The Nobel Prizes have three structural constraints that were reasonable in 1895 and fit modern science badly. No more than three people may share one prize. The recipient must be alive, and since 1974 posthumous awards are prohibited outright. And each prize belongs to a named discipline, so work that falls between them, or outside them, has nowhere to go.
Those rules, plus the ordinary human tendency to credit the person who signs the paper, have produced a list of omissions that is in places more interesting than the list of laureates.
Lise Meitner, Nuclear Fission
The clearest case. Meitner worked with Otto Hahn in Berlin for thirty years. When the Nazi racial laws made her position impossible she fled to Sweden in 1938, and continued to correspond with Hahn, who sent her the chemical results he could not explain: bombarding uranium with neutrons appeared to produce barium, an element with roughly half the mass.
Over Christmas 1938, walking in the snow at Kungälv with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner worked out what had happened: the nucleus had split, and the missing mass had become energy according to Einstein’s relation. She and Frisch published the interpretation and gave the process its name.
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Hahn alone. Meitner had been nominated dozens of times across physics and chemistry and never received it. A 1997 analysis of the newly opened Nobel archives concluded that the outcome came from a mix of disciplinary bias, political caution and a committee that did not understand the physics.
Rosalind Franklin, the Structure of DNA
Photograph 51, taken in her laboratory at King’s College London, shows the X shaped diffraction pattern of the B form of DNA, from which the helical structure, its pitch and its diameter can be read directly by anyone competent in the technique.
The image was shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins without her knowledge, and her unpublished report was seen by the Cambridge pair through a Medical Research Council committee. The 1962 prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at thirty seven, four years before the award, so on the rules as they stood she was not eligible. What remains arguable is the credit rather than the medal, and Watson’s own book did her considerable further damage before later accounts corrected it.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Pulsars
As a graduate student in Cambridge in 1967, Bell Burnell noticed a bit of scruff on the paper chart recording from the radio telescope she had helped to build, recurring at intervals of 1.33 seconds with extraordinary regularity. She identified it, defended it against the assumption that it was interference, and found three more.
The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. Fred Hoyle publicly objected. Bell Burnell has consistently declined to complain, on the grounds that prizes to supervisors were the norm at the time, which is both gracious and an accurate description of the norm.
In 2018 she received the Breakthrough Prize, worth about three million dollars, and gave all of it away to fund physics studentships for people from under represented backgrounds.
Chien-Shiung Wu, Parity Violation
Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang proposed in 1956 that parity, the symmetry between a process and its mirror image, might not be conserved in the weak interaction. It was a theoretical suggestion, and it needed an experiment that was extremely difficult.
Wu designed and ran it, cooling cobalt 60 to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, aligning the nuclei in a magnetic field, and measuring the direction in which electrons were emitted. They came out preferentially in one direction. The mirror image of the universe is not the same as the universe.
Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize in 1957, the year after the experiment. Wu did not.
Dmitri Mendeleev, the Periodic Table
The table of 1869 left gaps and predicted the properties of the elements that would fill them, and gallium, scandium and germanium duly arrived with the properties specified. It is the model of what a good scientific classification does.
He was nominated in 1905, 1906 and 1907. In 1906 the chemistry committee recommended him and the wider Academy overturned the decision, partly through the influence of Svante Arrhenius, who had his own reasons for disliking Mendeleev. The prize went to Henri Moissan for isolating fluorine. Mendeleev died in February 1907.
Henrietta Leavitt, the Cosmic Distance Ladder
Working at Harvard College Observatory as one of the women employed to measure and classify photographic plates, Leavitt found in 1912 that the brightness of a Cepheid variable star is related to its period of variation in a fixed way.
That relation converts an observation anyone can make, how fast a star pulses, into a distance. It is the rung of the ladder that everything else stands on. Hubble used Leavitt’s law to establish that the spiral nebulae are galaxies far outside our own, and then to measure the expansion of the universe.
Gösta Mittag Leffler wrote to her in 1925 intending to nominate her. She had died of cancer in 1921, and he had not heard.
Oswald Avery, DNA as the Genetic Material
In 1944 Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty showed that the substance capable of transforming one strain of pneumococcus into another is DNA rather than protein, which is the experiment that identifies the carrier of heredity.
The result was resisted for years, largely because DNA was regarded as too monotonous a molecule to carry information. Avery was nominated repeatedly and died in 1955, before the significance was fully conceded.
Fred Hoyle, Stellar Nucleosynthesis
Hoyle worked out how the elements are built inside stars, including the specific nuclear resonance in carbon 12 that has to exist for carbon to form at all, which he predicted from the fact that carbon exists and which was then found experimentally.
The 1983 physics prize went to William Fowler for the same body of work. The usual explanation for Hoyle’s exclusion is that he had made himself difficult, having publicly attacked the Nobel committee over Bell Burnell and having spent years defending steady state cosmology after most people had abandoned it.
Others, More Briefly
- Nikola Tesla. Alternating current, the induction motor and the polyphase system. He was reportedly considered jointly with Edison in 1915, and the story that each refused to share with the other is unverified but persistent
- Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose Einstein statistics, which underpin an entire class of particles. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work built directly on his, and he received none
- Vera Rubin. Measured galaxy rotation curves and showed that galaxies contain far more mass than their visible matter accounts for, which is the observational basis of dark matter. She died in 2016 without the prize
- Arnold Sommerfeld. Nominated 84 times, more than anyone else in the history of the physics prize, and never awarded it. Seven of his students won
What the List Is Really About
Two of these cases, Franklin and Leavitt, come down to the requirement that a recipient be living. Two, Meitner and Wu, look like the discovery being credited to the person who framed the question rather than the person who answered it. Bell Burnell’s is about the relationship between a student and a supervisor. Mendeleev’s is about academic politics in Stockholm.
The three winner limit is the constraint that will matter most from here. The paper announcing the Higgs boson had thousands of authors and the prize went to two theorists. Gravitational waves were detected by a collaboration of more than a thousand people and the prize went to three. Discovery is now something institutions do, and the prize was designed for a world of individuals working in their own laboratories, which is the world Alfred Nobel knew when he wrote the will.
None of which makes the omissions less irritating. The correct response to reading a list like this is not that the prize is worthless, but that the history of a discovery and the list of its laureates are two different documents, and only one of them is compiled by a committee.
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