For several years now there has been a feeling that the Nobel Committee that selects the winners has been somewhat slapdash in its approach. This unease prevails even in respect of the latest awards in medicine. The award is for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”. What this means in lay language is that their research accelerated the development of Covid vaccines. The award has been given to two scientists whose enormous abilities are not open to doubt.
But there can be some justifiable misgivings in the public mind about whether the Nobel Committee could have waited a bit to see the full effects of the new technology. There have been concerns about side effects as well as controversies over efficacy (which includes whether the data on mRNA trials were massaged), which require further research. But it’s possible that now, with the stamp of approval that a Nobel prize confers, such research gets relegated, or even stops. From a purely scientific point of view, this would be a great pity. The world does need to know about the side effects of all new medical technologies, especially in the context of their developers who are driven by the profit motive along with the desire to solve medical problems.
There are other instances where the Committee had seemingly discarded its customary caution. The usual gap between a work of research and the award is anything between 10 and 15 years. However, in a number of cases this caution hasn’t been observed. And this has led to people wondering about the reasons. The most egregious case, in this context, was the Nobel peace prize awarded to Barack Obama in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Obama had become the President of the US in January that year and barely settled into office. The prize was given for a speech he made in June 2009 about Islam. That award came in for a lot of criticism. There have been a few other such instances.
The aura and importance of the Nobel prize, in a world where there are many such prizes, arises from two things. Eventual recognition by the world, of contributions that only peers know about; and the legitimacy it confers on the recipient and her or his research. But hurriedly conferred awards have eroded the award’s credibility. This has been observed with respect to the peace prize in particular, where lobbies are accused of being at work. In 1997, the economics award went famously wrong. It was given to two economists, working on the board of a hedge fund, for their financial sector modelling, barely a year before the fund went under. It is true that sometimes the criticism can be unwarranted. But given what the Nobel means, even one slip-up in a decade can be disappointing.
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