Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday October 17 2016, @04:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the I've-been-nominated-but-you-won't-see-it-for-50-years dept.

During this Nobel Prize season where we celebrate the annual winners, Nature has gone through the Nobel archives and compiled a top ten list of the most nominated, but never won people. The "winners" are:

Gaston Ramon: 155 (Physiology or Medicine)
Emile Roux: 115 (Physiology or Medicine)
Arnold Sommerfeld: 84 (Physics)
Rene Leriche: 79 (Physiology or Medicine)
Jacques Loeb: 78 (Physiology or Medicine)
Albert Calmette 77 (Physiology or Medicine)
Rudolf Weigl 75 (Physiology or Medicine)
Christopher Ingold 68 (Chemistry)
Walter Reppe 63 (Chemistry)
Aldo Castellani 61 (Physiology or Medicine)

The Nobel commission doesn't reveal nomination information for at least 50 years, so one can't say who really has the most nominations. There are a plethora of reasons these people never won the award because the prestige of the prize brings in a variety of factors that have little to do with merit.

"A kaleidoscope of human agency is necessarily involved in awarding the Nobel Prize, as with any other prize," says Friedman. "There are no grounds for assuming the winners of the Nobel Prize constitute a unique population of the very 'best' in science."


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Snotnose on Monday October 17 2016, @04:52AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Monday October 17 2016, @04:52AM (#415097)

    But yeah, giving Obama a peace prize before he took office pretty much cheapened all Nobel prizes. Even knowing the peace prize was a completely different organization, calling it the Nobel poured a bunch of political skunkweed over all the prizes.

    Especially considering Obama is the king of killing by drone in history.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 17 2016, @05:31AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday October 17 2016, @05:31AM (#415106)

    What was there to cheapen? The Nobel was an arms industry award to to begin with. It was simply the age of colonialism so Academia played along.

    Even in the research awards and hard sciences, they're always focused on gradual industrial advancements and non-disruptive technologies and avoided rewarding basic research until products or an entire field established on the discovery.

    Their criteria, a secret. The process of nominations, opaque. What do you expect but corruption?

    --
    compiling...
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @05:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @05:50AM (#415109)

    Especially considering Obama is the king of killing by drone in history.

    It's totally not Obama's fault. He just uses the weapons that eggheaded nerds invent for him. It's all the fault of the eggheads.

  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday October 17 2016, @06:11AM

    by Marand (1081) on Monday October 17 2016, @06:11AM (#415116) Journal

    Especially considering Obama is the king of killing by drone in history.

    That's likely only because drone killing is in its infancy compared to older, better-researched methods of ending lives. I'm sure other, more bloodthirsty leaders in our past would have gotten a lot of use out of it, and there will likely be more in the future.

    Give it time.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:20AM (#415156)

      Big difference.
      Henry V, et al. were actually within weapons range of the opposition.

      Bill Maher was exactly right when he called USA cowardly for the way it uses weapons (cruise missiles in that case) with zero danger to USA's aggressor forces.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @06:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @06:51PM (#415319)

        Well, it IS more manly to go in, guns a-blazin', and taking out a whole town. Or just carpet-bombing it to hell. The precision attacks that severely limit collateral damage really is the sissy way of doing things.

        • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday October 17 2016, @09:00PM

          by Francis (5544) on Monday October 17 2016, @09:00PM (#415409)

          Except that if you don't have boots on the ground taking some risk, you have no way of knowing if that's a wedding party you're targeting.

          The cruise missiles are cowardly, so are the drone strikes. If we don't care enough about the target to put our troops in harms way, perhaps we should consider if it's really necessary to blow it up. With the exception of robots meant to disarm explosives, robots have no place in combat. All they do is encourage the people with the robots to start conflicts they have not business starting as now none of their people are going to be killed.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:04PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:04PM (#415441)

            Robert Hamner (and executive producer Gene Roddenberry) had this figured out in the 1960s.
            A Taste of Armageddon [wikipedia.org]

            -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @09:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @09:18PM (#415422)

          Dropping bombs on weddings and funerals is the opposite of "manly".

          Dropping bombs on private homes, and in the process murdering women and children (even in adjacent homes), is the opposite of "precision".

          Murdering non-combatants while there is no danger to the USAian aggressor on the other side of the planet is cowardly.

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:07PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:07PM (#415442)

            So just go back to dropping a bomb and taking out the whole block: be a real Man.

            Limiting causalities is for sissies.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @07:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @07:05AM (#415128)

    The "Peace" Prize idiots went one step further, they gave the prize to someone whose peace deal was rejected.
    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/rejected-farc-deal-earns-colombian-president-nobel-peace-prize/ [pbs.org]

    Video games have done more for peace than the past two winners. The more hours people spend killing each other in games the fewer hours they have left to kill each other in real life.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:04AM (#415153)

      Colombian President Receives Nobel Peace Prize for Rejected Accord with FARC [soylentnews.org]

      That submission notes that the dude was a militarist for most of his career, specifically fighting FARC.
      He's spent most of his life ESCALATING the violence.
      The PBS coverage didn't mention that. Surprise!

      PBS -did- mention that some say that the prize should have been shared with FARC.
      ...at a minimum, IMO.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday October 17 2016, @03:12PM

        by fritsd (4586) on Monday October 17 2016, @03:12PM (#415211) Journal

        I found that interesting as well, that he was such a right-wing firebrand for most of his career.

        Colombia leader Juan Manuel Santos: From hawk to dove [bbc.com]

        "At around the same time, evidence also emerged that the Colombian military had been killing civilians and passing them off as rebels in order to boost its "kill rate".

        The scandal, known as the "false positives", is widely seen as one of the darkest chapters of the Uribe presidency.

        However, Mr Santos' approval ratings remained high and he resigned as defence minister in 2009 to be able to run for president in 2010.
        "

        And then, before kicking the bucket, he changes his mind and thinks: "what kind of legacy do I want to leave for my country?"

        And apparently the answer he found was diametrically opposed to Alvaro "Deathsquads-R-US" Uribe's answer. Time will tell which one of those two approaches is right; but I suspect Santos' approach is best, even though it pisses off almost everybody.

        So it goes. There's a Bible story if you're interested: Acts of the Apostles chapter 9, about Saulus/Paulus [wikipedia.org], that's where the expression "on the road to Damascus" comes from, and the expression "the scales fell from his eyes".

        Acts 9 in the Bible is interesting, because everybody fucking hated him afterwards: the authorities whom he betrayed by giving up his job as religious infiltrator, and the Christians who had seen him arrest their brethren. Must have been difficult to convince them that he really, honestly, had changed his mind.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 17 2016, @03:36PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday October 17 2016, @03:36PM (#415222)

    Obama's phony Peace Prize wasn't even close to the end of that prize meaning something. They really ended it as a serious thing when they gave one to Henry Kissinger, apparently for expanding the Vietnam War into only 3 other countries that really had nothing to do with the conflict in question.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @06:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @06:48PM (#415317)

      ...and, even though they -knew- that any combatants in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand were out in the jungle where they couldn't easily be found, Kissinger and his henchmen had villages in those countries bombed--places that they -knew- were full of NON-COMBATANTS.

      Evil bastards. War criminals.

      ...and there are STILL millions of bomblets from cluster bombs all over those countries STILL killing and maiming--mainly children to whom they appear to be toys.

      ...and USA **STILL** hasn't forsworn the use of cluster bombs.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday October 17 2016, @09:03PM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday October 17 2016, @09:03PM (#415411)

      And you don't think being the first black man elected to be head of state of a non-black country doesn't deserve recognition?

      Regardless of ones views of what he did with the opportunity, proving to the world that black people can be heads of state in places where they aren't the majority is a lot more important than a lot of the other things they've handed the award for. I'm not sure why people bitch about Obama when others are far less deserving. Yasser Arafat springs instantly to mind.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:26PM (#415446)

        In his youth, black men who couldn't get into college and couldn't subsequently get student deferments ended up in Vietnam, then in body bags.

        ...yet Obama is a Neoconservative, ratcheting up the war machine even worse than Dubya.

        Regardless of [ones'] views of what he did with the opportunity

        He has made every attempt to join the 1 Percent and has feathered his nest at the expense of Joe Average.

        ...and, in particular, he hasn't ended the racist War on Drugs nor improved the racist "justice" system.
        He's an oreo. [urbandictionary.com]

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday October 17 2016, @08:57PM

    by Francis (5544) on Monday October 17 2016, @08:57PM (#415402)

    Sigh, yet another person who has no idea what they're talking about.

    The prize itself is handed out for various reasons and I'm not sure why people do so much whining about Obama being named for essentially being the first black head of state in a non-majority black country is so much worse than the one they handed to Yasser Arafat hoping that it would encourage peace in the Middle East.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @10:36PM (#415449)

      Obama being named for essentially being the first black head of state in a non-majority black country

      Not even close.
      Obama got the Peace Prize for not being Dubya.
      ...then he turned around and out-Dubya'd Dubya, ESCALATING the hostilities in southwest Asia.

      The Nobel "Peace" Prize has been a joke since Kissinger got it.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]