Here's 8 densely printed pages of contributors to a discovery that lead to a Nobel prize:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7214#page=26

Guess how many of them were included in the prize. It's a shame that the Nobel committee shies away from awarding it to institutions, but the AlphaFold prize doesn't even make the top 10 in a list of most controversial omissions from a Nobel prize. It's a simple case of lab director gets the most credit.

Perhaps it's time the prize goes to the discovery itself instead of a person.

How do you give $1M to a discovery?

$1M ain't what it used to be.

It's not a case of shying away from it: the rules of the prize don't allow it.

rules of the prize can be changed.

Can they? I mean, in the sense that you can yolo anything, sure, but the prizes were designed in a time when it was (more) reasonable to award them to individuals, and they are defined in a will. There may not be a mechanism for updating the standards.

Yes, they can. In 1901, science was not nearly as collaborative as it is today. Especially considering the need for a Nobel Prize to be experimental and the fact that most major labs today _need_ dozens of people.

He asked _can_ not _should_: what is the legal mechanism for doing so? Personally I don't doubt there is one but I don't think you know it off the top of your head, so I don't see it as fair to disparage OP for not knowing either.

Well, it seems like amendments have been made before. [0] > Before the board ... votes on a proposal to amend the statutes ... with the first paragraph, the prize-awarding bodies shall examine the proposal.

https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-regulations-...

That…has nothing to do with my question. It was a procedural and legal question, not an abstract moral one.

Well, it seems like amendments have been made before. [0] > Before the board ... votes on a proposal to amend the statutes ... with the first paragraph, the prize-awarding bodies shall examine the proposal.

https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-regulations-...

The nature of scientific work has changed significantly since 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were established. 100 years ago, lots of scientific work really were driven forward largely by a singular person. That's rarely true today for groundbreaking research. I don't know if this means the Nobel needs to change or we need a another prize that reflects the collaborative work of modern science.

> The nature of scientific work has changed significantly since 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were established. 100 years ago, lots of scientific work really were driven forward largely by a singular person. That's rarely true today for groundbreaking research.

The question is: is this a necessity for doing good science today, or rather an artifact of how important research is organized today (i.e. an artifact of the bureacratic and organizational structure that you have to "accept"/"tolerate" if you want to do want to have a career in science)?

So I did a mini research project on Claude to answer your question. From 1900-1930, 87% of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine were awarded to individual contributions, 13% were awarded to collaborative contributions.

This ratio has flipped in the past 30 years, from 1994-2023, where 17% prizes were individual, 83% collaborative.

So I'd say yes, collaborative work is increasingly a requirement to do groundbreaking research today. The organizational structures and funding are a part of the reason as you mention. But it's also that modern scientific problems are more complex. I used to have a professor that used to say about biology "the easy problems have been solved". While I think that's dismissive to some of the ingenious experiments done in the past, there's some truth to it.

This begs the question. If all science is now structured as big research teams, we'd expect the breakthroughs to come from such teams. That doesn’t necessarily imply that teams are needed.

Your argument is exactly a central part of the point that I raised.

And further down: ” Contributions

J.J. and D.H. led the research. J.J., R.E., A. Pritzel, M.F., O.R., R.B., A. Potapenko, S.A.A.K., B.R.-P., J.A., M.P., T. Berghammer and O.V. developed the neural network architecture and training. T.G., A.Ž., K.T., R.B., A.B., R.E., A.J.B., A.C., S.N., R.J., D.R., M.Z. and S.B. developed the data, analytics and inference systems. D.H., K.K., P.K., C.M. and E.C. managed the research. T.G. led the technical platform. P.K., A.W.S., K.K., O.V., D.S., S.P. and T. Back contributed technical advice and ideas. M.S. created the BFD genomics database and provided technical assistance on HHBlits. D.H., R.E., A.W.S. and K.K. conceived the AlphaFold project. J.J., R.E. and A.W.S. conceived the end-to-end approach. J.J., A. Pritzel, O.R., A. Potapenko, R.E., M.F., T.G., K.T., C.M. and D.H. wrote the paper.”

> J.J. and D.H. led the research

Hey, I wonder who these mysterious "J.J." and "D.H." might be?

These people aren't in the "These authors contributed equally" list.

They didnt give the award to the paper

The paper represents the work which lead to the prize.

if A=B and A=C, then A=C

> if A=B and A=C, then A=C

Technically true, but you might still want to double check your logic.

Not all of the work. For example, it doesn't account for the fact that Demis Hassabis, as head of DeepMind, undoubtedly recruited many of the co-authors to participate in this effort, which is worth something when it comes to the final output.

To recruit isn't scientific work.

I didn't realize the Nobel specified that the only work which mattered was that of the "scientific" variety.

What will the paper do with the prize money?

At least they could have read it before awarding the price.