Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [81]
It is easy to romanticise the early years of the Nobel Prizes as a time when science was still finding its way in the world. Perhaps the intrigue, insults, infighting and machinations at the Karolinska Institute in the first half of the twentieth century were just outward signs of an adolescent phase that science was going through. It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t stand much scrutiny. As the case of Barbara McClintock showed, scientists’ predilection for conflict, insult and disparagement of peers remained strong through the post-war period. And things aren’t much different now.
In July 2010, Nobel manoeuvrings came to the fore over a prize that may never be awarded. The Higgs boson, a particle that our best theories of physics suggest is what endows objects with mass, has yet to be discovered. But five people are in line to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics should the discovery be made. And, since a Nobel can be shared between three scientists at most, blood will be spilt.
The problem is one of priority. The British researcher Peter Higgs’s name is associated with the particle only by accident. In 1967, Higgs shared a bottle of wine with a US researcher called Benjamin Lee. In 1972, Lee was the rapporteur for a conference at the US National Accelerator Laboratory (now Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, and used Higgs’s name as a shorthand for the idea. The name stuck.
The existence of the Higgs boson was actually suggested by three different research groups within a few weeks of each other. Two Belgians, Robert Brout (who died in May 2011) and François Englert, were first to the idea, in August 1964. Then, a fortnight later, came Higgs’s brief paper about it in Physics Letters. By the time a three-way UK–US collaboration published their paper four weeks after that, all the seats in Stockholm – should they ever be made available – were taken. One of the third-placed contributors expressed his disappointment in a paper published in 2009: ‘We were naive enough to feel that these other articles offered no threat to our insights or to the crediting of our contribution. Nearly 45 years later, it is clear that we were very wrong.’
The disappointment simmered, then boiled over when the announcement of a meeting in Paris to discuss the latest results in the hunt for the Higgs boson mentioned only the first three scientists. In a reaction that belied scientists’ reputation for a calm, measured, patient outlook on life, a number of particle physicists, mostly US-based, threatened to boycott the meeting or stage a protest.
‘Anyone who witnesses the advance of science first-hand sees an intensely personal undertaking,’ Carl Sagan once wrote. ‘A few saintly personalities stand out amidst a roiling sea of jealousies, ambition, backbiting, suppression of dissent, and absurd conceits. In some fields, highly productive fields, such behavior is almost the norm.’
Sagan might have been writing about the travails of his first wife, Lynn Margulis. Those who can see the impact of Margulis’s work find it astonishing that she hasn’t yet been awarded a Nobel Prize. Put simply, she suggested that much of our biology – the complexity of our cells, for instance – arose through two or more organisms co-operating together for mutual advantage. The idea is now known as endosymbiosis, and it is taught in every university biology department in the world.
Perhaps Margulis has her own personal Arrhenius blocking the nominations. It’s certainly not because her idea isn’t big enough – that much is clear from reading what other scientists say about it. The American palaeontologist Niles Eldredge calls it ‘probably the grandest idea in modern biology’, while philosopher of science Daniel Dennett says that it