Who will win this year's science Nobel Prizes?

Predicting who will win a Nobel this year is always a safer game than it might sound—no one really expects you to get it right. There are rare occasions—such as last year’s award in physics to Peter Higgs and François Englert—when the outcome is a foregone conclusion (at least in terms of what, if not necessarily who). But more often the Nobel committee can’t be second-guessed, given its option of dredging some important but long assimilated advance out of the archives before those responsible for it are dead.

I can say without prejudice, for example, that the pioneers of optical engineering who (deservedly) shared the physics prize in 2009 were far from household names even among physicists. The discoverer of “quasicrystals” Dan Schechtman, who was rewarded with the chemistry prize in 2011, was widely known and lauded for the boldness and resolution of his work, but I’m not sure that anyone saw that decision coming almost three decades after the event.

Having thus comprehensively covered my back, I am going to make some futile predictions. But the first, of which I am wholly confident, concerns who isn’t going to win. When it was announced in March that a team of scientists using a telescope called BICEP2 had discovered evidence for the period of extremely rapid expansion of the universe, called inflation, just a few blinks after the Big Bang began, many—including me in a previous article for Prospect—figured that a physics Nobel was on the cards for the prime architects of inflationary theory, most probably American cosmologists Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. Not straight away, for the BICEP2 findings would need to be checked and replicated first—but soon enough. Now those particular dreams are in tatters, as it seems likely that the claims were premature: what looked like a fingerprint of inflation in the microwave radiation spread throughout the cosmos appears now to be more probably produced by dust in our galaxy. A video of Linde being given a bottle of champagne after being told of the BICEP2 results has now become one of those YouTube moments that will make some rue the web’s unforgiving memory.

If the problems are confirmed, the BICEP2 results don’t rule out inflation, but merely fail to confirm it. However, the episode has sparked interesting debate. Some cosmologists have used it as an opportunity to suggest that in fact inflation doesn’t seem to be a truly scientific idea at all, because the theory is so flexible that it can be “tuned” to suit almost any observation. Others have argued that the BICEP2 findings, taken in conjunction with latest thinking on how galactic dust might influence them, actually rule out most reasonable versions of inflationary theory. Rather than returning us to square one, the defects of the BICEP2 results have opened a can of worms.

The other big talking point is whether the BICEP2 team rushed to announce their findings to the press before they had been properly assessed by peers because they wanted to stake a Nobel claim. That can only be conjecture, perhaps of an uncharitable sort. It’s doesn’t greatly matter whether it is true or not; more edifying is the fact that it’s a plausible accusation in the first place. There is a clear precedent for giving physics Nobels for important observations in astronomy. Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish won in 1974 (and Jocelyn Bell Burnell should have joined them) for the discovery of pulsars; Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson did so in 1978 for discovering the cosmic microwave background that BICEP2 studied; Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor were rewarded in 1993 for discovering pulsars in double-star systems (binary pulsars); and a trio of astronomers got the 2011 prize for finding that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Each of these is a big deal, and well worth celebrating. But the general principle—that one can win a science Nobel for spotting something important—is not self-evidently valid. BICEP2 is technologically impressive, and the experiment is a very challenging one. But everyone in the field understands what it is looking for, and why, and how, and it is not unique in doing so. If BICEP2 had been first past the post, that would have certainly been a testament to the diligence of its team. But would it have justified a Nobel? I don’t think so.

Too often in science, rewards come from being in the right place at the right time, or having better resources or more money. Even if you don’t get a Nobel, you might get a process, a technique, an equation named after you, and gather lesser accolades into the bargain. When there are several teams racing to find a particular gene or protein structure, or to synthesize an especially fiddly molecule, the winning group might indeed benefit from just that extra touch of flair or experimental skill, but the competitors would probably get there moments after anyway. In the old days, a “winner” might be anointed just because they managed to get their paper published first. It’s widely acknowledged that this competitiveness is becoming unhealthy for science, and the ways in which prizes and medals are distributed should be aiming to alleviate it, not to reward it.

We probably will never know now if the BICEP2 findings would have brought the team leaders a Nobel—but I would like to think they would not. Science Nobels in particular ought to be awarded on much the same grounds as are the prizes for peace and literature (at least in theory)—for substantial, sustained, unique and inspirational achievements. Important discoveries should certainly qualify, but not simply for their own sake: they should also be contingent on such things as originality, insight, creativity. They should, in short, be achievements and contributions that no one else was likely to make. The 1998 chemistry award is a good example: Walter Kohn’s theory for calculating the distributions and energies of electrons in complex molecules and materials is unglamorous but seminal, and perhaps more to the point, it isn’t obvious that someone else would have concocted it if Kohn hadn’t have.

(To have the courage of my convictions, I must now relinquish my hopes of a chemistry Nobel that would delight me: to Japanese microscopist Sumio Iijima for the first clear discovery of carbon nanotubes, the pivotal microscopic building blocks of nanotechnology.)

Who, then, deserves such recognition this year? The reason Harvard chemist George Whitesides has defended his position of the world’s most cited chemist over recent years in the face of Nobel-winning rivals is not that he has been responsible for any single big discovery but because he has sustained a career of extraordinary breadth and inventiveness. Most chemists would consider it a travesty if he doesn’t win a Nobel soon.

Much the same is true of physicists Michael E Fisher and Leo Kadanoff, who would make a splendid pairing for their contributions to the understanding of so-called condensed matter, which is essentially the everyday stuff that you can see and touch, from superconductors to polymers. In particular, Fisher and Kadanoff have helped explain how to understand the transformations that matter can undergo—when heated or cooled, say—in terms of the statistical behaviour of their constituent atoms and molecules. You could fairly make it a threesome here with the Italian Giorgio Parisi.

For medicine or physiology, it’s always nice to see the prize go to people who genuinely work in those fields, which are more rarely seen as cutting-edge now. So why not Joseph Vacanti and Robert Langer for their work on tissue engineering for wound repair, a discipline that is already enhancing patients’ lives? However, it is strange that Alec Jeffreys has not yet won for inventing DNA fingerprinting, and that can’t be long in coming.