PERFORMING EXCELLENCE: NOBEL PRIZE NOMINATION NETWORKS IN NORTH AMERICA
by
NILS HANSSON1,* ANDTHOMAS SCHLICH2,†
1Department for the History, Philosophy, and Ethics of Medicine, Heinrich-Heine- University Duesseldorf, Moorenstrasse 5, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
2Department of Social Studies of Medicine, Peel 3647, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1X1
This paper examines how scientific excellence is performed in Nobel nominations for medical scientists. Performing excellence encompasses both conducting excellent scientific work and being recognized for it. Both dimensions are closely intertwined: doing and recognizing excellent work depend on each other. Tracing nominations from the Nobel Archives in Solna, Sweden, the paper shows that Nobel Prizes are only the tip of the iceberg of networks of scientific recognition, which belong to cultures of excellence. Approaching cultures of excellence through nominations helps to understand how scientific prizes were awarded. The nominations show that science is not just a cognitive activity but also a social endeavour, and that the decision about who is awarded the Nobel Prize is also an outcome of social processes. Analysing the nomination networks thus explains to a certain extent the predominance of researchers from the USA versus Canada (and other countries).
It shows, among other things, that a proactive policy of Nobel Prize nominations is part of the culture of excellence in which American scientists often participate. The mechanisms of scientific recognition as reflected in Nobel Prize nomination networks and rhetoric give insight into the patterns and the background of awarding the prize.
Keywords: prizes, Nobel Prize, scientific excellence, Hans Selye, Paul Dudley White
INTRODUCTION
In a video interview entitled ‘The Nobel Prize and Canadian research excellence’, Art McDonald, 2015 Canadian Nobel laureate in physics, was asked what it was like to receive
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the Nobel Prize. McDonald responded that‘life has changed tremendously’.1Although he had celebrated a major scientific breakthrough in 2002 (on neutrinos), the prize some ten years later was‘another dimension altogether’. This quote is quite characteristic for interviews with Nobel laureates.2The public image of the award affects the prize winners and makes them national or international role models. However, McDonald also put the spotlight on the laureates’ professional environment, which is often characterized as inspired by a culture of excellence and creativity. He added that the prize recognized Canada as a science hub: ‘Canada is a place where you can do research of that quality’. At the same time, he implied that this has perhaps not always been the case. Canada as an environment for top research was also the main topic in a 2019 essay by Canadian cell biologist and biochemist John Bergeron.3 Bergeron discussed why Frederick Banting, who in 1923 received the award for the discovery of insulin, was for a long time the only Canadian Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine; we can now add Charles Huggins (1966), David Hubel (1981), Jack Szostak (2009), Ralph Steinman (2011) and John O’Keefe (2014) to the list, although not all of them did their prize-winning work in Canada.4 Of course, talent and achievement as such, Bergeron argued, are key in Nobel Prize-worthy research, but the selection of talent and the support that leads to achievement could perhaps be better developed in Canada.
The USA isfirst by a large margin in number of Nobel laureates per country (all Nobel Prize categories). American citizens have received 398 prizes to date (November 2021).
Number two on the list is the UK, with 137.5 Canada is number nine, with 28 prizes.
Does that mean, if we put it polemically, that American and British scientists are naturally smarter? This is improbable. Then how can we explain the disparity? Our underlying hypothesis is that because science is not just a cognitive activity but also a social endeavour, the effects of social processes in prize politics need to be examined to understand why some researchers are considered prizeworthy (or not).6 This special issue is focused on the essence of scientific excellence and reputation. In our paper, we contribute to this focus by examining how excellence needs to be brought into existence,
‘enacted’ or ‘performed’. We want to show how cultures of excellence influence the chances of being awarded a Nobel Prize and to stimulate a discussion around prizes as alleged parameters for scientific credit. The term ‘culture’ is used in the sense of norms, customs and practices, which often escape conscious awareness. Scientific excellence, we hypothesize, is a product of such cultures of excellence. These cultures make it possible for scientists to successfully create new knowledge that is recognized as accurate and relevant by significant social actors, such as their scientific peers. The term ‘construction’
emphasizes the fact that excellence depends on its recognition.7 Along these lines,
1 Universities Canada/Universités Canada,‘In conversation with Art McDonald—The Nobel Prize and Canadian research excellence’, 9 December 2015,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaNpkiYk3o0(accessed 11 March 2021).
2 Jean-Baptiste Gouyon,‘From engaged citizen to lone hero: Nobel Prize laureates on British television, 1962–2004’, Publ.
Understand. Sci. 27, 446–457 (2018).
3 John Bergeron,‘Nobel Prizes and Stanley Cups: Canada’s history with being on the winning team’, Conversation, 29 May 2019,https://theconversation.com/nobel-prizes-and-stanley-cups-canadas-history-with-being-on-the-winning-team-117716(accessed 11 March 2021).
4 Regarding the problem of situating the works that have been recognized by a Nobel Prize in the appropriate place, see Kevin Orrman-Rossiter,‘Places of invention and discovery and the Nobel Prize in Physics’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 75, 439–459 (2021).
5 Nils Hansson and Daniela Angetter-Pfeiffer (eds), Laureaten und Verlierer: der Nobelpreis und die Hochschulmedizin in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2021).
6 Richard Münch, Die akademische Elite: zur sozialen Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Exzellenz (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2007).
7 See, for example, Ludmilla Jordanova,‘The social construction of medical knowledge’, Social Hist. Med. 8, 361–381 (1995).
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researchers have shown that the status of a knowledge claim as being accurate, new and relevant—in other words, as a ‘discovery’—is in itself a social construction.8A discovery needs to be acknowledged as such, in the same way that a scientist needs to be recognized as the ‘discoverer’. The term ‘enactment’ stresses the active character of this recognition. In this sense, scientific excellence is ‘enacted’—by colleagues, by journals and prize committees, and by the scientists themselves. Cultures of excellence therefore enable the recognition of knowledge claims as discoveries and as being prizeworthy. Further, they also help scientists making the discoveries in the first place. To include both functions, we use the term‘performance’. Performance can refer to ‘something accomplished’, but it can also mean a‘public presentation or exhibition’.9Its multi-layered semantics make the term useful as an analytic tool for looking at these two related dimensions of scientific excellence simultaneously.10
The direct link between cultures of excellence and the Nobel Prize is the nomination process.11Awarding the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine happens in four steps. First, scientists from around the world are invited by the Nobel Committee (each of the prizes has its own committee) on a rotational basis to submit proposals. Second, after the nomination deadline, the Committee invites experts to evaluate the nominees. Third, the reports are discussed within the Committee, which submits its recommendation(s) to the Nobel Assembly. The Assembly chooses the laureate(s) by a majority vote.12 The nomination is thus at the very core of the entire Nobel venture. It is therefore surprising that the Nobel archive files for Physiology or Medicine have been largely overlooked in historical and sociological research about the Nobel Prize.13One reason is that, so far, scholars have been more interested in conducting historical studies using other Nobel Prize archives, such as physics/chemistry and literature, and less so for medicine.14Another probable reason is that most files are written in Swedish (all reports by the Nobel Committee at least until the 1970s), though the nominations themselves are written in various languages, mainly in English, German, French, Italian or one of the Scandinavian languages.
Considering the importance of the nomination process, in this paper we use the nominations to explore the cultures of excellence. We thus examine the social processes at work behind the scenes of the nomination system to raise questions about social and political dimensions of reward mechanisms in medicine more generally. Our focus is on the nominations and nominators in North America during the first half of the twentieth century. On a more general level, this paper is an attempt to begin a follow-up study of
8 The classic reference is Agustine Brannigan,‘Naturalistic and sociological models of the problem of scientific discovery’, Br. J. Sociol. 31, 559–573 (1980).
9 ‘Performance’, Merriam-Webster dictionary, n.d.,http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/performance(accessed 8 April 2013).
10 Iwan Rhys Morus,‘Placing performance’, Isis 101, 775–778 (2010); Delia Gavrus, ‘Men of dreams and men of action:
neurologists, neurosurgeons, and the performance of professional identity, 1920–1950’, Bull. Hist. Med. 85, 57–92 (2011); Michael Worboys,‘Practice and the science of medicine in the nineteenth century’, Isis 102, 109–115 (2011); Thomas Schlich, ‘‘The days of brilliancy are past’: skill, styles and the changing rules of surgical performance, ca. 1820–1920’, Med. Hist. 59, 379–403 (2015).
11 Nils Hansson, Thorsten Halling and Heiner Fangerau (eds), Attributing excellence in medicine: the history of the Nobel Prize (Brill, Leiden, 2019).
12 Erling Norrby, Nobel Prizes and nature’s surprises (World Scientific, Singapore, 2013).
13 Nils Hansson,‘What’s so special about the Nobel Prize?’, Publ. Understand. Sci. 27, 485–488 (2018).
14 Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in literature: a study of the criteria behind the choices (G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1991); Bo Svensén, Nobelpriset i litteratur. Nomineringar och utlåtanden 1901–1950. Part I: 1901–1920 (Norstedts, Stockholm, 2001); Bo Svensén, Nobelpriset i litteratur. Nomineringar och utlåtanden 1901–1950. Part II: 1921–1950 (Norstedts, Stockholm, 2001); Robert Marc Friedman, The politics of excellence: behind the Nobel Prize in science (Freeman & Times Books, New York, 2001).
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Harriet Zuckerman’s book Scientific elite: Nobel laureates in the United States, published in 1977,15 by shedding new light on the networks of nomination in North America.
Based on interviews with US laureates, Zuckerman’s book is still the most comprehensive analysis of American Nobel laureates to date, analysing both ‘pre-prize’ career patterns of the scientific elite and ‘Nobel effects’ on an individual and a national level.16 While Zuckerman limited her investigation to Nobel laureates, we include Nobel Prize nominees who did not end up receiving the prize. Thus, our account opens up another dimension for understanding cultures of excellence and how excellence is being constructed in practice.
Our account does not aim at criticizing the decisions of the Nobel Committee. Nor do we want to provide instructions on how to play the system. Instead, we see Nobel Prize nominations as sources that enable us to reconstruct how excellence has been enacted.
They provide us with the opportunity to examine how priority, creativity, originality and significance were attributed to individuals and larger groups of scientists. We use the nominations and evaluations as a window into the mechanisms of attribution of excellence in medicine. We argue that the nomination strategies that we were able to identify demonstrate the importance of the networks of colleagues who create opportunities both achieving scientific excellence and its recognition. This will be demonstrated in the following panoramic overview of Nobel nomination patterns in the USA and Canada, and then in two case studies, one of Hans Selye (1907−1982) and another of Paul Dudley White (1886–1973).
MAPPING THE ‘NOBEL POPULATION’IN NORTH AMERICA 1901–1953
Nobel Prizes have since the very beginning been used for underlining the scientific reputation of nations; or, as it has been put in a volume edited by Carl Gustaf Bernhard, Elisabeth Crawford and Per Sörbom (1982): ‘The prize was regarded as a symbol of national superiority, like having the most battleships, the fastest cars, the most Olympic gold medals.’17 Commentators have thus argued that the history of the prize demonstrates how certain countries were located either at the centre or at the periphery of the world of scientific excellence in medicine and how their positions changed over time.18 One example is a JAMA contribution in 2015 that raised the question of why American scientists outnumber researchers of any other origin in reaching the‘Himalayas of medical research’ recognition, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which ‘still towers over all other research awards in public profile’.19 The authors, C. David Naylor and John I. Bell, suggest that early-career networking at highly ranked institutions boosts
15 Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific elite. Nobel laureates in the United States (Macmillan, London, 1977).
16 Inspired by Zuckerman, several scholars have published on‘Nobel elite’ aspects, for example, Jichao Li, Yian Yin, Santo Fortunato and Dashun Wang,‘Scientific elite revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact’, J. R. Soc.
Interface 17, 1–10 (2020).
17 Carl Gustaf Bernhard, Elisabeth Crawford and Per Sörbom (eds), Science, technology and society in the time of Alfred Nobel.
Proceedings of a Nobel Symposium (Pergamon Press, Sweden, 1982).
18 For example, on the change of centres of innovation in surgery, see Thomas Schlich,‘‘One and the Same the World Over’—
the international culture of surgical exchange in an age of globalization, 1870–1914’, J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci. 71, 247–270 (2016).
19 C. David Naylor and John I. Bell,‘On the recognition of global excellence in medical research’, J. Am. Med. Assoc. 314, 1125–1126 (2015).
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the chances to be awarded a prize later on, as demonstrated by the fact that a number of Ivy League alumni have won several of the most reputed prizes since around 1950.20This is in accordance with a recent book by economist Miguel Urquiola, who looked at the most mentioned universities in Nobel laureate biographies to pinpoint important research institutions, arguing that US institutions are ‘distinctly ahead’ of their European counterparts.21
In the following section we identify nominees and nominators for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine from the USA and Canada. Using the Nobel nomination database (nobelprize.org), which contains 5950 nominations in the accessible period from 1901 to 1953, we list the candidates to describe the North American‘Nobel population’.22
American nominees
For 1901 to 1953 the Nobel database includes a total of 1484 nominations submitted in favour of US researchers. This number compares with 1208 nominations for German, 1097 nominations for French and 580 nominations for British scientists during the same time period. Interestingly, only few US scientists were nominated until 1925.23 From 1901 to 1924 an average of eight nomination letters yearly were sent to Stockholm for scientists based in the USA, whereas the corresponding number between 1925 and 1953 was 44.
Overall, 259 different candidates, among them only nine female scientists, were proposed.
Historian Elisabeth Crawford coined the term ‘favourite son’ (rather than ‘daughter’, revealing once more the gender award gap in the selection processes) in a Nobel context, pointing at scientists who received a high number of nominations by colleagues from the same country.24 For the USA, we found several such favourite sons: 19 US candidates were nominated 20 times or more often (although the nominators were internationally diverse in many cases—seetable 1).
The most frequently nominated individuals were Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) for his work on artificial parthenogenesis and physiological morphology (78 nominations),25 George Minot (1885–1950) ‘for his research on the treatment of pernicious anaemia by means of a diet rich in liver’ (60 nominations, laureate 1934), Alfred Richards (1876–1966) ‘for his work on the physiology of the kidneys’ (57 nominations), and Selman Waksman (1888–1973) ‘for his discoveries concerning antibiotics’ (43 nominations, laureate 1952).
These four scientists were nominated by various nominators from many different universities, although 43 of Richards’ nominations were handed in by his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. Among the female scholars, Gladys Dick (1881–1963) (24 nominations for research on scarlet fever) and Helen Taussig (1898–1986)
20 See also Allen B. Weisse,‘Nobel laureates and their medical schools: who selected whom?’, Proc. Bayl. Univ. Med. Cent. 28, 404–405 (2015).
21 Miguel Urquiola, Markets, minds, and money: why America leads the world in university research (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020).
22 Michael Pohar and Nils Hansson,‘The ‘Nobel Population’ in pharmacology: Nobel Prize laureates, nominees and nominators 1901–1953 with a focus on B. Naunyn and O. Schmiedeberg’, Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch. Pharmacol. 393, 1173–1185 (2020).
23 This is surprising because the centre of medical innovation had already moved from Europe to the USA before 1900—see Schlich, op. cit. (note 18).
24 Elisabeth Crawford,‘Internationalism in science as a casualty of the First World War: relations between German and Allied scientists as reflected in nominations for the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry’, Social Sci. Inform. 27, 163–201 (1988).
25 Heiner Fangerau, Thorsten Halling and Nils Hansson,‘Discovery or reputation? Jacques Loeb and the role of nomination networks’, in Hansson et al. (eds), op. cit. (note 11), pp. 97–121.
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(24 nominations for the treatment of tetralogy of Fallot) were most often nominated during the examined period.26
Table 1. The twenty most frequently nominated candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, USA, 1901–1953.
Candidate
No.
nominations
Nomination
period Nominated for (main reason) Nominated by
1 Jacques Loeb 78 1901–1924 Artificial parthenogenesis Simon Flexner (7), 54 others 2 George R. Minota 60 1928–1934 Work on the treatment of
pernicious anaemia by means of a diet rich in liver
60 nominators
3 Alfred N. Richards 57 1931–1950 Physiology of the kidneys George Minot (4), 40 others 4 Selman A. Waksmana 43 1946–1952 Antibiotics (streptomycin) 42 nominators 5 Theobald Smith 38 1908–1934 Infectious diseases (Texas fever,
tuberculosis, swine plague)
33 nominators
6 Harvey W. Cushing 37 1917–1939 Neurosurgery, hypophysis, brain
tumours, Cushing’s disease 35 nominators 6 Oswald T. Avery 37 1939 Immunologically specific
polysaccharides and conjugated carbohydrate proteins
Otto Loewi (7), 26 others
8 Thomas H. Morgana 33 1920–1933 Work on the physical basis of heredity
29 nominators
9 Wendell M. Stanleya 32 1937–1947 Work on, and crystallization of, viruses
A. von Szent-Györgyi (3), George Whipple (3), 25 others 10 Herbert M. Evans 30 1924–1953 Hormones of the hypophysis 26 nominators 11 John H. Northrop 28 1932–1946 Crystallization of digestive
enzymes
George Whipple (4), A. von Szent- Györgyi (3), 20 others 12 Edward C. Kendalla 27 1922–1951 Discovery of thyroxine Frank Mann (3),
25 others 12 Walter B. Cannon 27 1921–1945 Various, work on adrenaline 26 nominators 14 George F. Dick 26 1925–1935 Work on scarlet fever
(Streptococcus haemolyticus)
25 nominators
15 Gladys H. Dick 24 1925–1935 Work on scarlet fever
(Streptococcus haemolyticus)
23 nominators
15 Hideyo Noguchi 24 1913–1927 Syphilis, yellow fever Alexis Carrel (4), 20 others 17 Helen B. Taussig 24 1947–1953 Inborn malformations of the
heart, surgical treatment
George Whipple (3), 21 others 18 George H. Whipplea 23 1929–1935 Liver therapy in pernicious
anaemia
23 nominators
19 Michael J.
Heidelberger
20 1937–1953 Carbohydrate antigens in bacteria Otto Loewi (7), 14 others
aLaureates.
26 Nils Hansson and Thomas Schlich,‘Why did Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig not receive the Nobel Prize?’, J. Card. Surg.
30, 506–509 (2015).
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In this overview, a handful of US universities stand out. By far the most nominations (316) were submitted for scientists from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research,27sphere of activity of Jacques Loeb as well as of 25 Nobel laureates to date, followed by Harvard University (172), Johns Hopkins University (80), the University of Chicago (63), and the University of California at Berkeley (56).28
All in all, scientists from 105 different institutions nominated US-based medical researchers for the Nobel Prize. About half of the nominations were submitted by American nominators (56%) (for our purposes, American nominators are those who were based at an American institution at the time of the nomination). Most nominations originated at the Rockefeller Institute in New York (74 or more), 51 at the University of Pennsylvania, and 47 at the University of Chicago. Among the foreign nominations, most were of European origin.29Since many researchers located in the USA were immigrants of European origin, a considerable share of the European nominators put forward candidates originally from their country. Relatively few nominations were submitted from countries outside the US and Europe; among these were 23 from Canada, eight from Brazil, six from Argentina, and only two from China and India.
Canadian nominees
For Canadian scientists, the Nobel Database records 51 nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine from 1901 to 1953, the first submitted in 1923. From that year onward, researchers working in Canada were nominated sporadically, and a rise in nominations can be seen in the early 1950s. In 1953, 14 nomination letters were sent to the Nobel Committee. These numbers appear rather low, putting Canada close to the bottom among Western countries in terms of nominations received (that said, in 1950, the USA had 152 million inhabitants and Canada 14 million30).
A total of 12 Canadian scientists received nominations, the most often nominated being Hans Selye (1907–1982) for his research on the general adaptation syndrome, stress and endocrinology (17 nominations) (see below), Charles H. Best (1899–1978) (11 nominations), James B. Collip (1892–1965) (eight nominations) and Sir Frederick G. Banting (1892–1941) (six nominations, Nobel laureate 1923) (table 2). All other researchers were only nominated once or twice.
John J. Macleod (1876–1935), who in 1923 shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin with Sir Frederick G. Banting, was nominated twice in the same year. Even though
27 Today, Rockefeller University on their official homepage lists the number of major rewards that faculty has received, in first place 24 Nobel Prizes. Rockefeller University,‘Awards and Honors’,https://www.rockefeller.edu/about/awards/(accessed 11 March 2021).
28 All of these US institutions celebrate‘their’ laureates on own sub-webpages of their official webpage: Harvard University,
‘Meet our Nobel laureates’,https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-history/nobel-laureates/(accessed 11 March 2021); Johns Hopkins University,‘Nobel Prize Winners’,https://www.jhu.edu/research/milestones/nobel-prize-winners/(accessed 11 March 2021);
University of Chicago,‘Nobel laureates’,https://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/nobel_laureates/(accessed 11 March 2021);
Berkeley University of California,‘History & Discoveries’,https://www.berkeley.edu/about/history-discoveries#89(accessed 11 March 2021).
29 143 from Germany, 55 from Sweden, 52 from Austria and 47 from Italy.
30 Macrotrends,‘U.S. Population 1950–2021’,https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population(accessed 11 March 2021).
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a Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin had been awarded, nominators continued to submit nominations regarding this topic in the following years, in particular for Best and Collip, who were left empty-handed by the Nobel Committee.
All candidates were distributed across universities in four cities: Edmonton (University of Alberta), London/Ontario (Western University), Montreal (McGill University and University of Montreal) and Toronto (University of Toronto), the latter rankingfirst with a total of 22 nominations submitted in favour of five scientists (but because individuals switched cities within Canada, some were nominated while working elsewhere). It is worth noting that research topics often used as a focus in nomination letters for Canadian scholars differ from the ones seen in nominations for US-American researchers. No scientist in Canada was nominated for work on infectious diseases or bacteriology. Instead, 24 nominations in favour of five different scientists cited research on endocrinology and hormones, notably insulin and parathyroid hormone, but also general endocrine secretion. Only four nominations regarded other topics (nutrition, histology, anaesthesia). What is more, in contrast to most other countries yet analysed, the vast majority of nominations for Canadian scientists were submitted by foreigners. Just nine (18%) of the nominations in favour of Canadian researchers were sent to Stockholm by fellow countrymen. Foreign nominations were mainly from the USA (eight nominations) and the UK (five nominations), with some also originating in other European and South American countries.
In most cases, nominators put forward only single candidates. Nobel campaigns for individual scientists seem not to be apparent (one later exception being Wilder Penfield (1891–1976)).31
Using the examples of Hans Selye, Montreal (McGill University and University of Montreal), and cardiologist Paul Dudley White, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard), we now take a step behind the scenes by reconstructing characteristic lines of argumentation (with relation to Hans Selye) and networks of nominators (with respect to Paul Dudley Table 2. Most frequently nominated candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,
Canada, 1901–1953.
Candidate Nominations
Nomination
period Nominated for Nominated by
1 Hans Selye 17 1949–1953 General adaptation syndrome, endocrinology
16 nominators
2 Charles Herbert Best
11 1950–1953 Work on insulin, choline and metabolism; dietary factors in the protection of the liver and kidney
Bernardo Houssay (3), Sir Henry Dale (3), 5 others
3 James B. Collip
8 1928–1951 Endocrine secretion (insulin, pituitary hormone, anti- hormones, other)
7 nominators
4 Sir Frederick G. Bantinga
6 1923–1924 The discovery of insulin 6 nominators
aLaureate(s).
31 Delia Gavrus,‘Wilder Penfield dreams of the Nobel Prize’, Notes Rec. 000, 000–000 (2021).
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White) in Nobel Prize nominations and by examining how scientific excellence was enacted in these contexts.
‘REFLECTIONS OF THE BRILLIANT MIND OF A GENIUS’: NOBEL NOMINATIONS FORHANSSELYE
Selye still has a strong legacy in the global scientific community (figure 1). This is mainly due to his development of a theory of biological stress, or, as it was described in 2006, when Selye was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame: ‘Dr. Hans Selye is
Figure 1. Hans Selye stamp.https://postagestampguide.com/stamps/17204/dr-hans-selye-documenting-the-stress-of- life-2000-canada-postage-stamp-the-millennium-collection-medical-innovators. (Online version in colour.)
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acknowledged as the ‘Father’ of the field of stress research, having gained world-wide recognition for introducing the concept of stress in a medical context.’32 He received numerous prizes and honours, including the highest state decoration in Canada, the
‘Companion of the Order of Canada’, and 43 honorary degrees, but he was never awarded the Nobel Prize.33 We collected Nobel nominations and Nobel Committee evaluations at the Nobel Forum at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, to reconstruct how Selye was portrayed as Nobel nominee. This material shows that, similar to Wilder Penfield—as Delia Gavrus has found in her contribution to this special issue34—Selye was a close call.
The fact that Selye was nominated on at least 20 occasions from 1949 to 1955 (table 2 lists nominations only to 1953) by European and by North and South American scientists points to his international contacts, which in part can be explained by his scientific
‘Wanderjahre’ in Europe, the USA and Canada. After receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1929 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Selye completed a PhD in organic chemistry, which led to a Rockefeller Research Fellowship. After a first stop at Johns Hopkins University, he completed the fellowship at McGill University in Montreal under James B. Collip (who had moved there from Toronto in 1928). In 1934, at the age of 27, Selye was appointed assistant professor of Biochemistry at McGill and in 1941 associate professor, before he became Director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal.35 He remained active after his retirement in 1977. In 1979, he founded the International Institute of Stress and the Hans Selye Foundation.
As a historical analysis shows, Selye was a central character in‘Nobel circles’ in various parts of his career, starting with the years he worked under Nobel nominee James Collip at McGill. Furthermore, his nominators proposed alongside Selye future laureates such as Philip Hench (1950) and Fritz Lipmann (1953), and the French–American neuroscientist Roger Guillemin, one of Selye’s first graduate students, who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow.36 What did the Nobel nominations say about Selye?
Thefirst two nominations for Selye were submitted in 1949 by the Utrecht gynaecologist Albert Jan Marinus Holmer and the surgeon Edmond Dubé from Montreal. Both emphasized work on endocrinology, and especially the adaptation syndrome. According to the Nobel database, 15 more nominations followed until 1953 by scientists from the UK (e.g. Robert Platt), Germany (e.g. Rudolf Schön), the USA (e.g. Ralph Victor Platou), Belgium (e.g. Jean-Jacques Bouckaert), Finland (e.g. Carl-Eric Räihä), Argentina (e.g.
Belzor Moyano Navarro), Brazil (Paulo Tibirica) and Guatemala (Carlos Martinez Duran).
The proposals for Selye are characteristic in terms of what we can call the Nobel rhetoric.37 Wefind that nominators emphasize ideas of genius and scientific heroism,38and that they pay attention to three criteria given in the will by Alfred Nobel:‘discovery’, ‘the
32 Canadian Medical Hall of Fame,‘Hans Selye, MD PhD’,https://www.cdnmedhall.org/search/node/selye(accessed 11 March 2021).
33 Sandor Szabo, Yvette Tache and Arpad Somogyi,‘The legacy of Hans Selye and the origins of stress research: a retrospective 75 years after his landmark brief“Letter” to the Editor of Nature’, Stress 15, 472–478 (2012).
34 Gavrus, op. cit. (note 31).
35 Hans Selye, Stress of my life: a scientist’s memoirs (Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1979).
36 Siang Yong Tan and A. Yip,‘Hans Selye (1907–1982): founder of the stress theory’, Singapore Med. J. 59, 170–171 (2018).
37 Celeste Condit,‘The character of scientists in the Nobel Prize speeches’, Publ. Underst. Sci. 27, 417–432 (2018).
38 Nils Hansson, David Jones and Thomas Schlich,‘Defining ‘cutting-edge’ excellence: awarding Nobel Prizes (or not) to surgeons’, in Hansson et al. (eds), op. cit. (note 11), pp. 122–139.
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preceding year’ (interpreted as ‘recency’), and ‘benefit to mankind’. This is demonstrated in the following two nomination quotes. The Philadelphia physiologist William Ehrich underlined the far-reaching effects of Selye’s work, recent activities, and worldwide renown:
… The candidate whom I should like to suggest is Doctor Hans Selye. This claim is based on the following consideration: Doctor Selye discovered the stress reaction and its mediation through the pituitary–adrenal axis. Through this discovery he became the chief stimulator of modern research in pituitary and adrenal hormones including their therapeutic usage. Later he developed an ingenious method to study certain phases of inflammation such as the physiology of granulation tissue which long resisted scientific investigation. Recently he integrated his discoveries in a unified concept of the nature of disease … The contributions of Doctor Selye … are both analytical and synthetical: they consist of discoveries and of concepts. They are masterpieces of research and works of art. In fact, they are reflections of the brilliant mind of a genius … Doctor Selye is known throughout the world. His contributions are invaluable to both physiologists and physicians. His stress reaction is now an inseparable part of medical thinking. I believe that the choice of Doctor Selye for the Nobel Prize in 1954 would be in keeping with the many excellent selections which you have made in the past.39
It is interesting to see how the wording closely follows the ‘rules of performance’ for attributing the Nobel Prize.40 In similar terms, the New York dermatologist Frank Combes also saw Selye as a scientist in the Nobel tradition:
I doubt that since the discoveries of Alexander Fleming any scientist has contributed more to the practice of clinical medicine than Hans Selye. I know of nothing which has had a more practical effect. It is true that his contributions cannot be designated as specific discoveries. Nevertheless, his real contributions, which have only recently been appreciated, have resulted in a more practical application of adrenooorticotropic [sic]
hormones on control of the Stress Syndrome. His publications on Stress and the Adaptation Syndrome are unsurpassed and have opened up a new era in therapy of many chronic incurable diseases. He has succeeded in transforming vague (and often faulty) impressions of disease into a precise science, has contributed much toward the development of contemporary clinical thought and has afforded hope of many more years of useful life to millions of people who otherwise would have succumbed to disease.41
It is still an open question why the Nobel Committee did not choose Selye as laureate. Perhaps his achievements were too difficult to depict as a single discovery, as would have been necessary to comply with rules of performance for the Nobel Prize. This could at least be concluded from Combes’ attempt to frame Selye’s work as a discovery, which, as Combes admitted, was a problem. We can see here how the status of a knowledge claim as a discovery is, in fact, a social construction. Other cases of non-successful nominations have shown the significance of this point for the enactment of excellence for the Nobel Prize. Repeatedly, the inability to pinpoint one decisive discovery, as opposed to sustained high achievements, has been crucial for withholding the prize from some individual
39 Nobel Committee Yearbook 1954 (Ehrich).
40 For rules of performance, see Schlich, op. cit. (note 10).
41 Nobel Committee Yearbook 1955 (Combes).
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scientists.42This aspect can even be seen as an obstacle for the Nobel Prize for wholefields, such as surgery, for which very few Nobel Prizes have been awarded, because it is untypical for a surgeon to be attributed an achievement that can be qualified as a discovery.43
Another important fact is timing. The discovery has to be original and recent, on the one hand, but it also has to be generally accepted before it can earn a Nobel Prize. We can see this in Selye’s case too. In 1949, Nobel Committee member Ulf von Euler (1905–1983, and Nobel laureate in 1970) wrote a so-called ‘special investigation’ on Selye, meaning that he had reached the Nobel shortlist of that year. At that time, Euler thought Selye’s concept of the adaptation syndrome was not a generally acknowledged concept and therefore not deemed
‘prizeworthy’.44 Indeed, some physiologists strongly contested Selye’s work.45 However, during the subsequent years, von Euler changed his mind: in 1955, one year before Selye published the bestseller The stress of life,46 he was evaluated by von Euler anew. In the conclusion of the special investigation, which ran to 20 type-written pages, Euler now judged Selye’s work on stress to be ‘highly prizeworthy’,47 but the other members of the Nobel Committee were not convinced (their reasons remain unclear since no minutes are kept from these discussions). Instead, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1955 was awarded to Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell (1903–1982) ‘for his discoveries concerning the nature and mode of action of oxidation enzymes.’
We do not know whether Selye’s nominators discussed nomination strategies with each other before the proposals were submitted. In the following example of American cardiologist Paul Dudley White, we show that such coordinated efforts did take place in a Nobel Prize context.
‘ITOO AM SHATTERED WITH DISAPPOINTMENT OVER OUR FAILURE!’: THENOBELPEACEPRIZE
CAMPAIGN FOR USCARDIOLOGIST PAUL DUDLEY WHITE
Paul Dudley White (1886–1973), who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital and is sometimes referred to as the ‘The Father of American Cardiology’,48 gained an international reputation as author of the textbook Heart disease49 and as a tireless promotor of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health (on White see also Annmarie Adams’ article in this special issue).50 The New York Times obituary on 1 November 1973 quoted a statement by President Nixon that he was‘a model of all that is best in American medicine’ and ‘a source of pride to physicians and laymen alike’. In the same obituary, John H. Knowles, former director of Massachusetts General
42 Nils Hansson and Thomas Schlich,“Highly qualified loser’? Harvey Cushing and the Nobel Prize’, J. Neurosurg. 122, 976–
979 (2015).
43 Hansson, Jones and Schlich, in Hansson et al. (eds), op. cit. (note 11), pp. 122–139; Nils Hansson et al., ‘Why so few Nobel Prizes for cancer researchers? An analysis of Nobel Prize nominations for German physicians with a focus on Ernst von Leyden and Karl Heinrich Bauer’, J. Cancer Res. Clin. Oncol. 147, 2547–2553 (2021).
44 Nobel Committee Yearbook 1949 (Euler).
45 Russel Viner,‘Putting stress in life: Hans Selye and the making of stress theory’, Social Stud. Sci. 29, 391–410 (1999).
46 Hans Selye, The stress of life (Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1956).
47 ‘i hög grad prisvärd’, Nobel Committee Yearbook 1955 (Euler).
48 Paul Oglesby, Take heart. The life and prescription for living of Dr. Paul Dudley White (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996); J. Willis Hurst,‘Paul Dudley White: the father of American cardiology’, Clin Cardiol. 14, 622–626 (1991).
49 Paul Dudley White, Heart disease, 3rd edn (Macmillan, New York, 1931).
50 René Favaloro,‘A revival of Paul Dudley White: an overview of present medical practice and of our society’, Circulation 99, 1525–1537 (1999); Annmarie Adams, Notes Rec.
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Hospital, added that‘he was the doyen of cardiology in this country’. But it was not primarily for his research in cardiology that White was proposed for the Nobel Prize. Relying on primary source material gathered at the Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, we have traced an extraordinary Nobel campaign from 1963 to 1970 for White.51 Such campaigns constitute a special form of enacting excellence.
In the early 1960s, White’s Harvard colleagues—first and foremost cardiac surgeon Dwight Harken (1910–1993), cardiologist Howard Sprague (1895–1970) (White’s associate)52 and Allan L. Friedrich as representative of the International Cardiology Foundation—organized formal meetings to work out a strategy on how to write a convincing Nobel Prize nomination for their colleague. They decided to focus on the Peace Prize and not on the prize category ‘Physiology or Medicine’, emphasizing that White had used medicine as a vehicle to unite groups separated by Cold War tensions. White’s example is still useful for our investigation, since he was a medical scientist, as were his nominators. As we discuss below, the nomination campaign was quite extensive, meaning that it was unusual in scale. But it was not unusual in its nature. Its scope and intensity help us to see the mechanisms of the lobbying efforts in the American context of the time more clearly.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is composed of five members appointed by the Norwegian parliament. According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the prize is awarded annually to the person who in the preceding year ‘shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’. The nominators argued that White was that person. They encouraged individuals in the USA and Europe, and in Far Eastern countries to submit letters of support. In particular, they reached out to pioneers in cardiology and surgery, prominent historians, Scandinavian journalists and physicians, and organizations such as the YMCA and Rotary International, but also to presidents, ministers of health, Pope Paul VI and Royal families (Queen Elizabeth, the King of Thailand). In a letter to the Nobel Committee dated 6 January 1970, Harken, Sprague and Friedrich stated that: ‘[S]everal times over the past half century, Dr White’s signal services in fostering friendly and useful cooperative efforts between various nationals has suggested the propriety of the Peace Prize. It appears to us that the time has come for a serious proposal.’53 The attached nomination book(!) consisted of elaborations on White’s international activities, his curriculum vitae, national and international positions and honours, as well as copies of the endorsement letters. Among the global contacts, it was put forward that White had been a Medical Officer of the British and American Expeditionary Force in France (1916–1919) and had worked for the American Red Cross in Greece (1919). In addition, his many foreign acknowledgements, such as honorary degrees from Athens University in 1948, the University of Brazil in 1960, honorary Doctor of Science, University of Montreal in 1960, and medals and awards such as the Légion
51 Nomination Book draft, Paul Dudley White Papers, 1870s–1987 (inclusive), HMS c 36, Harvard Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA,https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/med00081/catalog(hereafter Paul Dudley White Papers) (accessed 10 March 2021).
52 In a special issue of the American Journal of Cardiology devoted to Paul D. White, Sprague shares memories from his collaboration with White: Howard B. Sprague,‘Reminiscences of old days’, Am. J. Cardiol. 15, 548–550 (1965).
53 Dwight Harken, Howard Sprague and Allan L. Friedrich, Letter to Norwegian Nobel Committee, 6 January 1970, Paul Dudley White Papers.
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d’Honneur by the French Government in 1951, the award of merit by the Canadian Heart Foundation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the United States Government were highlighted. The proposal also referred to honours in Eastern Europe, among others the Order of the White Lion in Czechoslovakia 1948 and honorary degrees from Prague (Charles University) in 1948 and the Jagellonian University in Kracow, Poland, in 1964.
Thefirst letter of support was signed by Nathan M. Pusey, President of Harvard University.
He argued that ‘It is possible to say without exaggeration that of the medical men of his generation he [White] is one of the best known outside his own country.’54 The international network was central also in the statement by US Senator John O. Pastore:
‘For half a century the influence of Dr. White has inspired nation after nation as he worked creatively for health and peace.’55 Other prominent scientists and politicians such as W. Petrowsky, Secretary of Health of the USSR,56 André de Vries, Professor of Internal Medicine and Rector of the Tel-Aviv University, Yen Chia-kan, Vice President and concurrently President of the Executive Yuan, China, and John McMichael, President of the British Cardiac Society, put forward White’s diplomatic skills on the global arena,57 demonstrated, for example, by his being Chief of the Unitarian Service Committee in Czechoslovakia (1946) and by his promotion of international cooperation through leadership of World and Regional Congresses of Cardiology, for example in Paris (1950), Buenos Aires (1952), Havana and Stockholm (1956), Prague (1964) and New Delhi (1966).58 In addition, certain activities directed toward improving East–West relations were mentioned. He acted as Chief of the Medical Mission of American Professors to the USSR in 1956, and as Chief for the Medical Mission to Rumania and Bulgaria in 1960.
Interestingly, it remains an open question whether the comprehensive nomination reached Oslo, since the Nobel Committee to date has no material on White in their archive. Thus, he was not evaluated by the Nobel Committee in 1970.59
After the Nobel Committee had announced that the 1970 Peace Prize was to be awarded to the American agronomist Norman E. Borlaug‘for having given a well-founded hope—the green revolution’, Dwight Harken wrote to Allan Friedrich: ‘I too am shattered with disappointment over our failure! Not only did we have an outstanding candidate whom it hurt to see lose, but we must have failed to make the point about Medicine for Peace.’60 We have not found other such extensively orchestrated international campaigns for other Nobel Prize candidates, but we hope this case can serve as a starting-point for further analyses of other nominees. Fifteen years later, in 1985, another Harvard cardiologist, Bernard Lown, travelled to Oslo as representative of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to accept the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for spreading authoritative information and by creating awareness of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war.’ Any discussion about this prize is unknown, because of the
54 Nathan M. Pusey, Letter to Norwegian Nobel Committee, 10 November 1969, Paul Dudley White Papers.
55 John O. Pastore, Letter to Norwegian Nobel Committee, 20 October 1969, Paul Dudley White Papers.
56 About Paul Dudley White’s contacts with Russia, see D. M. Krikler, ‘Alexander Filipovich Samojloff and Paul Dudley White:
electrocardiography and a Russian–American friendship’, J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 14, 530–531 (1989).
57 Nomination Book draft, op. cit. (note 51).
58 His visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971 as one of the first US physicians to be invited was not brought up since it took place after the nomination book had been completed.
59 Personal communication between the office of the Nobel Peace Prize committee and author NH, November 2020. However, whether or not the nomination arrived in Oslo is of minor interest in this short overview with a focus on Nobel campaigns.
60 Dwight Harken, Letter to Allan Friedrich, Paul Dudley White Papers.
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50-year embargo of the archive, so that thefiles from around the 1985 prize can be examined in 2035 at the earliest.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Having gone through thousands of nominations in the Nobel archives, we have seen that American scientists have been disproportionally active in nominating their colleagues for the Nobel Prize. As mentioned above, 1484 Nobel Prize nominations (Physiology or Medicine) were submitted in favour of US researchers between 1901 and 1953, and only 51 for Canadians during the same time period. This leads us to the hypothesis that the dominance of US scientists regarding the Nobel Prize can be explained by the nomination networks, in terms of quantity and in terms of quality, which means number of attempts and reputation of the nominators, but also the high degree of organization of the American contributors to the network. The more active role of the American nominators paid off.
This goes to show that being awarded a Nobel Prize does not happen simply by making a great achievement and passively waiting for it to be rewarded. A more active stance is involved. This does not necessarily mean that one needs to push for a Nobel Prize. This can very well be counterproductive, as Göran Liljestrand (1886–1968), former Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine indicated:
Frequently, several members of the same faculty propose a common candidate– in most cases a fellow-countryman, who is sometimes, moreover, one of their own faculty colleagues – and they usually do it, either in a joint statement, or in personal letters which in content vary very little from each other. This procedure is probably due to the erroneous assumption that the prize-distributing bodies will be impressed and influenced in proportion to the number of supporters a candidate has among those officially invited to submit nominations. This idea has become so common that it has often been possible to predict with a fair degree of accuracy, even before opening a letter to the Committee, the name of the candidate it has supported.61
Clearly, the rules of performance for the Nobel Prize are stricter than some nominators think.
In any case, the social dimension of the behind-the-scenes processes of the awarding the Nobel Prize goes beyond simple lobbying efforts. It includes more subtle mechanisms, such as rhetorical strategies, the building and maintaining of networks of colleagues in different countries, and the accumulation of credibility over time. As we have seen, US scientists organized formal meetings to prepare nominations. They asked world authorities (the Pope or Queen Elizabeth) to write endorsement letters. Here it is of less importance whether such measures really worked or not. It is also less important whether White’s was typical—it is, in fact, not typical in the rather extreme activist attitude of its nominators.
However, it illustrates how ambition and initiative were more pronounced in certain cultures of excellence than in others. Further, a culture of excellence is more than pushing for recognition of achievements. It includes the appreciation of, and commitment to, scientific achievements and the building of networks within, and sometimes outside, the scientific disciplines. It is worth reiterating that recognition of excellence and the
61 Göran Liljestrand,‘The prize in physiology or medicine’, in Nobel: the man and his prizes (ed. H. Schück et al.), pp. 135–316 (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1962), from p. 149 onwards.
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opportunity to produce excellent research are often closely linked to each other. Not only does scientific excellence lead to prizes: recognition also leads to excellence.62 If we follow this lead further, wefind that these networks that produce positive reinforcement are part of a culture of excellence that embodies optimism and a proactive attitude towards scientific distinction. However, on the downside, the cultures of excellence are also the source of the inequality of opportunities. They are heavily gendered and they differ between countries, thus perpetuating the inequality of opportunity to the advantage of male scientists and American researchers. In an important way the Nobel Prize is only the tip of the iceberg.
The submerged mass of the iceberg comprises the less visible networks of recognition, based in cultures of excellence. They are the essence of the difference between men and women, between Canada and the USA. Any attempts at changing such inequities have to start here, at the level of the culture of excellence.
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
The archival data are available at Countway Library and Nobel Forum, Karolinska Institute.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine in Solna, Sweden, and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo, Norway, for providing access to information about Hans Selye and Paul Dudley White. We are also grateful to medical student Giacomo Padrini, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, who assisted us with extracting data for the USA and Canada from the online Nobel database, and Fiona Kenney at McGill University for her excellent copy-editing job.
62 James F. English, The economy of prestige: prizes, awards, and the circulation of cultural value (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005).
