The people this year’s Nobel Prizes left out

Winning a Nobel Prize is a matter of great prestige. Winning a Nobel Prize also means the award going to a small number of people while a large number are left out, even if they really deserved to win.

This is partly because of the prizes’ rules. Alfred Nobel’s will said nothing about the number of people that can be awarded at one time but the Nobel Foundation’s statutes limit each prize to at most three people at a time, and no one that has died by the time a prize is announced. Also, scientists need to have been nominated by nominators who have their own eligibility criteria.

A big-picture view of the science Nobel Prizes through history brings another pattern into view: a preference for singular breakthroughs rather than lifetime achievements.

Boyden, Bamberg, and beyond

Start with the Nobel Prize this year for physiology/medicine, to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work on optogenetics. In 2002, Austrian scientist Gero Miessenböck & co. had first sensitised to light some neurons that were not naturally light-sensitive. Miessenböck is now at the University of Oxford, where his profile page describes him as an ‘inventor’ of optogenetics.

Hegemann and Nagel have been feted for identifying and characterising the protein channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2). The next step was to show that it could control neurons. The first author of the paper that did was Edward Boyden, who helped pioneer the application of ChR2 to neuroscience. Boyden is now a professor of neurotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute.

Another author of this paper, Ernst Bamberg, had supervised Nagel’s PhD and was part of the team that established the importance of ChR2. A page on the website of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Germany, where Bamberg is now an emeritus professor, says he was instrumental in translating the ChR2 finding into practical applications.

Yet another author, Feng Zhang, is also at MIT now, and in 2007, he was a member of one of two teams that adapted another protein, called halorhodopsin, to silence neurons with light instead of activating them. The other team, consisting of Xue Han and Boyden, had demonstrated the same capability.

These contributions together — rather than only those that the laureates led — turned the ability to control neurons with light into a tool of neuroscience with real-world applications, including in medicine.

No lone wolf

Next, the physics prize — which this year demonstrated the brokenness of the Nobel Prizes on a whole other level. Francis Halzen won the prize all by himself “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”. But IceCube is an international collaboration involving around 450 experts from 58 institutions in 14 countries.