in ethics [would] probably turn down an honorarium," Hyman says, and he was right. "The money part of it becomes insignificant," though the award is already becoming widely known. In fact, the money is often insignificant in prizes given by professional organizations, even as the awards rise in prestige. Another prize Hyman funded, the Joseph B. Hyman Award of the North Jersey Section of the American Chemical Society, has been given for 10 years with an honorarium of $200. The Hyman award, given to a researcher who has inspired young scientists to go into chemistry, is "a very popular and prestigious award," says Frederick Dammont, chairman of the awards committee of ACS's North Jersey section, by far the largest section of the society. The award has become so highly respected among ACS members that the section plans to rename it the general North Jersey Section Award. Dammont says that renaming the award was contemplated because "we want to get funding from industry and universities; with a name award it's a little more difficult to do that." He hopes with new funding the honorarium can rise--to $500. "Usually we pay more for the dinner than the honorarium," he says. For the other major category of science award, according to the Franklin Institute's Tise, the characteristics are reversed. Instead of merely honoring, these awards use their high profiles and the high values of their stipends to try to command the attention of the media, in order to further general scientific values or heighten awareness of a cause or principle. These are awards given by "people who hope to use awards to change the world--to solve a problem, benefit humanity," says Tise. "These are the ones I'm intrigued by." He numbers among these the Nobel Prize; the King Faisal Prize; the World Food Prize; and newcomers like the Charles Stark Draper Prize, given annually by the National Academy of Engineering, and the Franklin Institute's Bower Award. "If you overlay achievement in science with contribution to humanity, it changes things dramatically," he says. "We're talking about the difference between sending out the word among scientists or among a much broader intelligentsia." When the Bower Award was conceived, Tise recalls, its strictures were straightforward. Endowed through the 1988 bequest of $7.5 million by Henry Bower, grandson of a Philadelphia chemical manufacturer, the award was designed, Tise says, "to be a symbolic representation of what the institute has always stood for"--that is, the application of science for the benefit of mankind. To emphasize the practical side of science, Bower's will specified the award should stress "practical, useful, humanitarian, and philanthropic" advances in science. Its large prize, Tise says, draws attention to those values. A similarly well-endowed new award is the Stockholm Water Prize, a $150,000 award honoring a limnologist that is funded by several European corporations and given through the Stockholm Water Foundation. The foundation uses its large prize--and a 10-day Stockholm festival--to bring the importance of clean water to the attention of the international press. These larger prizes differ from smaller ones in several respects. For one thing, instead of seeking nominees through small mailings or advertisements in specialized journals, larger prizes advertise in large-circulation, multidisciplinary publications. In addition, says Tise, "we notify the 5,000 or 6,000 institutions and individuals around the world that we are giving the award and are soliciting and accepting nominations." This raises both the profile of the award and the caliber of the nominees. Another notable difference between larger prizes and smaller ones is that the press is far more likely to cover a $375,000 award, like the Charles Stark Draper Prize, than an award that carries a $500 honorarium. "Engineering has been called the invisible profession," says Douglas Wolford, assistant director for administration and external affairs for the National Academy of Engineering, which administers the award, with funds provided by the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. The Draper Prize, first given in 1989, "is not given so much to demonstrate what we think is important," Wolford says, "but to get people to notice" the profession of engineering. Essentially, the prize money is a way of getting the world to pay attention. Even then, though, the attention might not be exactly what was sought. "The coverage we did get," says Tise of the first Bower Award, "was because it was the largest cash prize given in science. You could not get [the media] to pay attention to who got the award or why. It was like, `If you want to get rich, here's a way to do it.' " Of course, winning scientific prizes is not the way to get rich. But if it's not going to make scientists wealthy, and it may not get the publicity desired, why do organizations give these large awards? Why not just give grants instead? The answer to that question is multifaceted. In the first place, many awards are the result of a bequest, as the Bower Award is, and are constricted by the terms of the bequest. And, says Bob Crawford, dean of science at the University of Alberta, "If you give a grant, maybe it's held in trust by the university. They may have operations limits, say only 15 percent can be used for travel. Or they may take overhead out of that. With a prize, the entire award goes to the recipient." Going further, though, the two types of funds support differing proj-ects: Whereas grants support ongoing research, prizes recognize outstanding completed contributions. New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has given both unrestricted grants of $500,000 to universities and $50,000 awards to scientists in a growing number of disciplines since its first grants and awards in 1977 for cancer research. Wishing to "make significant contributions to science and medicine" by "reporting research, fostering the exchange of ideas, and providing a reward for scientific achievement," the company tailors its programs to its goals, says Jerome Birnbaum, senior vice president for pharmaceutical development at Bristol- Myers Squibb. The grants support research, whereas the awards and the symposia accompanying them foster the exchange of ideas. Of course, the company has its own welfare in mind, too. "The program does enormous good for the company in achieving the goal of having everybody understand that we are a serious member of the biomedical community," Birnbaum says. Birnbaum also echoes a point made by many others: Almost nobody tries to win scientific prizes. "We prefer to call them awards," he says. "You think of a prize as something you purposefully compete for; an award is given for something that happens in the normal course of events." And though there are scientists who do try to position themselves for awards, consensus is that those are the scientists who do not win them. Award winners do not try to cultivate the attention of awards boards, says University of Alberta professor David Schindler, the first Stockholm Water Prize winner; in fact, "the people who win almost anticultivate." And for good reason. In a lot of ways, receiving awards is almost as much work as giving them. According to Schindler, many scientists have felt "that getting the prize was a big detriment," because of the extra demands it makes on their time. Beset by calls from the media and other organizations, Schindler says, "I actually had to buy an hour tape instead of a half-hour tape for my answering machine." And there's no end in sight. New awards are started every year, and somehow they find advisers, sponsors, and, of course, recipients. The American Chemical Society is even planning a lifetime achievement award for chemists who have never received the awards they might have deserved. As long as scientific organizations exist, they will honor their members and associates; as long as companies and organizations have agendas, they will dispense awards to further those agendas. And unless something changes drastically, in most cases, the two will be inextricably linked. Which, if nothing will make for a more interesting next edition of Awards, Honors, and Prizes. Scott Huler is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

Why Do Societies Take The Trouble To Give Science Prizes?

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of