Why is the Nobel prize in chemistry given for things that are not chemistry?
By T.C.
THIS year's Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to three researchers who helped to discover how cells repair damaged DNA. It is unquestionably important work—without such repair mechanisms, complex life would be impossible. But those watching the announcement might be forgiven for wondering: doesn't that seem more like biology than chemistry? This is not the first time: five of the past ten chemistry prizes have been awarded for research that seems closer to biology than to chemistry. Fred Sanger, the only person to have won a chemistry Nobel twice, received both his awards for biological research, once for work on the structure of proteins, and once for developing a method of DNA synthesis. The other two science prizes—for medicine and physics—stick much more closely to their remits. All that has led to grumbles from chemists, and jokes by other scientists at their expense. What is going on?
The philosophically bloody-minded can argue that categories of science are just meaningless human constructions anyway. Nature does not distinguish between physics or chemistry or biology. The Greek philosopher Democritus was basically right: when you boil the universe down to its essence there is nothing but atoms and the void. On that interpretation, any attempts to categorise science are bound to be imperfect—or perhaps all science prizes are really physics prizes in disguise. A more positive take on the same argument is that the diversity of the chemistry prizes reflects the fact that chemistry is found everywhere—what is life, after all, but a bunch of self-replicating chemicals?
A less high-minded answer is that the Nobel prizes reflect the wishes of their founder, Alfred Nobel. The prize categories were laid down in his will in 1895, at a time when the intellectual landscape looked very different. Biology was in its infancy, and so no award was established. These days, biology is the perhaps the most prominent of all the sciences. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which runs the prizes, must respect Nobel's will, and thus has its hands tied. The chemistry prize seems to have become a way to honour the best non-medical biological research while still respecting the letter of Nobel's wishes. Besides, the absence of a biology prize is hardly the only feature that looks odd to modern eyes. The Nobels do not honour mathematics, the language of the sciences (a separate prize, the Fields Medal, is that discipline's top award). Only three people can win one, a serious problem in physics, whose advances these days often come from giant collaborative projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider, which are staffed by hundreds or thousands of scientists. The dead are not eligible, which is one reason Rosalind Franklin was not honoured alongside Francis Crick and James Watson for discovering the structure of DNA.
Finally, Nobel himself was a chemist. He made the fortune from which the prizes are endowed from dynamite, a powerful and relatively safe explosive. That made him a controversial figure: an obituary published (prematurely) by a French newspaper in 1888 said "the merchant of death is dead", and that Nobel had become rich by "finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before". Concerned by how he would be perceived after his death, he founded the Nobels to try to do something good with his money. That is why he also endowed the peace prize. Having been awarded to, among others, Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa and—the year after he was elected—Barack Obama, that has proven itself even more controversial than the prize for chemistry.
