We’re about two weeks out from the Nobel Foundation announcing the 2021 Nobel Prize laureates. The schedule is here, if you’re interested; as always, I am amused by the fact that the Literature prize is announced at least an hour later in the day than any of the others. Writers, man…
This season is something of a mixed bag for someone who works in science communication, as I do. On the one hand, it’s the one week of the year when you’re more or less guaranteed to get science stories on the front pages of major newspapers, which is a great thing. On the other, it’s also more or less guaranteed to produce a flurry of “The Nobel Prizes are Bad and you should feel bad for caring about them” pieces, which, [heavy sigh]…
A chunk of the Bad-ness is generally attributed to the distortion of the nature of science imposed by the Nobel tradition of not awarding a Prize to more than three laureates at a time. This doesn’t really square with the way that modern science is done, which mostly involves collaborations of many more than three people. As a result, deserving individuals get left out, and media-friendly spokespeople get elevated to prominence in a way that’s disproportionate to their actual contributions.
The other annual complaint is about the shameful lack of diversity in the Nobel laureates of the past. This is particularly true in Physics, where the prizes over the last century have skewed even more male than the very skewed demographics of the field. There are also a handful of very glaring omissions, a list headed by Lise Meitner (who should’ve shared the 1944 Chemistry prize with Otto Hahn) and Jocelyn Bell Burnell (who should’ve shared the 1974 Physics prize with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish for discovering pulsars). There are a bunch of other deserving women who were passed over as well, notably Chien-Shiung Wu, Millie Dresselhaus and Vera Rubin. In my own subfield, there’s a case that the late Debbie Jin should be included (though it would’ve been a little on the early side relative to the usual pace of such things for her to have been honored before her tragically early passing).
It is almost as safe a bet as you can find to say that there will be multiple blog posts/ opinion pieces around the time of the announcements running through that litany of disgracefully overlooked names. They probably won’t reach the media prominence of the actual announcements, but they will be frustratingly common in my social-media feeds.
What we are, sadly, dramatically less likely to see is the thing that I would really like to see, which is a piece on the (lack of) diversity of Nobel laureates that looks forward, not back. That is, a piece that promotes and celebrates the work of scientists from under-represented groups who deserve to win in the future. Not just rehearsing the slights and offenses of history, but pointing the way toward correcting them and shaping a more just future.
I’m tempted to say something like “Everybody who cares already knows that Lise Meitner got screwed, we don’t need to hear it again,” but that’s not quite true. There will always ben new people coming along who haven’t heard the history, so while “been there, done that” is a genuine reaction for me personally, it’s also falling into the “Educate Yourself” trope that I hate when other people do it. (That’s a future rant, maybe…)
What I will say instead is that I think it would be much healthier for everyone, scientists and journalists alike, to balance out the annual recitation of historical grievances with some more optimistic and forward-looking coverage. This is an example of a much larger problem, of course— we’re all marinating in a toxic mix of “everything has always sucked” because that’s the way that social-media incentives push the #discourse—but science coverage is a small area where I think it would be relatively easy to do better. As it is, Nobel coverage has sort of bifurcated into “Here’s a bunch of old white guys who ought to win” vs. “Here’s a list of mostly dead women who got left out,” and I don’t think that’s good for the mental health of either side.
It’s probably a bit too late to generate big glossy feature stories— I need to remember to pitch this to magazines next May or so— but I’d really like to see people who might be penciling in a “Meitner and Bell and Rubin and…” post for the next two weeks instead do a “Here’s a woman or a scientist of color whose work ought to be on the list this year or in a year to come” piece. Something that builds toward something better, rather than just tearing down the past.
Of course, this is a daunting task, because the categories for the Nobel are so broad and science is so compartmentalized that it’s hard to know enough about enough fields to know who might be worthy. The last woman to actually win the Physics Nobel, Donna Strickland, won for work on ultra-fast lasers, a research area that’s close enough to my own field that I regularly go to conference talks about it. Despite that, I was totally unaware of her. (There’s another regularly cited candidate closer to my own field, but as I wrote a few years back, I’m ambivalent about that suggestion.)
I think that makes this a job for an actual science journalist, someone with contacts across a broad range of fields who can shake a bunch of different trees and collect a broader selection of possibilities than just asking the tiny slice of scientists active on Twitter or Substack for ideas. That said, if you’ve got suggestions to offer, I’m willing to give it a shot (time permitting, anyway… I’m going to be pretty busy with other stuff over the next week or two). Leave some names in a comment here, or shoot me an email/ DM/ whatever, and I’ll try to do what I can to learn about their work and promote them.
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