Deutsche Welle :
Every October, a handful of scientists get woken up by a phone call to find out they’ve won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Physics or Chemistry.
Startled and bleary-eyed, they throw a shirt on over their pajamas, join a video call to Stockholm and try to explain a life-time’s worth of research to the world’s media in a few short minutes.
Journalists then desperately try to understand what “quantum dots,” or “entangled photons” are, file their reports, then breathe a sigh of relief that it’s all over until next year. By the following week everyone’s forgotten – what was another a flash in an endless news cycle.
Be honest, who really cares about Nobel Prizes? Are these prizes, first awarded in 1901, with all their high-class pomp and ceremony, still relevant today?
The Nobel Prizes do help to popularize scientific discoveries. But do they also give a false impression of how discoveries are made? Are t.hey too biased in favoring science from the US, Europe, and men?
The Nobel Prizes originated from one guilt-ridden scientist’s final will and testament – Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite.
Nobel’s goal was to reward outstanding science to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
Nobel Prizes are meaningful milestones for scientific advances. They credit how millions of people were protected from severe COVID-19 infections from rapid vaccine development , the invention of energy-saving LED lights, and gene editing technologies which have cured previously untreatable diseases.
“Doubtless they’re the Mount Everest of science. The Nobel Prizes show the pinnacle of scientific discoveries, and there’s an emotive attachment to them,” said Rajib Dasgupta, a physician and professor of public health based in New Delhi, India.
If anything, the prizes help remind us that we’re fortunate to live in an age of new scientific advances: After DNA, after vaccinations, after theories of the big bang and sub-atomic particles.
Do Nobel Prizes really inspire people about science?
The Nobel Prizes are certainly a useful way to capture people’s imagination about science when they are elevated to the platform of mass media.
The extent to which media outlets cover the Nobel Prizes varies by country, but Dasgupta said the Prizes were closely followed by the Indian media – and that in detail, rather than just for the news.
“The interest comes from an educational tilt towards STEM subjects in India, particularly among the middle class,” Dasgupta told DW.
Teaching children about the Nobel Prizes is embedded in the Indian school curriculum to get people interested in science, as it is around the world.
Lily Green, a biology teacher at a high school for 11-to-18-year-olds in Newbury, UK, said she taught a historical perspective of the Nobel Prizes in her science classes, but didn’t follow the prize announcements every October.