Nobel prizes are still failing to celebrate the diversity of science

The Nobel committees seem to have an unfortunate habit of overlooking women and Black people when it comes to science – this must change, says Alexandra Thompson





It is that time of year when congratulations are in order, as some of the best minds in science are awarded a Nobel prize. The latest winners have a few things in common: they undoubtedly have an impressive body of work – and they are all men, they live in high-income countries and none of them is Black.

Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros won the prize for physiology or medicine for their discovery of microRNAs and the role they play in controlling genes, which could help treat cancer. A string of papers led to this discovery, many of which list Rosalind Lee – Ambros’s wife – as an author. The Nobel committee for physiology or medicine was keen to recognise Lee on social media, but didn’t go as far as awarding her a medal. Maybe it thinks that one per household is good enough.



Lee’s omission may seem familiar. In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins took home the same prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA. This was off the back of three papers published in the same issue of Nature. One was co-authored by Wilkins, one by Watson and Crick, and the third by Rosalind Franklin, who captured an image of DNA having two chains. Prior to the image’s publication, it had ended up in the hands of Watson and Crick, and informed their model of DNA as a double helix. Franklin, who died from ovarian cancer in 1958, was left off the Nobel trophy due to a rule against posthumous awards.

Perhaps the committee dislikes the name Rosalind. But 972 people have won Nobel prizes since their inception in 1901, and only 64 were women. The hit rate for the physics prize, awarded this year to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries related to machine learning, is particularly bad – only five women have ever won.

At least women in science have seen some recognition. No Black person has ever won a science Nobel, and there have only been 17 Black winners in total across the peace, literature and economics prizes. Many argue that Charles Drew, an African American man who discovered how to store blood plasma long term, should have won for medicine, while Percy Julian, who figured out how to synthesise medical compounds from plants, was snubbed for chemistry.


#NobelSoWhite and #GenderGapInScience#WomenInSTEM, #BlackAndSTEM, and #DecolonizeScience#NobelSoWhite#GenderGapInScience#WomenInSTEM#BlackInSTEM
#LatinxInSTEM#IndigenousInSTEM




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