Scientists will die waiting for a Nobel unless committee acts faster, critics say
The decades it takes the awards committee to honour researchers means many will miss out and prizes could become irrelevant, critics say
Awarding Nobels decades after the original scientific discovery could lead to the prize becoming irrelevant, some observers say, as ageing researchers miss out on their turn to get the long-awaited call from Sweden.
That is what happened in 2011, when the Nobel committee announced that half the prize for medicine and physiology would go to Canadian-born biologist Ralph Steinman.
It soon emerged that Steinman had died three days earlier, but the Nobel committee made an exception to its own rule that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously, arguing that it thought he was alive when it made the decision.
"If we keep going on like this, there will be many more cases of this kind. It's just a matter of time. So something has to be done," said Santo Fortunato, a physicist at Finland's Aalto University.
Earlier this year, Fortunato and several other scientists wrote an article in magazine that documented how the wait was growing longer.
"Before 1940, Nobels were awarded more than 20 years after the original discovery for only about 11 per cent of physics, 15 per cent of chemistry and 24 per cent of physiology or medicine prizes," they wrote. "Since 1985, however, such lengthy delays have featured in 60 per cent, 52 per cent and 45 per cent of these awards, respectively."
