How To Win A Nobel: A three minute guide

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Nature looks at 646 past laureates to work out who is statistically most likely to take home a medal

By 
• Emily Bates & 
• Kerri Smith
• 
  

• The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars.

  Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nobel prizes can be shared by up to three people) to work out which characteristics can be reliably linked to medals.

• Your best chance of winning comes when you’re 54, the age of 24 recipients. The average age of all laureates is 58.

• The youngest winner was Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he won the physics prize in 1915, together with his father, William Bragg, for their work analysing crystal structures using X-rays.

• The oldest was John B. Goodenough, who won the chemistry prize in 2019 at the age of 97. It was awarded to him and two others for developing lithium-ion batteries.

• The data suggest that for the best chance of a prize, you should identify as a man.

• If you identify as a woman, physiology or medicine is your best bet for an award.

• However, if you are a female scientist, your chances have improved in recent years.

  In the entire twentieth century, only 11 Nobel prizes were awarded to women. Since 2000, women have won another 15 prizes.

• You should expect to wait for your award — for about two decades after you produce your Nobel-worthy work1. So, on average, you should make a start on these projects by your 40s.

  The number of years between work and prize is lengthening as time goes by, with laureates before 1960 waiting an average of 14 years, and those honoured in the 2010s having to wait an average of 29 years. But there’s a time limit: prizes cannot be awarded posthumously.

• Be prepared to share the prize.

  Winners in physiology or medicine share the prize most often, with 65% of prizes awarded to two or three laureates. In chemistry, 55% of the prizes have been awarded to one laureate.

• Location matters for would-be awardees.

  To give yourself the best chance of winning a Nobel, you should ideally be born in North America and stay there.

• Almost 54% of all Nobel prizes were awarded to people in North America. And if you’re born anywhere else, the best option for winning a Nobel so far has been to move there.

• Alternatively, for a slightly lower chance, it helps to be born in Europe and stay, or to move there.

• Just ten awardees hail from low- and lower-middle-income countries, and most of this small group of winners had moved to North America or Europe by the time they were given their prize.

• You can greatly improve your chances of winning a Nobel by working in the laboratory of a scientist who already has one or will in the future, or by working with someone whose mentors won. Prizewinners often beget or emerge from the labs of other laureates2. They frequently share mentors or mentees — those who supervised them or their students, or their students’ students.

  Let’s start with an example of a particularly productive network in the bigger Nobel family tree.

• John W. Strutt, who won a physics prize in 1904 for his work on the properties of gases, has 228 academic descendants with Nobels — his students, their students and so on. Sometimes there are gaps between laureates, but they are still connected.

• Strutt had only one Nobel prizewinner among his trainees — Joseph Thomson, who won his Nobel in 1906.

• But Thomson really got the tree going — he trained nine physics winners (one of whom was his son, George Paget Thomson) and two in chemistry.

• And they went on to train many scientists who either won Nobels or produced prizewinners farther down their lineages.

• You might expect lots of separate clusters to emerge as distinct academic families. But it turns out that almost all Nobel laureates share some connection, however distant, as represented by this sprawling network.

  An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history.

• Only 32 laureates, have no connection to the bigger academic family.

A possible explanation is that talent begets talent, or that previous winners nominate their scientific descendants (researchers must be nominated to be considered for a prize, and the Nobel committees choose who can make these nominations). Either way, academic genealogy makes a big difference.

Aside from picking the right adviser, you can also increase your odds by choosing certain research areas.

An analysis3 of the 69 science prizes given from 1995 to 2017 found that a few disciplines are over-represented.

Just five subject areas account for more than half of the prizes mapped.

When asked about the statistics, representatives from the committees that award the Nobel prizes in science told Nature that any trend can have several different explanations. The committee members “work continuously to improve the nomination process, with the aim of broadening nominations with respect to gender, nationality and topics within fields in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine”.

As one last option, consider changing your name. The given names of 69 out of 642 science prize winners begin with J, and 62 with A. Good luck, Jennifer and Antonio!