Life after Nobels: Prizes foster fame

Since many Nobel laureates have already established themselves in their fields by the time they win, the award itself does not necessarily open up new research opportunities. For some, the name recognition that comes from winning provides a platform for the pursuit of non-scholarly activities. For others, laureate status does not bring much besides an onslaught of emails and invitations for speaking engagements.

But most laureates said the award was nonetheless an honor and that the experience of going to Sweden, where they receive the award from the king, was a very special moment in their professional lives.

A limited academic impact

Professors often receive Nobel Prizes too late their careers to open up new research opportunities. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that since the first Nobel Prize was given in 1901, the average age at which physicists complete their prize-winning work has jumped from 37 to 50. For chemists, this jump was from 36 to 46, and for medicine winners, 38 to 45.

Although Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that prizes should be awarded to achievements made in the preceding year, his foundation now recognizes accomplishments no matter when the work was completed. New laureates are typically older researchers with established careers who receive prizes for well-accepted work done decades earlier.

“There are many people for whom the prize completely opens horizons,” Philip Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 and is now a professor emeritus of physics, said. “I am not one of them.”

Anderson explained that when he won the award, he and the two other co-winners were already members of the National Academy of Sciences and senior figures in their fields.

“They just had to have to find some particular to hook our names onto, but there were three or four things I had done that could have been equally chosen as the development to hang the Nobel Prize on,” he said. “It may sound like an immodest-sounding statement, but it was true. I already had a lot of opportunities open for me and a number of attractive offers that I hadn’t taken.”

Molecular biology professor Eric Wieschaus, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the genes involved in embryonic development, said it was the scientific community’s acknowledgment of the value of experiments that propelled researchers’ careers forward, rather than the Nobel Prize itself.

“It’s odd,” Wieschaus said. “You might think that getting the Nobel Prize would be some significant thing, but I think it usually works that by the time you get the prize, the experiments are already acknowledged, the doors are already open.”

Nevertheless, some laureates said the prize can provide the visibility needed to work on large public projects.

Physics professor James Cronin, co-winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics along with emeritus physics professor Val Fitch, credited the prize with granting him the ability to recruit scientists to work on a project he was leading. After winning the prize, he built the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina with an international team composed of 250 scientists from 19 nations.

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“Having a Nobel Prize was very useful in that regard,” he said of the ability to recruit scientists globally.

Russell Hulse, who worked in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, said winning the prize allowed him the opportunity to speak publicly about one of his passions: math and science education. Hulse is now the Regental professor and associate vice president for strategic initiatives at University of Texas, Dallas seeking to further informal science education in schools and for the general public.

“I wanted to … take the opportunity afforded to me by the Nobel Prize to see if I could make a contribution to bring the excitement of science and engineering to a new generation of kids and adults,” Hulse said. “It may sound conventional to say this, but think that it is really true — first of all it is an enormous honor, and with that honor comes some responsibility, at least in my view, to do good with the blessing that one has received.”

While winning the prize may make a researcher’s name more recognizable nationwide, many laureates who continued teaching after winning said they did not notice a dramatic increase in the number of students enrolled in their classes.

According to economics professor Christopher Sims, who co-won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences this past fall, student interest in his courses hasn’t dramatically changed.

“I probably have more students shopping my classes,” he said. “But the number who actually take it for credit isn’t very different because the stuff I teach is pretty technical. Usually after the first couple of lectures and exercises, the numbers in the class drop drastically.”

Nevertheless, he noted that attendance in his course was higher than usual in the days immediately after he won the award.

“Some people may have also brought friends or something,” Sims said. “It lasted only a couple of lectures, and then it went back to normal.”

With victory, a flooded inbox

While receiving the prize has various effects on laureates’ teaching and research, most laureates said they had to contend with a flood of invitations for commemoration ceremonies and lecture series.

Upon returning to their home institutions, laureates find their inboxes flooded with invitations and requests for interviews. Universities around the globe invite them to give public lectures and attend symposia. Nonprofit organizations invite them to talk with high school students in classrooms about their work and serve as role models and mentors.

Cronin said that he often turns down invitations because he suspects that program sponsors “love to collect Nobel Prize winners.”

“You can be paid to have a fine first-class airfare trip to a place like Abu Dhabi or Dubai to participate in some kind of symposium, but it has no real scientific value, at least as far as I am concerned,” Cronin said.

Wieschaus said that he preferred to be invited to events on the basis of his work rather than just his laureate title. Earlier this year, he participated in a camp for high school students at Shantou University in China to promote science education. He noted that although he was one of eight scientists in attendance, he was the only laureate and not even the best-known member within the group.

“You would rather, as a scientist, have somewhat invite you [by saying], ‘Hey, they just heard about your experiment that you did four weeks ago, and they would love to invite you to come and talk about that experiment.’ And then you say, ‘Wow, yeah!’,” Wieschaus explained. “But if you said, ‘We’re organizing some meeting and would like to have a Nobel laureate speak, so would you be willing to come?’ The second is the less attractive invitation, obviously.”

While some invitations capitalize on the Nobel name, other invitations allow laureates the opportunity to discuss their work with the general public, which they said can lead to personal growth.

MIT Professor Frank Wilczek GS ’75 won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of asymptotic freedom of subatomic particles in the strong interaction, which allowed cosmologists to learn more about how matter behaved in the early moments of the Big Bang. He said that he receives two or three invitations a week that he takes seriously.

“It’s a lot,” he said. “I am sure it’s not as much as Britney Spears, but as a practical matter, it’s much more than I can accept, so I have to be selective.”

Although noting that accepting invitations detracts from time spent in research, Wilczek argued that they could also expose laureates to completely new fields and ideas. He said a public lecture series he once gave inspired him to write a book on the beauty of quantum mechanics, which also incorporated artwork and historical readings.

Professor Eric Maskin, a visiting lecturer in the economics department who won the 2007 Prize in Economic Sciences, said that while winning the prize didn’t influence his research agenda, it has positively affected his public career.

“The prize gives you a public visibility that you would not otherwise have, and so I’ve had the opportunity to speak to political leaders around the world, to general audiences around the world, and that’s been interesting,” Maskin said.

Maskin noted that he can only attend a “small fraction” of the invitations he receives, so he usually tries to pick the ones where he is especially needed. His experiences demonstrate another perk of the speaking engagements: the opportunity to serve as a mentor.

Last summer, he attended the Lindau Symposium for Nobel Laureates in southern Germany. He said there were many opportunities for the economic laureates there to talk with the several hundred economics students in attendance.

“I think the students really got a lot out of being able to listen to the lectures we gave, but more importantly, I think there were a lot of informal conversations between the generations,” Maskin said.

After accepting many invitations, laureates may itch to get back to their laboratories and offices; however, non-research opportunities may also arise during their hiatus.

Physics professor and 1993 Nobel laureate Joseph H. Taylor said winning the prize indirectly led him to accept a new administrative position as former dean of the faculty. After traveling and attending events for many years, he finally decided to return to his research. But then former University president Harold Shapiro GS ’64 offered him the position.

“I realized that if I said yes, and actually did serve as dean of the faculty, it would be an ironclad excuse for not doing much more traveling,” he said, adding more seriously that it was also a great opportunity to learn about the other 35 departments.

Yet perhaps one of the biggest perks of the prestige associated with the Nobel Prize is the opportunity to meet other researchers and laureates.

Anderson said receiving the prize was “wonderful,” explaining that winning allowed him to meet other physicists, in addition to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Wilczek said most laureates can relate to each others’ lives after winning the Nobel as well.

“We’ve all had to adjust our lives to either decide not to make use of the opportunities that are opened up, or else to adjust to very different ways of using our time and interacting with a different bunch of people than we are used to.”

Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article misstated the current position of Nobel laureate Russell Hulse. He is currently the Regental professor and associate vice president for strategic initiatives at the University of Texas, Dallas. The 'Prince' regrets the error.