Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States

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Transaction Publishers - Education - 335 pages
Scientific Elite is about Nobel prize winners and the well-defined stratification system in twentieth-century science. It tracks the careers of all American laureates who won prizes from 1907 until 1972, examining the complex interplay of merit and privilege at each stage of their scientific lives and the creation of the ultra-elite in science.
The study draws on biographical and bibliographical data on laureates who did their prize-winning research in the United States, and on detailed interviews with forty-one of the fifty-six laureates living in the United States at the time the study was done. Zuckerman finds laureates being successively advantaged as time passes. These advantages are producing growing disparities between the elite and other scientists both in performance and in rewards, which create and maintain a sharply graded stratification system.
 

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Contents

NOBEL LAUREATES AND SCIENTIFIC ELITES
1
THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE NOBEL PRIZE
16
THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF LAUREATES
59
MASTERS AND APPRENTICES IN SCIENCE
96
MOVING INTO THE SCIENTIFIC ELITE
144
THE PRIZEWINNING RESEARCH
163
AFTER THE PRIZE
208
THE NOBEL PRIZE AND THE ACCUMULATION OF ADVANTAGE IN SCIENCE
243
NOBEL LAUREATES IN SCIENCE 190176
281
PRIZEWINNING RESEARCH SPECIALTY AND YEAR OF AWARD
291
OFFICIAL OCCUPANTS OF THE FORTYFIRST CHAIR HONORABLE MENTIONS FOR NOBEL PRIZES
295
AGESPECIFIC ANNUAL RATES OF PRODUCTIVITY OF LAUREATES AND MATCHED SAMPLE OF SCIENTISTS WHO SURVIVED TO EAC...
301
BIBLIOGRAPHY
303
INDEX OF NAMES
327
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
332
Copyright

INTERVIEWING AN ULTRAELITE
255

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About the author

Harriet Zuckerman is vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University.

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