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Nobel Prize Winners Live Longer
anthemaniac writes "A new study finds those who won Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1950 lived about 2 years longer than nominees who didn't win. The researchers conclude that the instantly conferred social status leads to health benefits. From the story: 'The research rules out the possibility that intervening prize-related money itself adds the years through improved prosperity.' If you're thinking of aiming for the prize, pick the right field. Nobel laureates in physics lived nearly a year longer than winners in chemistry."
Except for the 1903 and 1911 winner.
Correlation, causation, etcetera.
It really bugs me when they post these things as if they are fact, and then give no indication whatsoever about how accurate the results are. You're talking about 135 winners out of 524 nominees - not exactly a huge sample size. Is it that hard to put in a few extra characters telling you what the error bars are? Something as simple as "the researchers found that nobel winners live 2 (+/- 0.5) years on average" would do, as would a sentence saying "the standard deviation was 0.5". How are we supposed to make any judgement about the validity of the study if we don't at least have the tiniest insight into the statsitics?
Nobel winners - that's a MASSIVE sample size, eh? Especially when comparing against the general population. This sounds NOT like cheesy made-for-CNN sensationalism.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
If you're thinking of aiming for the prize, pick the right field. Nobel laureates in physics lived nearly a year longer than winners in chemistry.
No doubt because they were in better physic-al condition.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
guess I'll live a couple years longer than the rest of you
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There are old chemists and bold chemists. There are no old bold chemists.
A bit of heavy metal here, a bit there, a perchloric acid spill, a falling piece of glassware, a leaky gas jet...
If you don't mod me up, I'll die earlier. Modding Down = Murder. Please, think of others. Mod up. A public service announcement.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
not winning the prize caused the losers to die early. Therefore, it would be best not to try for the prize unless you are certain you can win or don't mind dying a few years sooner. Is there any evidence that either group lived longer or shorter lives than the common man? No? Wow, more sensational pop-culture crap on slashdot being passed off as science? Nooooo. It's unpossible.
They don't die like the chemists do. They only go blind, usually blaming it on the laser.
But how did this average age of the Nobel winners compare to the average life expectancy of the general population? That something I didn't see in TFA.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
*whacks CowboyNeal with a rolled up newspaper*
NO.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They are already old when they win and the ones who dies young can't win. Noble stated that no dead person could win the Nobel Prize. Many often object that Rosalind Franklin the Prize with Watson and Crick but the fact is that she was already dead and Nobel Prize didn't have the power to name her even if they believed that she was deserving.
Is the study trying to make some sort of a general conclusion that winners live longer than losers? .. because if all they're trying to conclude is whats stated in the headline, then I think the old adage applies: ... nothing to see here.. move right along.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Winners live slightly longer than nominees? Well..seeing as anyone can be nominated, this proves exactly nothing.
I'll bet Tookie Williams skewed the sample a little bit.
there will come the time of the gathering, when those who remain will fight for the prize... there can be only one!
no? not that prize?
This is a better conclusion: People who tend to win also tend to live longer, due to a separate causal factor.
Now gimme my Nobel Prize. I just corrected a bunch of Junk Scientists.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
So the Secret of Immortality is to win a Nobel Prize every other year.
-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
I'll bet that the Nobel prize winners for statistics live longest of all.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I work with a Nobel Laureate, and I was shocked to learn he is 70; I have been thinking was in his early 60's for years.
Guess I'll have to go out and win the Nobel prize. Since there's a lot I can do about that. That's some top-notch research, very applicable to my life.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
You can't immediately blame it on social status. For all we know, it could be because they're being shuttled around the world giving lectures everywhere, such that they get better exercise; it could be that they're being given more money and have a more relaxed personal life to eat better; it could be a lot of other things.
90 years old = no memory, need help pooping, can barely walk, sleeps 90% of the day, sick from something, no social life.
92 years old = no memory, need help pooping, can barely walk, sleeps 90% of the day, sick from something, no social life.
Gee criminey... It's like using tweezers to pick up sand grains on the far shore of the bell curve to see how sandy they are.
FTFA:
A single car crash could have skewed your margins on that.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I for one welcome our new peace prize winning immortal overlords.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
So if some super scientist comes along and gives us spectacular work every year so he gets nobel prizes every year, then wouldn't he be able to live forever?
God spoke to me.
I bet that [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherfor d]Rutherford[/url] would have been even more annoyed about winning the Chemistry price if he saw this 'research'
Over the last 200 years there has been a significant decreases in the number of (sea) pirates to almost non-existence. Global temperatures have risen by half a degree. Thusly the global decline in pirates has lead to global warming.
"At the end of 1979 disco was at an all time high. If this trend continues... EEEYYYHHH" - Disco "i dont advertise" Stu
A
B
Therefore A->B
And you thought exercising regularly was tough!
Seems like a concrete case.
Does this mean winners of the Ig Nobel Prize http://www.improb.com/ig/ on average die two years earlier?
I think it goes with that theory of the brain's "use it or lose it" feature. I bet you live a little longer when you feel you have a reason to get up in the morning and do something. This guy does.
Even if this study is statistically accurate, would it matter? How is this information useful/applicable?
It's not like someone who's got a couple months to live will magically survive for two years longer by receiving the Nobel prize.
Next thing you know, they'll be reporting that millionaires who win the lottery end up being richer than those millionaires who don't win the lottery. At the end of the day, neither finding can be used to fix any social problems.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Come on. Why is this news? Intelligence correlates with many behaviors that increase longevity, including eating right and exercising more. I hope (at least) that they expected this to be the case in their hypothesis...
Insert self-referential sig here.
I wonder if the researchers will win a Nobel Prize for this discovery...
I'd have modded you insightful if I had some mod points. I don't know why this article was deemed fit to be posted on /. - May be there should be a 'Trivia' or 'Tabloid' section here and these articles can be lined up for that section.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
So whiners don't live longer than winners. Whats new in that?
Eclipse PDE and Me
Perhaps Nobel prize winners had higher intelligence and thus had more brain cells to waste before they went senile?
I bet they'll find the results much more striking if they investigate recipients of the Darwin award.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Two Aussies won the Nobel for Medicine by proving that stomach ulcers are caused bacteria rather than 'stress' as used to be beleived. They proved it when one of them, on the spur of the moment, drank a vat containing the bacteria. He said he felt very sick afterwards, and he also he survived the bacteria it was his wife who nearly killed him! :-)
BTW although his is now accepted, at the time they were ridiculed by other scientists who though the idea preposterous. Got to be inpependent thinkers, Slashdotters. ("Yes! We're all individuals!" "No, I mean you are all different" "Yes, we're all different!")
Maybe, just maybe it has something to do with the million dollars.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Dr. Leon Lederman may be living longer, but he is quite out of it. He tends fall asleep at most everything, be it a lecture by a physicist he invited, or a lecture he's giving himself. Perhaps he's always been that way. What do I know? I don't have a Nobel prize.
"Hey gordon! You haven't aged a day! What's your secret?"
Give nobel prize to _everyone_. If you think, it is not cost effective, revise nobel prize monetary reward, such that it would cost nothing to do so. Everyone wins.
Well, then you've really made the point as to why the article is bogus, eh? Yes, they make a "nearly two years" claim at the top, but if you read a bit further: "The average lifespan for the nominees (including winners) was 76 years. Winners worldwide lived 1.4 years longer on average, and winners from the same country as non-winning nominees lived another two-thirds of a year, on average."
So lemme see. If you take the whole sample, the difference was 1.4 years, or 1.4 * 12 = 16.8 months. I'm still not done with the morning coffee, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but 16.8 months is a bit lower than the 20 months you've calculated for two sigma.
I find it more interesting when they restrict it to winners from the same country, since, well, only then it's really apples to apples. (You'd expect that someone from the USA would live longer than someone from, say, India. Doubly so when there's data from the early 1900's.) Then it's only 2/3 of a year, or 8 months difference. Quite a bit lower than 20 months, I would say. Plus, it's inherently a lot of smaller samples, so even the 20 months figure would become larger.
More importantly, that difference between "winners vs nominees everywhere" and "winners vs nominees from the same country" tells me that the first one might not be entirely unbiased as samples go. If, say, more winners come from the top industrialized nations with high standards of living, while the larger nominees sample include more people from some poorer countries too, that alone could account for the the 8.8 months difference in the two figures.
I haven't properly studied the names and countries of origin for everyone, but for physics and chemistry it sounds at least like a _believable_ kind of bias: you don't see third world countries building big cyclotrons (for advanced physics research) or having advanced big pharma companies (for advanced chemistry research.) Something like, say, the prize for literature might have been a less biased sample: you don't need lab equipment and funding in the billions to write a book. And if the only cause there is that winning a prize and resulting alpha-monkey status instantly gives you some extra months, then the effect should be the same there too.
This gets funnier when you add this quote into the mix: "Oswald and Rablen found that Nobel laureates in physics lived an average of almost a year longer than laureates in chemistry."
Err... wait a minute. Let's do some maths there, then. Assuming there have been roughly as many winners in physics and chemistry, to keep the average, then the 16.8 months figure becomes something like 22.8 months for physics and 10.8 months for chemistry. It may look like now the physics number is finally signifficant, but it also means half the sample, so sigma is 120 months / sqrt(67) ~= 120 / 8 = 15 months, so two sigma is 30 months. Hmm, now even the figure for physicists is still less significant, and the figure for chemists is outright useless.
Let's apply that piece of wisdom for the "winners vs nominees from the same country", since, again, that's really the only one which doesn't have a built-in bias. To keep the 8 month average and assuming again equal numbers from the same country it becomes 14 months for the physicists and 2 months for the chemists. Frankly, living 2 months longer as a chemistry winner already starts to sound thoroughly insignifficant. But probably that 1 year difference doesn't apply here too, or is proportioanlly reduced too, so let's ignore this.
Was there some other difference between
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
two things:
-This study is a candidate for an ig Nobel prize
-What will be the effect if they win? positive or negative?
Do the extra two years apply to those who receive the prize posthumously as well?
Yet another notch on the bedpost of wasted time labelled as research. Besides the fact that a 2-year old with a basic spreadsheet and the appropriate data could reach the same conclusions, I humbly propose that nobody really cares.
Nothing witty
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Cool! Finally we have some real "scientific" method to enlarge people's life. Well, at least some people's life...
All these bogus statistics items remind me of the story of the nerd who (for his own security) always would sneak a bomb on the plane, because of the obvious logic- "What's the probability of TWO independent bombs on the same plane?"
I think it could be because Nobel Prize winners are usually quite old. Many people are nominated for years before they are selected. I guess nominees are younger on average. Thus the winners have already survived more years, and are likely to live longer.
On a side note, Nobel Prize nomination means very little. It only requires a nomination from any of the large number of people allowed to nominate.
Research in these particular areas are extremely hard; evolution has mixed together being smart, being healthy, and being socially dominant/socially attractive. Our subconscious automatically slightly prefer people that are healthy for everything positive (winning a Nobel prize), and that are unhealthy for everything negative (e.g, being judged as criminals). This mostly shows up in statistically sized samples, not evaluation of a single person.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I just hope doctors are going to take this on board. You can just see them now, patient is on the operating table & slipping away. Out goes the cry "NURSE ! Get a Nobel prize in here".
No, really !
In other news, people named CowboyNeal did NOT live too long because of constant knocking on the head by Slashdot readers.
Well..Nobel is not awarded posthumously..is it?. Then only those who live longer get the Nobel!!!
Henry Kissinger.
While a lot of these people who win the Nobel Prize sound humbled and surprised. My guess is that a lot of them focused their life work towards getting the Nobel Prize, at least when they realize that they are on to something big. With heavy competition and arguing with the other who are trying to get the prize. So after they win there stress levels will drop because they are no longer competing for the prize and if someone argues with them they can just go well how many Nobel Prizes do you have?... Right.... Now back to my idea.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
a story this dumb on slashdot?
Marie Curie?
Physics and chemistry before 1950s were mainly conducted in developed countries under very supportive atmosphere. Physics and chemistry today are conducted near everywhere in university labs, mostly insufficiently funded, overshadowed by other technological developments such as stem cells and nano-transistors. The PhDs either work in fields totally irrelevant to their studies (on Wall St. or in booming high tech) or get their lives squeezed out of them by constant pressure to publish and the tenureship rat-race. If we measure their lifespan after 1950s we may get headlines like 'Science shortens your lifespan by 10 years' etc etc.
No statistics was used to back up this hypothesis.
Coincidence!
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
Of course correlation does not prove causation, but in these cases it would be astonishing if there were not causative factors at work. People with higher education are more likely to be aware of the factors that influence their health, and take steps to improve them. That's more likely to be true of reflective, thoughtful people who have higher degrees rather than, say, working people who are economically successful (and may well look down on what they see as book learning.) People with higher socioeconomic status have better access to healthcare - even in countries with supposedly inclusive systems.
The one thing we don't get from the New Testament is Jesus' tone of voice. It would be really good to know _how_ he made his remark about those who had not losing all they had, and more being given to those who had a lot to start with. Acceptance of a statement of fact? Sarcasm about the way we organise society? Anger? Or did he think it was a good thing?
Pining for the fjords
The authors performed a survival analysis (see here) to correct for nominees who might have won but died first, as well as other methods to reduce possible biases.
Every time I see a social science study posted here on Slashdot, everyone comes out of the woodwork with "correlation doesn't equal causation", or "this study is obviously [true|false] because of so-and-so obvious effect", etc. Please give the authors some credit. They did consider various biasing effects, such as Nobel nominee age, the fact that nominees may die before being awarded the prize, they examined alternative causal factors such as the possibility that the winners' longevity was due to their increased income, and so on. Sure, correlation isn't causation and this study doesn't prove anything, but it's not as shoddy as the Slashdot armchair experts seem to think. Read the paper, or a brief summary by a statistician unrelated to the study.
People who were Time Magazine's person of the year in 2006? Like me?
Headline: "Nobel loser dies, committee arrested for murder" or "Nobel loser sues for wrongful early death"
Yeah... I'm sure the sudden influx of money improving their lifestyle has nothing to do with improving their overall health....
longer? I was hoping the old Bast**d would die soon.
Any real scientist knows this, since each Nobel gold medal is made from a part of an ancient Egyptian magical amulet that confers long life to the wearer. These guys should have correlated the amount of magical gold used in each medal with life expectancy. Duh!
Nobel laureates in physics lived nearly a year longer than winners in chemistry.
No shit, Sherlock. My dad was a chemist (not a Nobel prize winner ;-()
who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54.
The last 15 or so years of his life he was basically in management, but before that, he told me that (for example) he used benzene for all sorts of things, and practically washed his hands with the stuff. That would have been in the 50's and 60's before benzene became famous as a carcinogen.
I'd love to see a comparison of life expectancies of scientists in various subfields, but certainly the obvious hypothesis is that chemists will be at the bottom.
...someone could do the same study for people that have won Time's Man of the Year!
The researchers conclude that the instantly conferred social status leads to health benefits.
Or maybe, being they took care of themselves in the first place, they did the work that won the prize asnd also lived a couple years longer?
This brings to mind a kid's tape with a song extolling eating bread, one verse basically says "if you eat my bread for one-hundred years, you will live long, and that is for sure".
Have you read my journal today?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Correlation does not imply causation.
BWilde
How about... people win Nobel prizes when they are ALREADY a part of a sample which survived (long enough)?
Correct me, if wrong, but the mortality rates depending on age aren't quite uniform.
There's a bunch of people dying as infants, and the next big wave is around 18-22 afai remember (all the stupid tricks you wanted to show off in your car, etc).
I don't expect many people get their Nobel in their mid-twenties, so of course they tend to live longer... they already did before they got the prize!
Correlation ain't causality
'nuf said.
probably already been said...
If this study were to win the Nobel prize in medicine would the authors live longer?
See: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/01 /modern_mathemat.html
Bye,
Oliver