New Nobel-exceeding cash prizes evoke mixed responses across science

By Steven T. Corneliussen

The Princeton University string theorist Alexander Polyakov received the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize for 2013 at a ceremony calling to mind the Oscars, reports a Nature news feature . Hollywood’s Morgan Freeman hosted the black-tie event, with soprano and actress Sarah Brightman performing. At 2.5 times the Nobel Prize’s $1.2 million, the article says, this and other emerging large awards are drawing criticism.

Besides the Fundamental Physics Prize , Nature cites three more ‘big-money science prizes': the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences , the Tang Prize ‘as an Asian complement to the Nobels,’ and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering . The purposes are to publicize inspiring exemplars, thereby stimulating public awareness, scientists’ ambition, research funding, and scientific advances. The article quotes a Breakthrough Prize board member: ‘We wanted to create science superheroes.’

Nature quotes physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek of MIT: ‘I don’t want to run these awards down, but I find it offensive that people are trying to either borrow the prestige of the Nobel, or buy it.... Prizes are a good thing, but the question is, if your goal is to help science, are large prizes the most efficient way to do that?’

The article reports other criticisms too:

* Such prizes could distort priorities by over-supporting well-off fields, ‘increasing the divide between the scientific haves and have-nots,’ or by rewarding poor science. * It’d be better to put the money directly into research. * It’d be better to use smaller amounts to give financial security to lots of young researchers who are trying to establish not just careers but families. * The public actually gets its science knowledge and inspiration from high-visibility science communicators, so it’d be better to finance them. * A few big-money prizes for a minuscule proportion of researchers can’t constitute an incentive for most scientists—for whom enrichment isn’t a major goal anyway. * The prizes mislead the public into thinking that science progresses thanks to lone researchers working in isolation.

Nature‘s editors acknowledge such complaints, but judge that ‘lucrative prizes emulating the Nobels bring welcome money and publicity for science.’ In an editorial they ask, ‘What’s not to like?’ In the end, they declare, ‘it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather than go elsewhere.’

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.