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Source: Intellectuals Author: Zhang Tianqi
How to win a Nobel Prize? An economist gave a very simple answer: to win a Nobel Prize, it is better to have a Nobel Prize-winning professor, classmate or student. Because the Nobel Prize is very particular about "blood".
Richard SJ Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, ·United Kingdom, has counted Nobel laureates in economics and found that 82 of the 87 Nobel laureates in economics share a common "academic ancestor" and often don't need to go back too far. Nobel laureates' mentors and classmates are more likely to win the prize under the condition of being a candidate [1].
He later extended this research to all Nobel prizes in science, and found that of the 727 winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Economics, 696 were from the same academic genealogy, with the exception of 31 [2].
There are a total of 360 pairs of professors and students who have won the Nobel Prize at the same time, of which 255 pairs belong to the same discipline. This figure becomes even more exaggerated when the relationship between mentors and apprentices, as well as further academic ties, is taken into account: a total of 863 pairs (a Nobel laureate may correspond to multiple students, professors, academic ancestors and descendants, counting as many pairs) members of the teacher-student or more distant academic relationship have won Nobel Prizes, of which 431 have won awards in the same subject area.
The same professor may have several students who have won the Nobel Prize, such as Jose·ph Thomson, the physicist who discovered the electron, who himself won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906, and among his students there were seven Nobel Prize winners in physics (one of whom was his son) and two in chemistry. Among his disciples, a total of 227 Nobel laureates were produced.
Thanks to Thomson's contributions, his teacher, Lord Reilly, became the Nobel laureate with the most Nobel descendants and the most Nobel Prize winners in physics (126). Adolf von Baeyer ·· topped the list in chemistry with 107 Nobel Prize descendants.
This relationship can also be "inherited from generation to generation". For example, Oppenheimer's education was guided by Percy W. Bridgman, Thomson, Born, and other Nobel laureates at that time or later, and his student ·Willis Lamb (Willis Lamb) also won the Nobel Prize, and he was the only one who missed the Nobel Prize.
The highest concentration of "Nobel blood" is Craig Mello, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006 for his discovery ·of RNA interference. On his academic pedigree, there are 51 predecessors who are Nobel laureates. Although Merlot's direct mentor did not win a Nobel Prize, four of his five mentors won Nobel Prizes, all of them winners of the Physiology or Medicine Prize.
Of the 727 Nobel laureates, 66 have neither a Nobel laureate nor a Nobel laureate as a peer, but they still have connections with other Nobel laureates through some scientists who have not won a Nobel Prize. In addition, none of the 130 Nobel laureates have won a Nobel Prize, but there are Nobel laureates among their classmates. Because of these indirect connections, they are also included in the largest Nobel Prize academic genealogy.
01 Physics, Chemistry and Biology, who is the teacher and who is the student
Different disciplines play different roles in the academic heritage of Nobel laureates.
From the perspective of the relationship between doctoral supervisors and students, 116 Nobel Prize winners in physics, as doctoral supervisors, have trained 98 winners in the field of physics and 16 winners in the field of chemistry, but they have hardly sent talents to the field of biology, and only trained 2 winners in the field of physiology or medicine.
The contribution of chemistry to the other two fields is more balanced, with 66 students of 96 Nobel laureates winning prizes in chemistry, 12 in physics and 18 in medicine. Nobel laureates in the field of physiology or medicine have only trained Nobel laureates in the field of chemistry, but not in the field of physics.
In other words, chemistry is the intersection of the two disciplines, physics and biology. There are no two majors, chemistry, physics and biology, which are almost impossible to export talents to each other. If we take into account the academic kinship between generations and even beyond, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is more in line with everyone's impression of its "comprehensive award", which not only cultivates more Nobel laureates in other fields, but also performs the most balanced in cultivating Nobel laureates across disciplines, and at the same time receives more academic talents from these fields.
On average, 4.6 academic ancestors of each Nobel laureate have won the Nobel Prize. The average number of Nobel Prize ancestors in the field of chemistry is the largest, with 5.9. At the same time, chemistry also has the largest number of academic offspring, with an average of 7 Nobel laureates in chemistry, which is the highest among all disciplines. This was followed by physics (6.2), physiology or medicine (2.6) and economics (0.8).
Physics is a relatively independent discipline, and most of the academic ancestors have won the Nobel Prize in this field, followed by chemistry. About one-third (34%) and one-fifth (21%) of the academic ancestors of chemistry and physics, respectively, came from other fields.
Compared with physics and chemistry, biology receives more knowledge input. The academic ancestors of Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine, the majority (59%) are Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry. According to the authors, this pattern is to be expected. Because medicine relies heavily on new developments in physics and chemistry to design new diagnostic tools and new treatments.
Over time, the network of Nobel laureates' academic heritage has become less centralized. The number of Nobel laureates is growing faster than the number of Nobel laureates among their academic descendants. To put it simply, there are more and more new Nobel laureates, but the number of new Nobel laureates produced by these laureates has not increased correspondingly.
This is not only because the recent Nobel laureates have been awarded so recently, but also because their descendants have not yet received the attention of the Nobel Prize. From the side of academic ancestry, the concentration of Nobel Prize academic genealogies has also declined.
Since 1950, although more and more people have won the Nobel Prize, there is still a certain percentage of new laureates each year who do not have Nobel laureates as academic ancestors, and this proportion has not changed much. That is, the awarding of the Nobel Prize covers more and more new fields whose laureates cannot be included in the old academic genealogy.
02 Holding together or achieving each other
Ninety-six percent of Nobel laureates belong to an academic family tree, is this because these Nobel laureates or prospective laureates exert their influence in the nomination and evaluation of the prize, favoring scientists they are familiar with? Or is it because great mentors choose great students, and these best people work together to deliver exceptional results? The author admits that he doesn't have a good answer.
The evaluation of the Nobel Prize is always determined by a small number of people, and deviations can be expected. Looking back on history, in fact, it is not uncommon for the Nobel Prize to be judged due to prejudice, competition, and grouping, and the change in the composition of the committee will even affect the general direction of the award. A study of Nobel Prize nominations pointed out that in the first seven decades of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the number of nominations by many scientists increased year by year, and the members of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry and the Royal Sweden Academy of Sciences "organized behavior" in the selection process [3].
The Economist once conducted a survey based on the public nomination data of the Nobel Prize, and found that candidates nominated by past Nobel laureates have a 40% higher chance of winning future awards than candidates nominated by other scientists. In addition, if the nominee was not a Nobel laureate at the time, but later won a Nobel Prize, the candidate nominated by them usually has a higher chance of winning the prize [4]. This seems to illustrate the influence of Nobel laureates in the award, but it cannot be ruled out that they are insightful.
However, there are also positive effects brought about by cooperation and exchange among excellent researchers. Another study, which may shed some light United States three scientists at Northwestern University's Institute for Complex Systems (NICO), analyzed and tracked 37,157 mentors and disciples who published 1,167,518 papers in the fields of biomedicine, chemistry, mathematics, and physics between 1960 and 2017.
The study found six groups of matched mentors who were statistically similar on academic records and reputation metrics. These indicators include: subject, year of first publication, productivity, number of citations, h-index, average journal impact factor, number of students, number of co-authors, subject expertise, school ranking, and gender. It's just that in some groups, mentors will win important scientific awards in the future, while mentors in the matching group will not.
The matching cycle begins in the year in which the supervisor first publishes the paper and ends with the winning supervisor receiving the first scientific award. A significant proportion of the students of future awardees have graduated ten years before their mentor's first award. In other words, their development during the time period of the study was largely not influenced by the aura of their mentor's awards.
It was found that students who graduated 10 years before their mentor won the award were 5.7 times more likely to win a science award than students who did not award the award, 4.3 times more likely to be a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and 2.0 times more likely to have their papers cited [5].
Surprisingly, there was a significant positive correlation between the research topic differences between supervisors and students and student success, while co-authoring papers had a negative impact on students' futures. The most successful way for students to succeed is not to follow their supervisor's research topic, but to research their own original topic and co-write no more than a small part of the paper with the supervisor.
The authors explain that the ability to discover and disseminate novel, high-impact research may be a form of tacit knowledge, disseminated more through informal communication between people. This tacit knowledge includes selecting questions, asking research questions, responding to review comments, and even a way to communicate the results in a professional and stylized way. It also explains why students are more likely to be more successful in differentiated fields, as these skills are not so limited by specific areas of expertise.
As Albert Einstein said, "The value of education is not to learn many facts, but to train the mind to think about things that cannot be learned from textbooks." For Nobel laureates, this educational motto still holds true.
References: (Swipe up and down to browse)
1.Tol, R. S. (2022). Rise of the Kniesians: the professor-student network of Nobel laureates in economics. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 29(4), 680-703.
2.Tol, R. S. (2024). The Nobel family. Scientometrics, 129(3), 1329-1346.
3.Seeman, J. I., & Restrepo, G. (2023). The Uncertain Role of Nominations for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Chemistry–A European Journal, 29(36), e202203985.
4.The Economist. (2021, October 9). The best way to win a Nobel is to get nominated by another laureate. The Economist.
5.Ma, Y., Mukherjee, S., & Uzzi, B. (2020). Mentorship and protégé success in STEM fields. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(25), 14077-14083.