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We Have So Few
In 2003, the number of Russian Nobel Prize winners increased by 10% from 17 to 19. However, our compatriots still make up less than 3% of the 705 winners of this supreme honor, although there may be differences of opinion regarding the winners’ nationality.
Superconducting and Superfluid
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Academician Petr Kapitsa (above) waited 40 years for his well-deserved honor. He received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for work published in 1938. The Nobel Committee responded quickly to Nikolai Basov (below) and Aleksandr Prokhorov’s discovery of the laser, awarding them the prize only five years after their discovery |
The 2003 Nobel Prize in physics, worth 10 million Swedish kroner ($1.33 million), was divided equally among Englishman Anthony Leggett and two Russian physicists, Vitaly Ginzburg of the Lebedev Physical Institute and Aleksei Abrikosov, who has lived and worked in America at Argonne National Laboratory for the past ten years.
Academicians Ginzburg and Abrikosov won the Nobel Prize for their “pioneering contribution” to the theory of low-temperature superconductivity, and Professor Leggett, for the same contribution to the theory of 3He superfluidity. They all won the prize for discoveries made fairly long ago. Anthony Leggett discovered the phenomenon of superfluidity of the rare natural helium isotope in the 1970s (superfluidity of the usual 4He isotope has been known for a long time and is well studied; Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes won the Nobel Prize for work on this phenomenon back in 1913, as did Lev Landau in 1962 and Petr Kapitsa in 1978. Vitaly Ginzburg (born 1916) and Aleksei Abrikosov (born 1928) received the prize for scientific achievements dating to the 1950s, which is entirely in keeping with the Nobel Committee’s practice of selecting Nobel Prize winners for physics.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Academician Andrei Sakharov, was no great admirer of the Soviet state and social systems, just like Academician Ivan Pavlov (below), who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in medicine |
After the so-called physics revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the principal discoveries that form the basis of modern science were made, there were no new breakthroughs on this scale. Scientists, figuratively speaking, dug wider and deeper in already known places, and it took time to clarify how greatly of their individual achievements differed from a series of similar individual discoveries
If you analyze the date of the discoveries for which physicists received the Nobel Prize starting in the 1920s, it turns out that they had to wait between 5 and 50 years for their prize. Examples of “ultrafast” reactions by the Nobel Committee include Nikolai Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who received the prize in 1964 for the laser, which they devised in 1959 and built in 1963, and Zhores Alferov, who received the prize in 2000 for work on semiconductors in the early 1990s. Nobel laureates who waited extra-long for their prizes are also well known, for example, Petr Kapitsa, who won in 1978 for work on liquid helium published in 1938. On average, the Nobel Committee’s award takes 25 years to find its recipient. Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank, and Igor Tamm won the prize in 1958 for discovering and developing a theory of the Cherenkov effect in the early 1930s.
When Petr Kapitsa learned of his award in 1978, he sarcastically remarked on the TV program “Time” (Vremya), “Well, thank you very much. It finally dawned on you.” Winner of the 2003 prize, Vitaly Ginzburg, told the First Rating (Pervy reiting) correspondent, “Aleksei Abrikosov and I were nominated as candidates for the Nobel Prize 30 years ago. I gave up on it a long time ago: they didn’t give it, and again they didn’t give it. I was sitting in my office when some gentleman from Stockholm called and told me in English that I had won. At first I thought it was a joke.”
Posthumous Awards
According to the Nobel Prize rules, only a candidate who is alive and in good health can be nominated. However, there have been cases where the winner has died between the time of his nomination and the announcement of his name as a winner. There have already been two of these cases. The Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt died in April 1931, but was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in October. Then in September 1961, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld died in an airplane crash in the Congo, and in October, the Nobel Committee declared him the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1961.
Head of the UN mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira di Mello, was nominated for the peace prize in 2003 and was considered one of the favorites. He was fatally wounded in a terrorist attack in Baghdad on August 19. However, this time, despite the support of another Nobel laureate, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Nobel Committee did not award the prize posthumously.
If the Right Person Comes Along
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Winners of Nobel Prizes related to Russian and Soviet literature: Mikhail Sholokhov (1965) |
The situation with Nobel Prizes in two other natural science disciplines, chemistry and physiology/medicine is more complex. The 2003 prize in physiology and medicine went to a 74-year-old American, Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and a 70-year-old Englishman, Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, for discoveries in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Although the Nobel Committee’s official announcement states that observation of a person’s internal organs using precise, noninvasive methods is very important in medical diagnostics, treatment, and further study of the organs and their diseases, we are really dealing with physics, namely, applied use of the phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a discovery that was honored with a Nobel physics prize in 1952.
In just the same way, the 2003 prize in chemistry was awarded to 54-year-old Peter Agre of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and 47-year-old Roderick MacKinnon of Rockefeller University in New York. In his work with brain cells in 1998, MacKinnon determined the structure of the potassium ion membrane channel, while Agre isolated and marked a membrane protein that turned out to be the long-sought-after membrane channel for water molecules. Peter Agre explained in plain language why humans excrete salt water even though we drink fresh water, and Roderick MacKinnon showed what happens when this mechanism breaks down. Is this chemistry or physiology and medicine?
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Winners of Nobel Prizes related to Russian and Soviet literature: Joseph Brodsky (1987) |
It no longer makes sense to emphasize the discipline for which a Nobel Prize is awarded. For example, the 2003 prize in economics for methods of analyzing economic trends went to physicist Robert Engle of New York University (who also had time to make a respectable, but not Nobel-Prize-winning contribution to liquid helium research) and British astrophysicist Clive Granger, who also unexpectedly (even for him) became an economist and now works at the University of California. They simply used statistical methods for processing experimental data, which they were familiar with as physicists, to analyze economic data over many years and demonstrated to economists that this method could be used to estimate financial market volatility with time with high reliability. In other words, we are talking about the possibility of predicting rises or falls of financial market indices by applying the physical simulations used in preparing modern meteorological forecasts.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Winners of Nobel Prizes related to Russian and Soviet literature: Ivan Bunin (1933) |
In summary, physicists received Nobel Prizes in 2003 in three different disciplines: in their own, in economics, and in physiology and medicine. Physiologists and doctors received the prize in chemistry, leaving nothing for chemists. The situation was much the same in 2002, when two prizes went to physicists: one for physics (for neutrino capture methods and the discovery of X-ray sources in space) and one for chemistry (for improving mass spectrometry and NMR spectrometry for studying molecules in the living organism). Physiologists received their prize for genetic control of organ development and programmed cell death, and chemists were once again left without anything.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Winners of Nobel Prizes related to Russian and Soviet literature: Boris Pasternak (1958) |
The Peace Prize is probably the most unpredictable and “nonprofessional” Nobel Prize. It has been awarded to physicists (e.g., Andrei Sakharov), chemists (Linus Pauling), and doctors. The 2003 Peace Prize was a surprise once again. Everyone expected that the winner would be Pope John Paul II, but it went instead to a little-known Iranian human rights advocate, Shirin Abadi.
The Nobel Prize in literature may be the only one still confined to its discipline. In any case, all the winners have actually been the authors of literary works. The winner of the 2003 prize was South African prose writer John Maxwell Coetzee.
Why Our People Rarely Win
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| Photo: Pavel Kassin |
| Winners of Nobel Prizes related to Russian and Soviet literature: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) |
The only way to understand certain paradoxical decisions of the Nobel Committee is to know what goes on behind the scenes during the decision-making. The scientists of the so-called endowing organizations who make up the jury play a decisive role. They are professors of the corresponding discipline who work at institutes of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Medical and Surgical Institute in Stockholm (for physiology and medicine), the Swedish Academy of 18 “immortals” (for literature), and the Nobel Committee of five members of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament; for the peace prize).
According to Professor Abram Bloch, who is thoroughly familiar with Nobel procedures, the jury receives proposals for awards from five sources: members of the endowing organizations themselves; proposals presented by professors of five Scandinavian universities (two in Sweden and one each in Denmark, Norway, and Finland); five non-Scandinavian universities chosen each year on a rotation basis, whose professors also receive the right to submit lists of candidates; Nobel laureates, who have a lifelong right to nominate candidates annually; and finally, letters from confidants, i.e., persons who enjoy the special esteem and trust of the Nobel Committee, which make up the largest number of applications. The slightest hint that any one of them has disclosed the names of his or her candidates results in automatic lifelong exclusion of this person from the list of confidants.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Russian native, chemist Ilya Prigogine (1977 prize) |
The Nobel Committee was interested in the opinion of 100 physicists and 200 chemists in the Soviet Union. In 2002, 70 people in Russia received letters from the committee asking them to propose candidates for prizes in various disciplines. This difference is not due to the indiscretion of Russian scientists, but to the natural loss of people the Nobel Committee was used to working with: some have died, and others have emigrated from Russia.
In Soviet times, the Iron Curtain hampered the lobbying efforts of our native confidants of the Nobel Committee by restricting contacts between Soviet scientists, especially public figures, and their Western colleagues. Today, the problem is the lack of necessary experience and a lack of desire to acquire it. As a vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) said to the “First Rating” correspondent in a conversation on this topic, “we have strong scientific schools, but we have no schools for establishing good relations with the international scientific community.” This, rather than any secret hatred of Scandinavians towards Russians after the Battle of Poltava (fought in 1709 between Russia and Sweden), probably explains why a country like Russia has such a disproportionately small number of scientists, writers, and public figures among the current 705 Nobel Prize winners.
How Many Is a Few?
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| Photo: AP |
| physicist Pavel Cherenkov (1958) |
There are various ways of counting native Nobel laureates. For example, you can include Ivan Bunin (“for ethical strength in adhering to the unique traditions of Russian prose”) and Joseph Brodsky (“for lucidity of mind and poetic intensity”) among Russian Nobel Prize winners for literature in 1933 and 1987, respectively, since both of them lived a good part of their lives in Russia and wrote in Russian. However, the Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Bunin as a “stateless person born in Voronezh” and Brodsky, as a citizen of the United States, and so they remain for the rest of the world. Then there was Ilya Mechnikov, who won the prize in physiology and medicine in 1908 as a Russian subject; but he had been forced to leave Russia in 1888 because of anti-Semitism at Odessa University and spent the last 30 years of his life in Paris, where he worked at the Pasteur Institute. The 2003 prize in physics was awarded to Aleksei Abrikosov, whom the Nobel Committee designated as “a citizen of the Russian Federation (and the United States).” Thus, for the rest of the world, Mechnikov and Abrikosov will always be Russian Nobel laureates.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet economist to win a Nobel Prize (1975) |
According to Nobel Committee estimates, there are 19 Russian prizewinners, 10 of whom are physicists. They are Petr Cherenkov, Igor Tamm, and Ilya Frank (1958); Lev Landau (1962); Aleksandr Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov (1964); Petr Kapitsa (1978); Zhores Alferov (2000); and Vitaly Ginzburg and Aleksei Abrikosov (2003). Writers are in second place. Boris Pasternak won the prize in 1958 “for significant achievements in both contemporary lyric poetry and the great Russian epic tradition”; Mikhail Sholokhov won in 1965 “for the artistic power with which he reflected a historic period in the life of the Russian people in his Don epic”; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won in 1970 “for the epic strength with which he followed the unique traditions of Russian literature.”
The prize in physiology and medicine was awarded to Ivan Pavlov in 1904 for his achievements in the field of physiology of digestion and to Ilya Mechnikov in 1908 for his discovery of the immune system. The 1956 prize in chemistry went to Nikolai Semenov for his contribution to the theory of chain reactions. Leonid Kantorovich won the 1975 in economics for his contribution to the theory of optimal distribution of labor. The 1975 peace prize was awarded to Andrei Sakharov “for his struggle against all forms of repression of human dignity”; and the 1990 peace prize, to Mikhail Gorbachev “for his leading role in the peace process that characterizes the international community today.” Finally, with great reservations, Academician Dr. Evgeny Chazov was a joint winner of the 1985 peace prize as one of the founders of the international organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
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| Photo: ITAR-TASS |
| Soviet physicist Lev Landau (1962) |
Of course, there may be indignation at the absence of Lev Tolstoi or chemist Dmitry Mendeleev from the ranks of Nobel laureates, but in his will, Alfred Nobel gave the Nobel Committee the right to decide independently whether Tolstoi’s prose, Mendeleev’s table, or something else was more important to humanity. The only time the committee displays obvious injustice towards Russia is in cases where it patently ignores the precedence of our citizens.
There have been two such cases. In the 1950s, Kiev geneticist Sergei Gershenson demonstrated the possibility of reverse transcription, that is, DNA synthesis on an RNA template (which at the time was considered absolutely impossible), but two Americans, David Baltimore and Howard Temin, received the prize for this discovery in 1975. Then in the early 1960s, Soviet chemists Boris Belousov and Aleksandr Zhabotinsky discovered so-called self-oscillating reactions and formulated the theory for them, but Belgian citizen Ilya Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in 1977 for almost the same discovery, i.e., the theory of self-regulation. There may be some small consolation in the fact that Ilya Prigogine was Russian by birth, knew his native language well, genuinely loved his historic homeland, and was not the only foreign Nobel Prize winner with Russian roots.
Russians at Heart
Besides Ilya Prigogine, other Russian-born Nobel Prize winners include Americans Simon Kuznets amd Vasily Leontev, who both won the prize in economics, and Selman Waksman, who won for physiology and medicine, as well as British citizen Joseph Rotblat, who was born in Warsaw in 1908 (part of the Russian Empire at the time) and won the 1995 peace prize.
Second-generation Britons with Russian roots include physiologists Sir Bernard Katz and John Vane and chemist Herbert Brown. American Nobel Prize winners born into families of immigrants from the Russian Empire, RSFSR, or USSR include Saul Bellow (literature); physicists Donald Arthur Glaser, Sheldon Glashow, and Arthur Schawlow; chemist Melvin Calvin; and physiologists André Michel Lvov, Daniel Nathans, and Stanley Cohen.
Third-generation American Robert Horwitz (prize in physiology and medicine in 2002) and British citizen Ernst Boris Chain, whose father was a subject of the Russian Empire, have an even more distant relation with Russia. Henryk Sienkiewicz (prize in literature) and double winner Marie Sklodowska-Curie (prizes for physics and chemistry) were formally subjects of the Russian Empire by birthplace, although as Poles, they would not have been pleased at being listed as Russian Nobel Prize winners.
If you include these quasi-Russians, the number of Russian Nobel winners comes to more than 40. It is nice to know that if Russian history had followed another path in due course, Russia might have been among the world’s five most talented countries.
Sergei Petukhov
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 12, 2004
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