There are large, endowed prizes in a number of disciplines. The most famous of all are the Nobel prizes,
of course, and in the sciences at least (chemistry, physics, and
medicine), being awarded a Nobel is a singular crowning achievement. A
huge amount has been written about the Nobels - if you want to learn how
they came to be, and at the same time become extremely disillusioned
about the process for the early awards (my goodness I hope it's better
these days - it seems like it must be), I recommend The Politics of Excellence.
The purpose of the Nobel is to reward a major, transformative (to use
the NSF's favorite word) intellectual achievement. The money is not
meant to be a research grant. (Similar in spirit is the Fields Medal
for mathematics, though that is much less money and purposefully
directed at younger researchers.)
The MacArthur Fellowships
are another well-known set of awards. These are known in popular
parlance as "Genius Grants", and unlike the Nobels are (apparently)
intended not so much as a financial reward, but as a liberating
resource, a grant that can provide the winner with the financial freedom
to continue to excel. In some disciplines (the arts and the humanities
in particular) this can completely change the financial landscape for
the winners. Awards that go directly toward furthering the creative
ends of the recipients are clearly great things.
In recent years,
a couple of new, very large awards have been created, and it's
interesting to consider whether this is a good thing. The Kavli Foundation is awarding prizes every other year in Neuroscience, Astrophysics, and Nanoscience. To nominate someone, see here.
In spirit, these seem much like the Nobels, with awards so far going to
extremely well regarded people, and not meant to function as direct
research support.
In more flamboyant style, Yuri Milner has endowed the Fundamental Physics Prizes,
also not meant to function as research grants. What really
distinguishes these latest, apart from the sheer magnitude of the awards
($3M each), is that they have largely gone to high energy physics
theorists whose work has not been confirmed by experiment (in contrast
to theoretical physics Nobel awards). More recently there has been a
special award to the LHC experimentalists, and some related prizes to
condensed matter theorists. However, the idea of giving very large
prizes for unconfirmed theoretical work is controversial. In essence,
is something a "scientific breakthrough" if it's not confirmed by
experiment, or is it very exciting math? Perhaps this is just a
labeling issue, but it is hard not to be unsettled by the willingness of
some to try to detach science from experimental tests.
Is the
scientific community better off from having more of these kinds of
prizes? Certainly it makes sense to consider awards for fields not
recognized by the Nobel Foundation. Nobels have gravitas because of
their long established history, but that does not mean that there
shouldn't be an analogous prize for, e.g., computer science. Likewise,
anything positive about the sciences that gets public attention is
probably a net good. However, prizes will lose their meaning if there
are too many, and making some of them destabilizingly large amounts of
money is not necessarily great. It's also not clear quite what the
point is if the same people win multiple large prizes for the same work.
For example, it's credible that Alan Guth could win a Nobel in
addition and a Kavli astrophysics prize in addition to the Fundamental
Physics prize. I always tell would-be scientists not to get into this
if they're after the big prize at the end - that's not the point of the
enterprise, and I'd hate to see that change. It's also hard for me to
believe that the existence of these prizes is going to get the public or
students materially more interested in the sciences. Somehow prizes
that go toward helping people continue their work or recognize a career
of achievement seem more sound to me, but I remain ambivalent.
1 comment:
I have mixed feelings about these prizes. On the other hand, they liberate the recipients financially, which, I think, is a good thing, because it allows at least these people to do truly original research and think big instead of chasing grants. On the other hand, these prizes create a culture of hero worship, which I feel is detrimental to science. First of all because it creates fashions out of the research of the Nobel prize winners which homogenizes the research. Secondly, because it, paradoxically, discourages young people from science when they see these big thinkers blown out of proportion by the media and think that to make remarkable research, you have to be some sort of superhuman.
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