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The Nobel Also-Rans

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.

hubie writes:

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."

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  • (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.

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