Give Stephen Hawking a Nobel Prize

It’s Nobel season, so welcome to speculations that you should give as much credence as the psephology of recent British elections. Forced to reflect with a little more care and depth this year, owing to my participation on a panel of the American Chemical Society to discuss predictions in that field, I’ve come to realise that what I really want to see is not my own choices validated but a changed emphasis in the criteria of the choosing. One often hears the complaint that limiting each prize to no more than three people is inappropriate to the way science is now conducted in large teams. This is a fair criticism (even if it applies only to some kinds of science), but the answer is not—or should not be—to give awards to huge consortia of particle physicists or geneticists. Rather, Stockholm shouldn’t reward A Big Discovery at all, but instead recognize individual careers that have made a sustained and profound contribution to science.

That’s why, in response to an ACS request to identify an exemplary past recipient, I selected Gerhard Ertl (2007), an expert in surface science and catalysis—not because Ertl’s work was so much more significant than any of the others, but precisely because he made no Big Discovery. Rather, he produced a substantial body of work that helped to shape this hugely important field. While acknowledging that there is often more to being in the right place at the right time than blind luck, some Nobel recipients (including rather famous ones) have contributed only incrementally to scientific knowledge aside from the particular breakthrough that won them the prize. But more importantly, rewarding a body of work rather than a single discovery or invention could start to free us from the dreadful first-past-the-post culture that is corroding science through its encouragement of fierce competition, secrecy and publication gamesmanship. It could also, by promoting long-term effort over get-rich-quick land grabs, do something to redress the Nobels’ notorious gender imbalance.

Some might argue that this would be contrary to Alfred Nobel’s stipulation that recipients should be those who have made “the most important discovery or improvement”—but given that we already blithely disregard the bit which says that this should have happened during “the preceding year”, I don’t think we need be too bothered by that.

Partly with this in mind, I surprise myself by concluding that it is high time Stephen Hawking got a Swedish gong. His impending Reith Lecture in November prompts the reflection that, through his work on black holes in particular, Hawking has stimulated a huge amount of science while deepening the connections between general relativity, quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory, thereby uniting several foundational ideas in physics. The usual reason cited for his lack of a Nobel so far is that the key prediction of his theory— the Hawking radiation that is expected to stream from the border of a black hole’s event horizon owing to quantum effects in empty space—hasn’t yet been directly verified. I say, enough with this obsession with verification or proven application as a criterion of Nobel-worthiness. Most physicists are confident that Hawking radiation is real, but in any event the more important point is that Hawking’s work has been tremendously fertile. That, in science, counts at least as much as being right. I’m no fan of Hawking’s simplistic pronouncements on philosophy, space travel and artificial intelligence, but his work on black holes becomes ever more profound and influential.

Besides, he isn’t getting any younger. And why not pair him up with Roger Penrose, who helped to nurture Hawking’s early career, has made comparably important contributions to physics (especially of gravitation), and has enriched science far beyond that field, not least with his geometrical notion of Penrose tiling that (literally) paved the way to an understanding the quasicrystals that won Dan Schechtman the 2011 chemistry Nobel.

But maybe not just yet. I want to see this year’s physics Nobel go to pioneers of quantum information theory (QIT), which is now one of the richest areas of modern physics. Already there seems little doubt that QIT is going to provide valuable new technologies, but there’s in any case absolutely no reason to wait until we have quantum computers on our desks (unlikely, actually) before acknowledging how invigorating this field has been. So who? Charles Bennett of IBM’s Yorktown Heights research lab in New York, for sure: he came up with some of the initial ideas in the 1980s. I’d pair him with Anton Zeilinger in Vienna, who has led the way in devising experiments with lasers (the field called quantum optics) to demonstrate and test some of QIT’s concepts, while also making significant contributions to the theory. It could be argued that David Deutsch in Oxford should have a share here too for his foundational work on quantum computing.

On the other hand, this could be the year that the science Nobels bite the bullet (already chomped for the Peace prize) and start dishing out gongs to teams rather than limiting them to three individuals. For it’s hard to ignore the case for giving the physics Nobel to the two teams who collaborated on the experiments (called CMS and ATLAS) that discovered the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.

Chemists often complain that their Nobels are hijacked by biologists these days—for example, the prizes in 2013, 2012, 2009 and 2008 all went to work on various classes of protein. But one could equally interpret this as broadmindedness by the Stockholm committee, who are prepared to accept that chemistry’s borders are broader than some of its practitioners are ready to admit. In any event, those complaints might be heard again if the prize goes, as I think it might, to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic editing technique, now repeatedly making headlines as the easy way to re-engineer genomes. This hardly fulfils my criterion for a “body of work”, of course, but under the current selection criteria it would be a very valid decision. Some say “too early”, but there is no need to wait and see if we will routinely edit human DNA this way; it is clear that the technique has transformed genetic technology. A potential obstacle, however, is an ongoing patent dispute.

There are some candidates who you just know are going to be laureates one day, and so one could safely trot out their names year after year until your prescience is rewarded. For chemistry these include the duo of Harry Gray and Stephen Lippard, who pioneered the important field of bioinorganic chemistry (the roles of metal atoms in biological molecules, such as the copper, iron, magnesium and zinc atoms that play key roles in some enzymes); George Whitesides, who has contributed to just about every area of chemistry going and is arguably its most inventive mind today; and John Goodenough (perhaps coupled with Stanley Whittingham), whose work on solids made from stacked layers of atoms made the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries of mobile devices possible. Goodenough is now 93, so his prize shouldn’t be delayed much longer.

Happily, though, the ACS asked me not who I thought would win, but who I think should. Last year I proposed the American chemical engineer Robert Langer, who has led the field of biomedical materials engineering for many years. For example, Langer has devised polymers and membranes that can be implanted or ingested to deliver drugs to the body at a steady rate rather than in one big dose—a much healthier and more reliable way to do it. He has also been a leader in the creation of biodegradable scaffolds for growing cells into new organs, a vision that Langer has shared with veteran biomedical engineer Joseph Vacanti, who ought to share such an award. I’d be very happy to see that happen, although I suspect this work would be deemed too medical, or too engineering-based, or too something.

But this time I’m rooting for another pair of outsiders: Japanese microscopist Sumio Iijima and American physical chemist Mildred Dresselhaus, for their contributions to carbon-based nanotechnology. Iijima identified carbon nanotubes in 1991: hollow tubes of pure, graphite-like carbon, some of them just one atom thick and a few nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) across. They have been used in areas ranging from atomic-resolution microscopes to drug delivery to engineering new, ultra-strong carbon composites. Dresselhaus did some of the crucial theory to understand the properties of these nanotubes, and has more generally helped define the shape of the field of nanotechnology that uses this and other carbon-based materials. That area has arguably already been given two Nobels: the chemistry prize in 1996 for the discovery of “carbon football” molecules called fullerenes (which started the ball rolling, so to speak), and the 2010 physics prize for work on the one-atom-thick carbon sheets of graphene. But carbon nanotubes have arguably so far had more impact than both of these forms, not least in the announcement from IBM yesterday of a way to use them effectively in the next generation of microelectronic circuitry.

In physiology and medicine there are, as ever, stacks of plausible candidates, but as with last year, I can’t see why the anomaly should persist much longer in which Alec Jeffreys goes unrewarded for DNA fingerprinting.