Nobel Prize 2.0
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Hello? Hello, Professor Sudhoff. This is Adam Smith calling from the Nobel Prize website in Stockholm. It's unexplainable. I'm Noah Hassenfeld. And this week, a few scientists are getting phone calls that sound something like this. It has just been announced that you've been awarded the Nobel Prize together with Jim Rothman and Randy Sheckman. Are you serious?

Each year, various Swedish and Norwegian institutions give out six Nobel Prizes to just a handful of people. I'm sorry. It was a lot of expecting. Four prizes go to science: one for physics, one for chemistry, one for physiology or medicine, and one for economics. This honor is incredibly beautiful.

The prize comes with about a million dollars and a fancy medal. It's also a chance to draw lots and lots of media attention to your scientific work. Oh my God, it's quite amazing. But this week, we're not here for a celebration. This week, reporter Berg Pinkerton digs into how the Nobel Prize affects what we know and what we don't. Brian Keating has been a cosmologist for decades. He's won several awards in that time. But the Nobel...

It used to be, like, the most important award to him. I mean, the Nobel Prize for most of my career was a huge motivator for me. And anybody who says it's not, I think, is not telling the truth or has already won a Nobel Prize. A Nobel Prize can make a scientist's career. Like, absolutely.

Academic institutions will often list how many Nobels they've won, how many Nobel laureates they employ. My department chair told me that part of the reason I was hired was because of my chances of winning a Nobel Prize were thought to be so high in my favor. And the pull of the prize can be especially strong in a small, expensive, competitive field like cosmology. There are fewer professors of cosmology that do experimental astrophysics than I do than there are NBA basketball players.

And a lot of the resources that come to bear are based in some sense on the probability to win a Nobel Prize. Which is why Brian started studying a question that a lot of people agreed was Nobel worthy. I wanted to answer the ultimate question. What was it like at the origin of time, space, matter itself? Namely, the Big Bang. The question is one of the biggest cosmic riddles out there. The riddle goes something like this.

The universe is weirdly uniform. Like, points that scientists have measured on one side of the universe have almost the same properties — so like temperature, density — as points that are billions of light years away.

And the easiest way to explain how that would happen is to assume that all of these points used to be very close together, right? Kind of like when you put an ice cube into hot water, because everything is touching, like all the water molecules eventually even out to the same temperature. But the twist here is that the universe is way too big for this kind of ice cube mixing explanation. There are points that are so far out there, they couldn't have been touching.

Unless these points were actually once very, very close, like right up against each other. And then there was a moment right after the Big Bang when there was just this period of wild, almost like unimaginable expansion, way faster than the universe expands today. Scientists call this idea inflation. But right now, it's just their best guess about what happened back then.

So Brian wanted to find more evidence that this answer might be true. If you think about the Big Bang as an explosion, every explosion leaves behind some kind of smoke. And usually they talk about the smoking gun. In this case, if the universe expanded like mind-bogglingly fast for a couple of moments, it wouldn't leave behind smoke, but it would leave behind sort of ripples called gravitational waves. Fluctuations in the very fabric of space-time itself.

So back in the 2000s, Brian had an idea.

He knew that if these gravitational waves had existed, they would have rippled out and affected photons that formed in the early days of the universe. Basically, the waves would have made those photons kind of spin and dance in this special swirling, curling pattern. So Brian thought that the best way to sort of find his smoking gun would be to look for early photons and see if he could catch them dancing.

So that's why we went to the South Pole, and I had to leave San Diego's sunny climes. Brian and his collaborators built a telescope in the South Pole. A robotic telescope that has computers built into it, has sensors. It can pirouette on its axis despite weighing over 10,000 pounds. After this first pirouetting telescope, they built a second one, and both telescopes searched the sky for very old photons that they could examine for traces of gravitational waves.

And for years, scientists would go down for months at a time and they would man the scopes. I think in German there's a word that means flat, boring and white. And that's what it's like. The South Pole is pretty damn boring. There's nothing to see there. It was this slow sort of painstaking work. But then in 2013, so seven years after the first scope started collecting data, Brian got a phone call.

It was one of his collaborators calling to say that he was pretty sure the team had spotted something in the telescope results. It started to look like an honest-to-goodness signal.

that had all the hallmarks of this smoking gun. So like, what do you do when you think you might have found the smoking gun that solves a cosmic riddle? We kind of went into a sort of lockdown. Like we wanted to be careful and we didn't want to let news out before we had fully vetted both the data and the interpretation that we were preparing to make. And we started to ask not all the ways that we could be right, but

but all the possible ways we might have screwed things up. So the team, they were checking, rechecking their data. They tried everything they could think of. And they even reached out to another team that was scanning the skies. This was the Planck satellite team. And because they were using a satellite, they had kind of different data that could have been used to cross-check the South Pole data even more effectively. This is how Brian's collaborator Clem Preik remembers it.

They had to thread this kind of delicate needle here because if they pushed too hard, they actually ran the risk of getting scooped by the Planck satellite team. So we were aware

At this point in the process, Brian was no longer a team lead. But a Nobel was in play here.

And even though he wasn't actually likely to get nominated, being so closely connected to a Nobel would be huge. And the odds were looking pretty good. People compared it to the most surefire Nobel Prizes that have ever been awarded. Eventually, the team decided that these sort of many crosschecks that they had done were just going to have to be enough, even without the Planck satellite data. So in March of 2014, they announced their findings to the world.

The Big Bang Theory just got a big boost. Scientists say after years of research, they've identified an echo from the first moments of the universe. We had a lot of positive media attention. We were on the front page of the New York Times. This is a major advance in understanding how we got here.

Probably covered in every magazine, online source that you can think about. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. CNN, PBS, etc., etc. So with this discovery, there's talk of a Nobel Prize for the Harvard-Smithsonian team. But then, a few months later, it all fell apart. And it all comes back to that...

That really pesky data from the Planck satellite. So the data that Brian's collaborator had requested when they were checking their work. That satellite data found a whole bunch of something called cosmic dust.

Our universe is littered literally with dust. It has dust on scales of my house, my kids, their playthings, etc., etc., all the way up to the solar system. We call them meteorites, micrometeorites, asteroids, planets. And this dust can make photons kind of dance and twirl in that same curling, swirling pattern as gravitational waves can. So...

With this new satellite data, it was becoming sort of increasingly clear that Brian's telescopes hadn't actually detected the beginning of the universe. But instead had been a very exquisitely sensitive dust detector.

It's still possible that there are much fainter traces of gravitational waves in the signal, but the team had really jumped the gun by kind of going out and announcing that they had solved the cosmic riddle so quickly. Like, the cosmic riddle is not solved, and while it's very easy to find TV coverage of that first celebration,

it's a lot harder to find coverage of the retraction. A lot of times, journalists will publish the announcement that goes on page one. But the retraction, if it ever occurs, always occurs on the Saturday edition and page B17. But even if there wasn't, like, a huge media sensation around the retraction, like,

Ryan, at least, was very aware. I would be lying if I said, you know, I wasn't really feeling crushing depression in some sense to have, you know, perhaps my best shot at at least being Nobel adjacent, if not winning a Nobel Prize, literally blown into dust in the cosmic wind. That was very depressing.

Brian and the people on this team, they weren't bad scientists. They were trying to check their work. And after all this fell apart, they even collaborated with the Planck satellite team to figure out what went wrong. But the system they were operating in wasn't really set up to reward collaboration or very slow double-checking. At least initially, it encouraged them to get their work out into the world as quickly as possible to not get scooped.

And yes, like, the pull of the Nobel was not the only problem here. But at least for Brian, it was the important nudge that led to a scientific paper that went all over the world and then crumbled into dust. And looking back, Brian admits that he does regret the emphasis that was placed on the Nobel Prize. Going forward, you know, I say, if people think I'm hypocritical, all they have to do is get the committee to offer me a Nobel Prize. And if I don't reject it,

then I'm a hypocrite. After the break, problems with the Nobel Prize go far deeper than just incentivizing shaky science. But we've got some ideas about how to fix them. That's next. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight. People with kids tell me time moves a lot faster. Before you know it, your kid is all grown up, they've got their own credit card,

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Unexplainable, we're back. In the first half of the show, we heard about one scientist's struggle with the lure of the Nobel. But Brian Keating was working in a field that regularly wins Nobels on a question that could win a Nobel. Devang Mehta, on the other hand, is a plant scientist. His field doesn't usually get much attention from the prize committee because it doesn't neatly fit into physics, chemistry, or medicine. And yet, Devang says that the Nobel prizes still shape the science he does every day.

They're the most public face of science today. And I want people to start thinking that, yes, the Nobels are extremely good at presenting new ideas to the public. They're very good advertisements for science. But there are also negatives with the kind of vision of science that they represent. Devang wrote an article for Slate that lays out three main criticisms with the Nobel's vision of science.

First, who gets the Nobels? We know that the UK and the US have gotten the most Nobels. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics

I think that's followed by Germany and then France. Among Asian countries, Japan is the only one with more than 10 Nobel Prizes in the sciences. There have been a few Black people who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. And in 1979, a Black economist won the Economics Prize.

But besides for economics, no black scientists have won Nobels? In physics, chemistry, or medicine, never. Oh, wow. Thank you very much for your attention. The Nobels are extremely skewed by genders. So before this year, in medicine, about 12 prizes went to women out of over 200.

Physics is worse. Only four have gone to women. So that's a percentage of like 2%, which is, of course, far below the number of women who actually work in physics. Or far below the percentage of women in the population. Yeah, exactly. And on our show, in the past, we've done episodes on Vera Rubin, Marie Tharp, Henrietta Leavitt. You know, they all made these huge contributions to science, and none of them ever won Nobels, which

which obviously, I guess, is part of this larger long-term problem of sexism in science, but it doesn't sound like the Nobels have helped here. No, they definitely don't help. And I think they even make it worse because they kind of amplify that vision of science. And that also affects how people view science and view who can be a scientist. You know, I grew up in India, and one part of the conception of science I grew up with was that it was something done in the West.

And there is a lot of great science happening in India, especially now, but the prices made it seem like India was not the place to do cutting-edge science. So if the first issue with the Nobels is who gets them, I think the second big point you make in your piece is that the Nobels also affect what science gets done. Is that fair? I think it definitely affects where resources get invested.

So, for example, if I'm writing a grant proposal to get some funding for my lab, if I can tangentially bring in a Nobel Prize winning discovery into that, I will. But that also shapes the kind of science I do because I'm trying to then, you know, do science that's more related to topics that some people in Sweden think is important rather than what might actually be important in the world.

So it definitely shapes what questions we ask and what kind of science we do. I wonder if it incentivizes certain questions that might be

sexier to the Nobel Committee or, you know, or easier to say, like, I figured it out. Like, maybe there are certain questions that people wouldn't want to even try to work on because they're just so difficult or they're not immediately their use, their practical use isn't immediately clear. Yeah. And I think it's also shaped by, you know, just the parameters of the Nobel that are given to chemistry and

physiology and medicine and in physics, but that excludes so much of science. It excludes environmental science, which is so important when we think about climate change and pollution. It excludes plant science, which of course I'm biased towards as a plant scientist, but it definitely excludes a whole slew of subjects that are so important to improving life on the planet.

So we have who gets the Nobel Prizes and what kind of science gets them. And then the third point you make is that the Nobels kind of shape how science actually gets done. You write that the Nobels only go to three people and then you point out that labs usually have lots of grad students and postdocs doing all this important work and making contributions that don't get recognized.

All of which affects how people think about science. Right, so I don't mean to say that the people who win the NOBAs don't deserve them. I think they were definitely, you know, they're definitely great scientists. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. But science in real life is built on teamwork, and none of that is actually represented in the NOBAs. I think one of the more recent prizes... This year's prize...

is about a discovery that shook the world. In 2017, the prize in physics went to the observation of gravitational waves. Oh, we talked about gravitational waves in the first half of the episode, but the ones that didn't win a Nobel, the ones before these. Yeah, and the actual endeavor to discover the gravitational waves required a lot of infrastructure, required thousands of people, people working in engineering, people working in fundamental science, in physics.

people from all over the world. It was an international collaboration. But then in the end, the prize went to three people, I think mainly in the US. With one half to Rainer Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne. It seems so kind of ridiculous that the effort of thousands of people would just, you know,

erased almost from the history books when the prize just went to three people because now those are the three people who will be remembered as the people who discovered gravitational waves, even though that's not really the case. Okay, so there are clearly a lot of problems with the Nobels. Can we do something? Can these be fixed? So if the Nobels have to go on, then I think they need to radically change.

First, I think you need to have a prize that was much more international, that acknowledged work from a broader range of countries. Ooh, like a Globel Prize? The International Academy has concluded its meeting, and we are ready to announce this year's Globel Prize in Medicine. One solution that I presented in my article was that you could have the Nobels going to discoveries so that you have a Nobel Prize, for example, for the invention of the mRNA vaccine, without actually saying who made that discovery.

This year's Global Prize recognized the spectacular efforts of thousands of scientists across the globe in the creation of vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. And then you could even have, you know, the prize money that still needs to go out, go into a fund to do research in that topic.

The majority of those founds would go to researchers in countries that have had limited access to the vaccine so far, and the country's hardest hit with variants. You still have discoveries in science going out to the world every year, but you don't have this kind of distortion of what science actually looks like. Thank you for your attention.

There's a danger here, you know, if you are celebrating the science and not necessarily elevating the people behind it. I wonder if there's a danger of losing the sense of something being relatable or magical about winning. You know, I'm sure all these scientists out there when they were kids were, you know, sitting on their bed late at night, wherever, watching this, listening to this on the radio, writing down the winners of the Nobels, just...

like wanting to grow up and be those people. I mean, do you think there's a danger of losing that sort of element of science being like someone's dream? I don't think so, because just think through this, right? So suppose the prize next year went out to the mRNA vaccine because it saved so many lives. And, you know, you had thousands of people involved in making the mRNA vaccine in different countries. And you could profile all of those people instead of just having three people, you know, with their faces on newspapers across the world.

And now we turn to an interview with Singapore's own Ruki D. Alwis. Ruki's work contributed to the Globel winning mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Brazilian Edson Moreira worked to ensure that the Globel winning vaccine was safe and effective.

And all of those people could be profiled by media in their own countries. And they could inspire children working in their own countries because they would see, oh, there's a scientist who has the same background as me, who's gone through the same challenges, you know, who has the same

the same cultural background, and yet is able to do this cutting-edge science that's been recognized as a major life-saving discovery.

Devang Mehta is a plant scientist at the University of Alberta. This episode was reported and produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. Noam Hassenfeld wrote the music and edited the episode, along with Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnot. Manning Nguyen checked the facts, and Christian Ayala was on mixing and sound design. Lauren Katz heads up our newsletter, and Liz Kelley-Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio.

Thanks to Iago Bertacchini, Melissa Hirsch, Sigal Samuel, Jen Kirby, and Teresa Santos-Gunt for their voice acting and translation help. And if you want to read more about Brian Keating's quest to answer the cosmic riddles of the universe, check out his book, Losing the Nobel Prize, or his latest book. We'll link to all of those in our newsletter, where you can also find Devang's full article.

You can sign up for that at vox.com slash unexplainable or email any thoughts you might have about the show to unexplainable at vox.com. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we'll be back in two weeks.