A Global Slant On Nobel Prizes

So far this week, my blogging had a distinctly local slant on Nobel Prizes, so now I want to do something different. Quite a lot of people have noticed how many science prizes this year went to Europeans. Read the excellent treatments by Katherine Sharpe, Abel Pharmboy, Steinn Sigurosson, Chad Orzel and PZ Myers to see the range of ideas and opinions on this.
I want to add just a couple of brief points…
If you look at the list of winners of Nobels for Literature, you will notice that they come from all over the world.
If you look at the Peace Prizes, they are also from all over, though U.S. recepients are quite frequent probably due to the fact that the US, as a country with a huge military which it is quite willing to use, is in the position to affect where and when the wars start and where and when they end. Often those decisions are disastrous, but sometimes they are a force for good and the US leaders behind those decisions deserve the prize.
The science prizes are mainly going to Americans and Europeans. This, in my mind, is not due to inherent superiority of scientists in these places, but due to difficulties facing scientists elsewhere. Especially for disciplines awarded by the Nobel committee – physics, chemistry, biomedical research – there is a necessity for quite a lot of space, money, infrastructure, equipment, state support, national science tradition, institutional memory, network of qualified collaborators and access to literature, none of which is readily available to scientists in developing countries. If the prizes were awarded for mathematics, non-medical areas of biology or archeology, for instance, I bet there would be many more recipients from other places, as at least some areas of such research can be done by individuals with minimal need for support, infrastructure and funds.
Let’s start with literature. If your library cannot afford subscriptions to any journals, as just subscription to Science and Nature exceeds entire annual operating budget, your research will be based on 40-year old hand-me-down textbooks, not on last week’s cutting-edge papers, thus your research is outdated and perhaps flawed even before you start doing it! Forget Nobel – you are doomed to mediocrity no matter how brilliant you may be. You know my solution to this problem: Open Access.
There are about 180 countries in the world (depends who is counting).
There are three science prizes every year, with potentially a total of nine recepients.
In an ideal world, each country would expect, on average (180/9 = 20) to have a science Nobel laureate once every 20 years. This would not mean that US science has gone down the drain, but that science has really became global as it should be. I can’t wait for this to happen.