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Nobel Jurors Facing Bribery Probe
RockDoctor writes "A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip (or trips) to China to 'explain the selection process.' That's not, in itself, an incriminating event ('Is there something that we're doing incorrectly, or not doing?' is a valid question), and if there was dishonorable intent, it doesn't seem to have worked too well (the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957). There does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict-of-interest mantrap."
PhysOrg mentions that a corruption prosecutor is also looking into a Nobel-related sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that was linked to one of the winners for this year's Medicine prize.
"I'm very unimpressed and becoming highly cynical on what passes for "accepted science." There seems to be a strengthening political element. Quite obvious in the case of Global Warming."
Indeed. If there was a Nobel prize for upholding the fundamental values of science - openness, curiosity, independence, experiment and the Popperian concept of falibility, that prize would surely go to Steve MacIntyre, who has spent ten years of his life in a battle with the entire scientific establishment in an effort to get them to do proper science.
Along the way he has disproved fundamental tenets of Global Warming, exposed fraud and collusion, and improved our knowledge of real climate statistics immensely. He has spent thousands of his own dollars on replicating experiments which were misleading, but which the establishment relied on and didn't want exposed as wrong. Single-handedly, he has opened up dendrochronology and shown how many influences other than temperature can affect the rings. He has fought scientific statisticians at the highest level and won. He was responsible for the Wegman committee investigation into the hockey-stick, at which all his accusations were justified.
Given the way establishment prizes are awarded, I susopect Steve would turn down a Nobel if offered by the current regime...
Winning a Nobel prize in any field makes someone pretty much a guaranteed celebrity for the rest of their life. You want your future books to become best sellers? You want a tenured professorship at Harvard with your own research team, plum grad students, no undergraduate teaching duties, and dinner with the President and members of Congress? Win a Nobel.
I would say, the process is guaranteed to be flawed because they can't possibly single out the one person in every field who most deserves such an honor. In the arts, it's a rather arbitrary pick and seems to be colored by politics.
A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist. They gave Jimmy Carter a prize for supposedly stopping the North Koreans from working on a nuclear bomb, and they just kept right on doing it. It doesn't hurt that Carter hates Israel and regularly visits groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Oh, for Israel haters it's probably fine but for those who are a bit more skeptical of Carter's intentions and methods, it has greatly demeaned the award.
The sciences are a bit different. But even there, it's difficult to tease out who exactly made complete and original innovations without relying heavily on the brilliant but unsung work of others. The most famous example is Watson, Crick, and Wilkins' discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Their colleague Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1958, played a key role in this discovery but is virtually unknown today because the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously.
Einstein said that his accomplishments were "on the shoulders of giants" who came before him. Surely he was being humble but still, that is how science works, and Nobel encourages a notion in the general public's mind that scientists operate in a vacuum.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.