Nobel Dreams

"The Curie story had also demonstrated that the Nobel Prizes had been born at a very lucky time," Feldman noted, a time when international science and literature was becoming "modern" and too specialized for the public to judge without some arbiter handing out the laurels. DNA, the nuclear bomb, and cloning may be hard to comprehend, but everyone understands that "these sciences embody vast and revolutionary might of an uncertain kind," Feldman wrote.

Still, after more than a century of prominence, the strictures of the Nobel Prize-- each one given to no more than three living individuals for specific achievements--seem increasingly unsuitable to the ways of modern science. "The Nobel Prize Is Really Annoying," wrote Caltech physicist Sean Carroll this week on hisPreposterous Universe blog. At least five other scientists, four of them living, cooked up the idea of the Higgs boson, he says, and deserve some credit.

Modern scientists often work in massive teams, whether on the Human Genome Project or at CERN, the European lab that experimentally verified the Higgs particle's existence last year. Pendlebury suggests that the science prizes ought to consider making awards to institutions rather than to specific individuals, and he cites the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a precedent.

In any case, McGrayne isn't so sure that regular people are paying attention to the Nobel Prizes anymore, despite the annual news coverage of their announcement.

"Academics compete for it. Institutions 'buy' scientists they've heard are in the running for prizes. Institutions list the number of Nobel Prizes they have on staff," McGrayne said by email. "But this doesn't sound to me like the kind of mass-magazine hero worship that Curie got." When Marie Curie arrived by ship in New York City in 1921, she was flooded by newspaper reporters, and housewives nationwide donated money to buy radium for her institute.

"She's still the only woman scientist that most people can name," McGrayne says. "Do we even know the names of recent winners?"