The US$3-million Fundamental physics prize is indeed an interesting experiment,
as Alexander Polyakov said when he accepted this year's award in March. And
it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature
discusses, a string of lucrative awards for researchers have joined the Nobel
Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded
from the telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These
benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to
use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science.
What's not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted
in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these
upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The
new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, say scientists.
They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund
peer-reviewed research. They perpetuate the myth of the long genius.
The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want
to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who
have made their careers in research.
As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about
how science prizes both new and old-are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize
in Life Sciences, launched this year, takes an unrepresentative view of what
the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation's limit of three recipients
per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the
collaborative nature of modern research-as will be demonstrated by the inevitable
row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the
Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of couse, themselves set up by a very rich individual
who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention,
has given them legitimacy.
As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear.
First, most researchers would accept such a prize if they were offered one.
Second, it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather
than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize and question the mechanism-that is the
culture of research , after all-but it is the prize-givers' money to do with as they
please. It is wise to take such gifts with gratitude and grace.