Scientists sound alarm over long wait for Nobel Prize

Awarding Nobels decades after the original scientific discovery could lead to the coveted prize becoming irrelevant, some observers say, as ageing researchers miss out on their turn to get the long-awaited call from Sweden.

That’s what happened in 2011 when the Nobel committee announced that half the prize for medicine and physiology would go to Canadian-born biologist Ralph Steinman.

It soon emerged that Steinman had died three days earlier, but the Nobel committee made an exception to its own rule that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously, arguing that it thought he was alive when it made the decision.‘

If we keep going on like this, there will be many more cases of this kind. It’s just a matter of time. So something has to be done,’ said Santo Fortunato, a physicist at Finland’s Aalto University.

Earlier this year, Fortunato and several other scientists wrote an article in the prestigious magazine Nature that documented how the wait was growing longer.’