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The Nobel Prize for Physics

Physics is perhaps the most recognized of the three primary scientific disciplines. The prominent names include the likes of: Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger (of "Schrodinger's Cat" fame), Max Planck, Felix Bloch, Arno Penzias, Murray Gell-Mann, and Richard Feynman, to name just a few. This is an elite group working in areas of great importance, too complex for most of us to fathom. Intellectually, their work is simply the leading edge. Ultimately, it touches our lives in the form of: X-rays, electrons, color photography, wireless radio, relativity, quantum physics, nuclear power and weapons, the nature of light, nuclear magnetic resonance, transistors, lasers, and other discoveries and inventions too numerous to describe.

So, who gets the awards? How have the Jews and others done in the competition?

Chance would say that of 174 prizes awarded from 1901 through 2004, Jews should have gotten none, or at best one. That is, with two-tenths of 1 percent of the world's population, one might reasonably expect Jews to get 2 of every 1,000 prizes (1 of every 500). With 174 prizes awarded, the odds are that at best one Jew might have earned a Nobel for physics, but only if that person beat the odds.

Actually, Jews have received forty-eight of the 174 awards. All forty-eight are identified in Exhibit 4a, but among them are:

• Albert Einstein, 1921, "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." (Interestingly, Einstein's Nobel was not for his immensely important theories of special relativity or general relativity.)
• Niels Bohr, 1922, "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and the radiation emanating from them."
• Lev Landau, 1962, "for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium."
• Richard Feynman, 1965, "for . . . fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics."
• Murray Gell-Mann, 1969, "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions."
• Dennis Gabor, 1971, "for his invention and development of the holographic method."
• Leon Cooper, 1972, "for their (Cooper and non-Jews John Bardeen and John Schrieffer) jointly developed theory of superconductivity."
• Arno Penzias, 1978, "for their (with non-Jew Robert Woodrow Wilson) discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation."
• Frederick Reines, 1995, "for the detection of the neutrino."
• Martin Perl, 1995, "for discovery of the tau lepton."

And thirty-eight more. All of the Nobel Prizes for physics are shown in Exhibit 4a with the names of Jews highlighted.

If the Jews had been citizens of a single nation, that country would have come in second, behind the United States, in Nobel awards for physics (seventy-five for the United States versus forty-eight for the Jews), Germans would come in third with twenty-eight, six more than Britain's twenty-two. France has eleven, the USSR/Russia eight and the Netherlands, six.

Of the seventy-five U.S. recipients, nineteen were native-born Jews, and another thirteen were Jews that lived in the United States and one or more other country during their lifetime (such as Einstein who lived in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States). Given that 2 percent of the U.S. population is Jewish, we should count ourselves grateful that Jews have helped us win 43 percent of our Nobels.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine

Though declining reimbursement rates from HMO's, Medicare and other payers, bureaucratic interference in decisions, paperwork, and malpractice lawsuits, practicing medicine has become a good deal less satisfying in recent years, it remains a career for the best and the brightest. At the leading edge of that field, though not necessarily in daily clinical practice, are the medical researchers who for whom quintessential recognition comes with the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.

Over time, at the behest of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which administers the award, the focus has shifted from physiology to medicine and the standard now used to determine the winners is "fundamental research in human health." In that assignment, the awards have gone to those whose discoveries and insights have changed our lives for the better. Immunization against tetanus and diphtheria won the first award in 1901. Since then, Nobels have gone for breakthroughs involving tuberculosis, malaria, chemotherapy, insulin, blood types, chromosomes, synthesis of vitamins, penicillin, DNA's double helix, cholesterol, monoclonal antibodies, and beta blockers, to name just a few. Like physics, medicine is vital. Those on the forefront have made enormous contributions to our world.

Since that first Nobel for physiology and medicine, in 1901, 182 Awards have been made. (For a variety of reasons, Nobels have not been awarded every year, and in some years more than one laureate has been honored.) Forty-nine (27 percent) of those have gone to Jews. This is half of the ninety-seven that went to U.S. citizens and nearly double the twenty-five awards that went to second-place winner, Britain. Germany with eighteen and Switzerland with eleven are the only other countries with more than ten 10 Nobel Prize laureates in physiology and medicine.

Among the forty-nine Jewish winners were:

• Karl Landsteiner, 1930, "for his discovery of human blood groups."
• Sir Ernst Boris Chain, 1945, "for the discovery (with non-Jews Alexander Fleming and Howard Walter Florey) of penicillin and its curative effects in various infectious diseases."
• Selman Waksman, 1952, "for his discovery of streptomycin, the first molecule effective against tuberculosis."
• Korad Block, 1964, "for their discoveries (with non-Jew Feodor Lynen) concerning the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism."
• Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown, 1985, "for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism." (Both Goldstein and Brown were later instrumental in the discovery of statins.)
• Stanley Prusiner, 1997, "for his discovery of Prions - a new biological principle of infection." (Prions were discovered to be involved in "mad cow disease".)
• And forty-two others, all of them highlighted in the list of all winners of the Nobel for physiology and medicine included as Exhibit 4b at the end of the book.

Interestingly, neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin, the two Jewish conquerors of polio, received Nobels for their important discoveries which brought an end to the polio scourge which lasted till the mid-1950s. With Salk and Sabin, the Nobel count for Jews in physiology and medicine would have been fifty-one.

The Albany Medical Center Prize and Other Medical Awards

Five years ago, the Albany Medical Center announced the creation of a new prestigious prize to "be awarded each spring to a physician or scientist, or group, whose work has led to significant advances in the fields of health care and scientific research with demonstrated translational benefits applied to improved patient care." With its $500,000 award, the Albany Medical Center Prize in medicine and biomedical research was immediately recognized as the second richest prize in medicine and, after the Nobel, the most prestigious award in American medicine.

To date, there have been six awards. The first went to Dr. Arnold J. Levine, who co-discovered the p53 protein, described as perhaps the most important tumor suppressor gene in human cancer. (About 50 percent of all human cancers contain a mutation in p53.) The second award went to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci for his "pioneering work helping researchers understand how the AIDS virus destroys the body's defenses, his groundbreaking work in developing effective therapies for several once fatal rheumatic diseases, his efforts spearheading the drive for vaccines to prevent the HIV virus, smallpox, anthrax, and the Ebola virus, as well as his overall scientific leadership and public service." The third award went to Dr. Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Michael S. Brown. Goldstein and Brown are doubly recognized in that they also received the 1985 Nobel Prize for their discovery (cited above) that people with a common genetic predisposition to heart disease lacked receptors in their cells that transport LDL cholesterol out of the bloodstream causing it to accumulate on artery walls. The April/May 2003 Albany award was for subsequent work involving how a family of proteins regulates the amount of cholesterol by controlling LDL receptors (which led to the development of statins) and their joint discovery of an insulin-sensitive regulator that holds promise in treating a rare form of diabetes.

Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert W. Boyer won the 2004 Albany Awards for their pioneering work in recombinant DNA (gene cloning), "paved the way for the modern biotechnology industry. They were the first to cut DNA and insert different genes into the DNA sequence, allowing the original cell to then reproduce the new DNA during cell division. This led to production of such products as human growth hormone and other pharmaceuticals to treat a wide range of ailments. Boyer went on to co-found Genentech, Inc. and Cohen chaired Stanford's Department of Genetics.

Goldstein and Brown are Jewish (see the Nobel list), as are Levine and Cohen. Thus, two-thirds of the Albany Prize's through 2004 have gone to Jews.

By way of comparison, Jews have won 26 percent of The Gairdner Foundation Awards, 36 percent of the Wolf prizes in Medicine, 40 percent of the Louisa Gross Horwitz prizes, and 32 percent of the GM Cancer Research Foundation Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. prizes.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry

These days, chemistry is not perceived as being nearly as glamorous as physics or medicine. Few laymen could recall a single Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in the way they could quickly cite Einstein, Fermi, or Heisenberg for physics.

For most of us, the two winners whose names we would immediately recognize, we would probably not associate with the Nobel Award for chemistry. Linus Pauling is most remembered for mega doses of vitamin C and his outspoken efforts on behalf of world peace. Few know he won a Nobel in 1954 for his 1928-30 creation of the valence bonding theory and a second for Peace in 1962.

There have only been three other double winners - including Marie Curie who won a prize for physics in 1903 (for research on radioactivity) and one for chemistry in 1911 (for the discovery of radium and polonium), John Bardeen (Physics, 1956 and 1972), and Frederick Sanger (Chemistry, 1958 and 1980).

Wile some might say the zenith of chemical discovery passed in the nineteenth-century, there have been continuing major discoveries that effect on our daily lives in such fields as thermodynamics (1920), radioactive isotopes (1921), the synthesis of vitamins C and A (1937), sex hormones (1938), electrophoresis (1948), analysis of protein (1958), carbon-14 dating (1960), analysis of hemoglobin (1962), and base sequence of chromosomes (1980).

Chemical research remains important and, with the possible exception of failing to grant awards to Mendeleev (the creator of the periodic table), and Josiah Gibbs (developer of chemical thermodynamics), Nobel awards have gone to the world's leading chemists of the last century or so.

There have been 146 Nobel Awards for chemistry since the first award in 1901. Awards were made in ninety-six of the 104 years. As before, given the statistic of two Jews per 1,000 in the world's population, Jews would be unlikely to have won even a single prize. In fact, they have received twenty-six (18 percent) of the Prizes for chemistry. This is slightly fewer than half the number earned by U.S. citizens (fifty-five), equal to the twenty-six won by Germans, three more than the British (twenty-three), and nineteen more than fourth-placed France with seven.

Among Jews who have won the Nobel for chemistry are:

• Richard Willstatter, 1915, "for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll."
• Fritz Haber, 1918 "for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements."
• Walter Gilbert, 1980, "for their (with non-Jew Fredrich Sanger) contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids."
• Paul Berg, 1980, "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA."

And twenty-two others, all included in Exhibit 4c.

The Fields Medal (for Mathematics)

John Nash received a Nobel Prize for economics in 1994. He was immensely pleased with the recognition and it probably contributed to his recovery from more than thirty years of schizophrenia. Ironically, the onset of his schizophrenia arose almost simultaneously with his immense disappointment at not winning the Fields Medal in 1958. To quote Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind,

"To understand how deep the disappointment was, one must know that the Fields Medal is the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the ultimate distinction that a mathematician can be granted by his peers, the trophy of trophies."

Nash's Nobel was for economics, but he thought of himself as a mathematician.

There is a fascinating, but groundless, bit of gossip suggesting the reason there is no Nobel for mathematics is because Gosta Mittag-Leffler, a mathematics professor at the University of Stockholm, had an affair with Nobel's wife, leading Nobel to damn all mathematicians. The problem is Nobel never married. But Nobel did know Mittag-Leffler, and disliked him. Moreover, Nobel preferred practical science to basic research. He thought mathematics was too theoretical to warrant a Nobel.

John Charles Fields was a Canadian, born in 1863. He devoted his career to mathematics, earning a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He taught and studied mathematics in the United States, Paris and Berlin before returning to a professorship at the University of Toronto. As organizer and president of the 1924 International Congress of Mathematics, he attracted sponsors and money to establish an international award in mathematics. At his death in 1932, his estate went to help establish the prize.

The first awards were made in 1936, but because of World War II, no further awards were made until 1950. Awards have been made every four years since. Eligibility is restricted to mathematicians under the age of forty, and while the prize of $15,000 Canadian (equivalent to about $9,600 U.S.) won't go very far, the international recognition is immense, ensuring subsequent offers of full professorships that dwarf the prize money while providing career and financial security. The relatively young age (forty) by which one must be awarded the prize reflects both the notion that mathematicians do some of their best work at a very early age and the wish to encourage "further achievement by the recipients."

Selection of awards is intended to be truly international. Quoting from John Charles Fields' letter establishing the medal:

"One would hear again emphasized the fact that the medals should be of a character as purely international and impersonal as possible. There should not be attached to them in any way the name of any country, institution or person."

Since 1966, up to four medals can be awarded every four years when the International Congress of Mathematicians meets. There have been forty-four Fields Medals awarded through August of 2002. Those honored are included in Exhibit 4d with the names of the Jewish winners highlighted.

Though U.S. citizens have won the most medals (ten), other countries have done well. France and the UK both have seven winners, Russia six, Japan and Germany three each, and Belgium two.

When looking at the universities where the winners were teaching at the time of the award, one senses why John Nash, then at Princeton, was hopeful. Ten of the forty-four winners were at Princeton when they won the Fields Medal. Seven were at the Institut des Hautes Scientifiques (IHES) in Paris. Four each were at Cambridge and Harvard, and two each were at Oxford, MIT, and Moscow University.

Using the two in 1,000 proportion that Jews are in the world, and the fact that only forty-four medals have been awarded, one would not expect any Jews to have won a Fields Medal. And in this domain, it is more difficult to know for sure because little analysis has been done on this question of ethnic, religious, or cultural affiliation. This is in sharp contrast to the Nobel, where notoriety has made the question of which winners were Jews a matter of more public discussion.

Nonetheless, Jews have taken twelve (27 percent) of the forty-four medals. This is roughly one hundred times more than one would expect.

Other Mathematical Awards

Lest there be doubt the Fields Medal awards are not representative of achievements by Jews in mathematics, three additional prestigious awards in mathematics, all administered by the American Mathematical Society, deserve mention:

• The Frank Nelson Cole Prizes in algebra and number theory, honoring Cole who served as secretary of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society until his death in 1926. Of the forty-two awards made since 1928, nineteen (45 percent) have gone to Jews. (See Exhibit 4e.)
• The Bocher Memorial Prize honors Maxime Bocher for a notable research memoir in mathematical analysis. Of the twenty-seven awards made since 1923, eleven (41 percent) have gone to Jews. (See Exhibit 4g.)
• The Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, made under the auspices of the AMS, is granted "for the cumulative influence of the total mathematical work of the recipient, high level of research over a period of time, particular influence on the development of a field, and influence on mathematics through PhD. students. Of the forty-four awards to date, twenty-two (half) have gone to Jews. (See Exhibit 4g.)
• Perhaps less prestigious, the Wolf Prize in mathematics was established by Dr. Ricardo Wolf, an inventor, diplomat, and philanthropist and awarded every year for outstanding achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people. The mathematics award is one of six (agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and arts). Of the forty-three mathematics awards made since 1978, sixteen (37 percent) have gone to Jews. This award is not administered by the AMS, and because Wolf became an Israeli citizen, some might give this award less credence for our purposes as contrasted with the other three awards and the Fields Medal. (See Exhibit 4h.)

The A. M. Turing Award

It seems every major award wants to be counted as the Nobel Prize of one thing or another. Computer science is no exception. The Association for Computing Machinery created the A. M. Turing Award in the 1960s to honor "the individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community." As one might expect, a November 23, 1998 Microsoft press release honoring Jim Gray, as a winner of this $100,000 award, described the Turing as being "regarded in technical circles as the Nobel Prize of computer science."

To date, Turing Awards have gone to forty-eight individuals (See Exhibit 4i). The award could well be considered "international" in character, given the number of non-U.S. winners, but given its U.S. roots, U.S. dominance in computers, and the financial support from Intel, the 2.1 percent standard suggests that perhaps one Jew should have won a Turing Award. Instead, Jews have won thirteen awards. (Were the international standard used instead, the outcome would have been more than one hundred times more than expected.)