Can a Hollywood-style award elevate scientists’ standing?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8200
Award recipient Rainer Weiss and his wife Rebecca receive the red-carpet treatment at the 2017 Breakthrough Prize gala on 4 December in Mountain View, California.
Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
“Hollywood’s finest stars meet the world’s top minds in a night celebrating scientific achievement!” So began an early December TV commercial. Flashing snippet views of a glamorous gathering resembling the Academy Awards, it proclaimed “the fifth annual Breakthrough Prizes!”
The promoted telecast presented highlights from a 4 December Silicon Valley celebration. The late astronomer Carl Sagan, the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, even the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman—familiar as they were with the public spotlight—could never have seen anything like it.
But present scientists and science stakeholders can. A 4-minute video recap describes the gala, headlined in the clip as “Scientists changing the world.” The video’s summary text says:
Host Morgan Freeman was joined by Vin Diesel, Alicia Keys, Kevin Durant, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Alex Rodriguez, Will.i.am and astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, who presented the Breakthrough Prizes alongside technologists Daniel Ek, Hiroshi Mikitani, Sundar Pinchai and Susan Wojcicki and prize founders Pricilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, and Yuri Milner. Alicia Keys performed the song “More Than We Know” from her new album “Here.” The event was produced by Vanity Fair and Don Mischer Productions. The show was broadcast live on National Geographic channel and later on Fox and National Geographic channels worldwide.
Bits of the recap clip show science seriousness. “Gravitational waves,” explains physicist Kip Thorne, “are ripples in the shape of space and time [that] travel to Earth bringing detailed information about their source.” Other parts show Hollywood fun. “Geneticists are sometimes accused of playing God,” quips Freeman. With a calculated pause—but with no wink necessary for his allusion to his film work—he deadpans: “I played God.”
Fourteen scientists appeared on stage. A quartet of New York Times reporters published a news article with these opening paragraphs:
The biggest prize payday in science came around again Sunday evening when the Breakthrough Foundation handed out more than $25 million in its annual prizes to more than a thousand physicists, life scientists and mathematicians.
This year’s winners include five molecular biologists who won $3 million each for work in genetics and cell biology, one mathematician, a trio of string theorists who split one $3 million physics prize, and another 1,015 physicists working on the LIGO gravitational wave detector split a special $3 million physics prize. In addition, there were six smaller “New Horizons” prizes totaling $600,000 for 10 “early career” researchers, and a pair of high school students won $400,000 apiece for making science videos.
The string-theory trio—recognized for “transformative advances in quantum field theory, string theory, and quantum gravity"—were Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University. Nature reported that the special award for the work at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory means dividing $1 million among LIGO founders Thorne, Ronald W. P. Drever, and Rainer Weiss and $2 million among their 1012 colleagues.
The Times continued:
The Breakthrough Foundation was founded by Sergey Brin of Google; Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe; Jack Ma of Alibaba and his wife, Cathy Zhang; Yuri Milner, an internet entrepreneur, and his wife, Julia Milner; and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
It sprang from Mr. Milner’s decision in 2012 to hand out $3 million apiece to nine theoretical physicists, in the belief that physicists are equal to rock stars and deserve to be paid and celebrated like them. Over the years, as more sponsors have joined, the prizes have spread to life sciences and mathematics. The winners each year are chosen by a committee of previous winners.
Physicists “equal to rock stars”? They “deserve to be paid and celebrated” accordingly? That calls to mind the assertions of Bruce Y. Lee of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His Forbes.com commentary “Breakthrough Awards give scientists some celebrity treatment, but it’s not enough” cites “the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Emmys, the Grammy Awards, the MTV Awards, the SAG Awards and many other well-televised, well-adorned, well-publicized awards for actors, actresses, musicians and entertainers.” Lee writes:
Yes, the entertainment industry is very good at giving itself awards, and entertaining you while doing so. Because they are, after all, entertainers. All these awards shows have helped make entertainment celebrities into household names and further promote the entertainment industry. Do stars in science, medicine, and healthcare get similar treatment? Not even close.
Lee invokes the longstanding view of Norman Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin CEO who led the effort a decade ago to produce the US competitiveness study Rising Above the Gathering Storm . In his own Forbes.com piece in 2011, Augustine observed, “Scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.”
Too often seen as geeks? The Wall Street Journal‘s report opened by referring to “the top minds in science,” but the Washington Post reached for a physicist-caricaturing spirit like the one that animates CBS’s decade-old sitcom The Big Bang Theory. “The nerds of science,” the Post‘s report began, “had a rare night in the spotlight on Sunday.”
The Post moved past the nerd cliché to raise—and to offer answers for—questions imposed by this new campaign to inspire public esteem for scientists:
The awards, which are making millionaires out of researchers, have been received with some ambivalence from the scientific community. While many have expressed gratitude to the philanthropists for recognizing the importance of science, others have questioned the premise of the prizes.
Some have suggested that the money would be better spent going directly to labs rather than financing a lavish awards event modeled after the Oscars and featuring celebrities….
Others say the prizes bestow riches on scientists who are already well-known and well-funded. (The Breakthrough Prize group has introduced a junior achievement award and did give out six prizes for early career achievement in physics and math this year.) Others have said they’re uncomfortable with the idea of the wealthy trying to “buy” the prestige of the Nobels.
But those who think that might want to take a closer look at the history of the Nobels. When they were first awarded in 1901, they attracted a lot of attention for precisely the same reason as the Breakthrough Prizes: for the huge cash award being given out. “In the early days, it was worth about 20 years of an academic salary,” Wired magazine noted , “and was the prototypical ‘genius award’ that allowed scholars to freely pursue their interests.”
If we fast-forward another century, it’s possible the Breakthrough Prizes will be looked at in a similar light.
Actress Sienna Miller attended the Breakthrough Prize gala.
Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Maybe so, but consider the light cast on the prizes at the moment by a pair of contrasting reports from the UK’s Daily Mail. Appearing second , with straightforward science reporting spiced by some glamor hype, was “Morgan Freeman, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner host the ‘Breakthrough Awards': Gala gives £19 million in funding to the world’s top scientists.” But hours earlier, the Daily Mail had posted the almost completely Hollywood-themed “Bryce Dallas Howard is the picture of elegance in plunging patterned gown as she hits the red carpet of the Breakthrough Prize gala.” With documenting photos, the first 15 paragraphs offered such news as that the “striking actress looked truly sensational in a plunging black gown as she posed elegantly.” At the end, with celebrity photos featured, the article mentioned international science awards.
A June 2013 editorial in Nature, citing an accompanying news story , listed criticisms of “lucrative awards” that have joined the Nobel Prize: “Upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them…. They could distort the meritocracy of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research.” Far from supporting such criticisms, though, the editors concluded that it’s “surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science” and that while it’s “fair to criticize and question the mechanism,” it’s “wise to accept such gifts with gratitude and grace.”
Still, the glamor focus seen in coverage like the Daily Mail‘s contrasts starkly with the serious one brought by scientists like Columbia University math professor, blogger, physicist, and string-theory critic Peter Woit , who questions the Hollywood emphasis and some of the choices for physics recognition. Woit’s views figured in Nature‘s 2013 news story that accompanied the prizes-approving editorial. His recent blog posting charged that if “you’re a string theorist, you don’t actually need to solve a problem to get a prize: speculation about what the solution to a problem might be is good enough, as is finding problems with the speculations of other string theorists.” He declared, “This sort of thing does nothing to improve the difficult situation of current theoretical physics, quite the opposite.”
Johns Hopkins’s Lee argues that, in any case, to “avoid or reverse our country’s decline in science, our society’s views of science have to change.” His commentary’s ending says:
One way to do this is to give real scientists more celebrity treatment through awards shows, television, movies, advertisements and other means. Again, real scientists and not actors playing scientists. Seem a little far-fetched? Think that scientists can’t handle the spotlight and do anything besides science? Well, you only have to look in our country’s history to find numerous scientists playing more prominent and leadership roles in society. Moreover, after this year’s presidential election, anything seems possible.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.