I know this is an unpopular opinion, but keep in mind that I come from Uppsala University (PhD wise, my undergraduate research and studies were done at GA Tech), a prestigious Swedish and European university (ranked 25th in Europe by QS), which every year in December hosts lectures by the Nobel Laureates (which I never attended in almost a decade as a visiting researcher and PhD student there, because I don't believe in the Nobel Prize, I think it rewards the wrong people about 80% of the time, but that's a story for another day). I remember this American professor (a Caucasian American professor) sarcastically saying one day during a regular chemistry lecture that all you need to win a Nobel Prize is to be white and American, from an American university, lol.
The Nobel Prize is heavily biased toward American and traditional Western (i.e., including Northern) European countries and researchers. Imagine all the undergraduate and masters and PhD students, visiting researchers and postdocs (who in many cases are people of color, who by the way almost never get professorships, maybe because they do not know how to play the political game, or are seen as outsiders and foreigners and so on) who make advances for many of these "famous professors" and whose work is never referenced in relation to the Nobel prize. People are also strangely proud of "having worked with a Nobel laureate", and in many cases that's enough to advance their own careers, even if they didn't publish anything "relevant" with such a professor lol.
In any case, the winners are scientists or researchers like you and me. The Nobel Prize perpetuates the "genius myth". Most of these guys are good people, and many of them are normal smart or very smart people, but almost never wicked smart or geniuses (the smartest guys I met were my undergraduate advisor Seth Marder and Northwestern professor Joseph Hupp, and my half-Latino guy Daniel Nocera; Chinese American Zhenan Bao was also very impressive intellectually, none of whom have won the Nobel Prize yet). Lots of times people joked that if you came to Sweden every year and were sufficiently famous that that would help you too. There is a lot of bureaucracy and shady political stuff going on.
In many cases, it feels like the discoveries are also hyped (especially in the 20% of cases where the discovery is "rightly deserved" for some eureka moment or sudden discovery, which is ironic).
I think the Nobel Prize should be given to a **tree of people** or a **group** instead of 2 or 3 vertical individuals. For example, instead of giving the prize to Hassabis and the other guy, they should have given it to Google/DeepMind Research and partners who worked on developing the protein folding technologies. Instead of giving the prize to a single professor who worked on something for 20 years, give it to the tree of researchers who worked on it and published either peer-reviewed or preprints relevant to the prize (e.g., top 75th percentile papers based on impact or citations of that professor and partners, for example).
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but keep in mind that I come from Uppsala University (PhD wise, my undergraduate research and studies were done at GA Tech), a prestigious Swedish and European university (ranked 25th in Europe by QS), which every year in December hosts lectures by the Nobel Laureates (which I never attended in almost a decade as a visiting researcher and PhD student there, because I don't believe in the Nobel Prize, I think it rewards the wrong people about 80% of the time, but that's a story for another day). I remember this American professor (a Caucasian American professor) sarcastically saying one day during a regular chemistry lecture that all you need to win a Nobel Prize is to be white and American, from an American university, lol.
The Nobel Prize is heavily biased toward American and traditional Western (i.e., including Northern) European countries and researchers. Imagine all the undergraduate and masters and PhD students, visiting researchers and postdocs (who in many cases are people of color, who by the way almost never get professorships, maybe because they do not know how to play the political game, or are seen as outsiders and foreigners and so on) who make advances for many of these "famous professors" and whose work is never referenced in relation to the Nobel prize. People are also strangely proud of "having worked with a Nobel laureate", and in many cases that's enough to advance their own careers, even if they didn't publish anything "relevant" with such a professor lol.
In any case, the winners are scientists or researchers like you and me. The Nobel Prize perpetuates the "genius myth". Most of these guys are good people, and many of them are normal smart or very smart people, but almost never wicked smart or geniuses (the smartest guys I met were my undergraduate advisor Seth Marder and Northwestern professor Joseph Hupp, and my half-Latino guy Daniel Nocera; Chinese American Zhenan Bao was also very impressive intellectually, none of whom have won the Nobel Prize yet). Lots of times people joked that if you came to Sweden every year and were sufficiently famous that that would help you too. There is a lot of bureaucracy and shady political stuff going on.
In many cases, it feels like the discoveries are also hyped (especially in the 20% of cases where the discovery is "rightly deserved" for some eureka moment or sudden discovery, which is ironic).
I think the Nobel Prize should be given to a **tree of people** or a **group** instead of 2 or 3 vertical individuals. For example, instead of giving the prize to Hassabis and the other guy, they should have given it to Google/DeepMind Research and partners who worked on developing the protein folding technologies. Instead of giving the prize to a single professor who worked on something for 20 years, give it to the tree of researchers who worked on it and published either peer-reviewed or preprints relevant to the prize (e.g., top 75th percentile papers based on impact or citations of that professor and partners, for example).
Nice recommendations. Cheers.