Why the Nobel is still the greatest prize

This is the time of year when eminent scientists, economists, writers and peacemakers long for a telephone call from a stranger with a crisp Nordic accent. Except, perhaps, for Professor Peter Higgs.

Within minutes of Tuesday’s announcement that Prof Higgs, who first theorised the existence of the Higgs boson, had jointly won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics with Belgian theorist François Englert, it transpired that the reclusive Edinburgh university physicist had vanished on holiday without his mobile phone. What a holiday he could have enjoyed if he had banked the cheque first: his £400,000 share would have bought a 10-day stay on Calivigny Island in the Caribbean, a 20-suite private resort boasting its own remote-controlled submarine.

Prof Higgs hoped to evade the media frenzy that attends fresh Nobel laureates, whose numbers will expand on Friday (peace) and on Monday (economic sciences). Alfred Nobel’s legacy captivates for a reason: there is something transcending about awarding kudos and a shedload of kronor to people who have pushed frontiers, deepened understanding and transformed lives. But the Nobels are no longer the only or the most lucrative show in town. They risk being eclipsed, particularly in the sciences, by a raft of mega-money accolades that have been created largely by a handful of technology billionaires.

This year Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman handed over the inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize to Alexander Polyakov, from Princeton, at an Oscars-style ceremony in Geneva. The underwhelming silver trophy, resembling a hollow ball of wool, came with an overwhelming $3m sum attached. Both were courtesy of Yuri Milner, a Russian theoretical physics graduate turned billionaire internet investor, who believes that the sharpest scientific brains should earn at least as much as a Wall Street trader.

Mr Milner is also a founder – along with others including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Mr Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, which recognises “excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life”. Other contributors include Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Alibaba, and Art Levinson, chairman of Apple. So far, 11 laureates have received $3m each. There will be six more every year. The sums, Ms Wojcicki says, are designed to shock. And then inspire.

Asia is minting its own laurels. Samuel Yin, a Taiwanese billionaire property developer, positioned his $100m Tang Prize Foundation to focus on areas neglected by the Nobels. Biennially from 2014, $1.3m prizes will be dished out to scholars in four fields: biopharmaceutical sciences, sustainable development, Chinese studies and the rule of law.

Enormous prizes inspire outsize opinions. Frank Wilczek, a US Nobel-winning physicist, warns that funnelling money to the few risks starving the many, while patrons may be tempted to reward young unknowns whose work might not endure in an effort to avoid over-garlanding talented academics. Another challenge is attribution. Science today is more collaborative than competitive, and is often about institutions as much as individuals. Even Nobels, which can be shared by up to three people, can seem unfair. Other observers point out that decorating difficult disciplines with glittering prizes may stop great minds being lured elsewhere.

No matter how many noughts billionaires append to their offerings, however, they can never buy the history or the mythology of Nobel’s legacy. Nobel Prizes were first bestowed in 1901, apart from economic sciences, which was created in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank. Jean-Paul Sartre declined the literature prize in 1964; Adolf Hitler forbade three Germans from accepting theirs; married couples (notably the Curies) and several father-and-son teams show that kin can win; Marie Curie, Frederick Sanger and Linus Pauling won twice.

Alice Munro, the new literature laureate, has just become only the 45th woman out of 839 individual Nobel winners. Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban, might become the 46th on Friday if the Norwegian committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize feels it would not further burden the courageous teenager. Malala would be an achingly relevant and popular choice, but where do you go after a Nobel?

And that is the thing about the Nobels: they are life-changing. All new trophies must nod publicly to their Swedish forerunner: the Breakthrough prizes were trumpeted as being worth three times a Nobel, while the Tang prizes are touted as the “Asian Nobels”. Israel’s Wolf Prizes and America’s Lasker Awards derive their status chiefly from being Nobel predictors; Profs Higgs and Englert won a Wolf in 2004, while stem-cell pioneers Sir John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, who picked up the 2012 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, had bagged a Lasker three years previously. While the Americans, Russians and Taiwanese flaunt their zeroes, the world still looks to Stockholm and Oslo to anoint its heroes.

The writer is a science commentator