Nobel insulin 3 - nature comment
When the Nobel Misses the Mark
Lessons from insulin, DNA and other disputed prizes
Each October, the Nobel Prizes crown new scientific heroes - and can reignite old debates. For over a century, these awards have symbolised excellence, yet they also expose the limits of how science remembers. Discovery is rarely the work of one or two people; it is cumulative, collaborative and social. Great discoveries are famously founded on the shoulders of Giants. Compressing that reality into three names and a brief citation all but guarantees controversy.
This year’s Nobel season is an apt moment to re-examine some of the most enduring disputes - beginning with insulin, a case that still divides commentors on social media, historians and national pride a century later.
Insulin’s tangled origins
The 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Frederick Banting and John Macleod “for the discovery of insulin.” Their work in Toronto transformed diabetes from a death sentence into a chronic condition, and the award cemented their fame. While seeking to reassure my child of his life expectancy, I came across a 90-year-old diabetic who proudly cited Dr Banting as her own physician. But at the time of the award the decision provoked protest.
Banting insisted that his assistant Charles Best, not Macleod, deserved half the honour; he shared his prize money with Best, while Macleod did the same with the biochemist James Collip, whose purification process made insulin safe for human use¹. Behind these gestures lay a deeper unease about how discovery unfolds: Banting was a young physician with an idea, Best a student, Macleod the senior physiologist who provided resources, and Collip the biochemical expert who achieved the decisive breakthrough.
Yet the Nobel Committee are constrained to three names so they split the difference, and in doing so ignited a century of dispute.
Even before Banting and Best began their experiments, others had already attempted to isolate an antidiabetic factor from the pancreas. Nicolae Paulescu, a Romanian physiologist, published detailed studies in 1921 showing that an aqueous pancreatic extract, which he called pancreine, could reduce blood sugar in diabetic dogs². He even tried limited human administration. German clinician Georg Zülzer and American biochemist Ernest L. Scott had reported similar, though inconsistent, results in the 1910s³.
Paulescu wrote to the Nobel Committee after the award, claiming priority. His extract, however, was toxic and unstable, and he had not achieved reproducible human therapy. The Toronto team’s success lay in Collip’s purification, which rendered insulin clinically viable. Modern historians generally agree that Paulescu identified the same biological principle, but did not produce a usable drug⁴.
The episode remains emblematic of Nobel dilemmas: how to define a “discovery,” how to weigh failed prototypes against practical triumphs, and how to judge overlapping claims separated by geography, language and resources.
Franklin, Meitner and Bell Burnell
The Nobel’s constraints have produced other famous omissions. Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction images of DNA were central to the model that earned James Watson, Francis Crick and the far less well known and less often mentioned, Maurice Wilkins the 1962 Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin had died four years earlier, and the Nobel cannot be awarded posthumously. Yet her case also reflects deeper inequities: data shared without full credit, gender bias, and the invisibility of technicians and junior researchers, which can be as true today as it was in mid-century science⁵.
Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Jewish physicist who helped interpret nuclear fission, was overlooked when her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Meitner’s exile from Nazi Germany and the Committee’s preference for experimental chemistry over theory compounded the exclusion⁶.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars in 1967 likewise went unrecognised when her supervisor Antony Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel in Physics. Bell Burnell herself has since argued that students rarely receive such awards - a statement that acknowledges both the hierarchy of academic credit and unlauded but common womanly restraint⁷.
Politics, culture and the prize
Not all controversies concern laboratory work. When Bob Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, critics questioned whether songwriting qualified as literature. When Barack Obama won the Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year into his presidency, many viewed it as premature; It was perhaps aspirational rather than earned. These decisions highlight another aspect of the Nobel’s power: it is not just a scientific or artistic distinction, but a global statement about values.
The committees’ desire to reflect the zeitgeist can make their judgments prophetic, or polarising. A prize intended to broaden cultural boundaries or signal moral leadership may instead invite accusations of political bias.
Built-in flaws
Many disputes stem not from individual injustice but from the Nobel architecture itself.
The three-person limit enshrined in Alfred Nobel’s will no longer fits modern, team-based science. Large collaborations, from the Higgs boson to the Human Genome Project, can only be represented by a few visible figures.
No posthumous awards exclude pioneers such as Franklin or Meitner who died before recognition. Though gender bias is likely to have precluded them in any case.
Nomination secrecy, with archives sealed for 50 years, impedes accountability and fosters speculation.
Disciplinary silos - prizes divided among physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine poorly capture the interdisciplinary character of contemporary research.
These features have remained remarkably unchanged for more than a century. The result is an award that simultaneously celebrates excellence and reproduces structural inequities - rewarding seniority, institutional prestige and, as so often in many walks of life, the luck of timing.
What should change
Several reforms could make the Nobels more equitable. Allowing team or institutional prizes would better reflect collaborative science. Permitting limited posthumous recognition would correct the most glaring exclusions. Increasing transparency in nomination and deliberation, even with a delay, could illuminate decision-making and discourage lobbying.
But controversy may be inseparable from the Nobel’s allure. Its selectivity creates both prestige and resentment. As sociologist Harriet Zuckerman observed, “The Nobel Prize is a mirror of science as much as its crown.” The stories of Paulescu, Franklin, Meitner and Bell Burnell remind us that discovery is rarely a solitary act and that recognition, like research itself, is always a work in progress.
References
de Leiva-Hidalgo, C. Diabetologia 66, 1734–1742 (2023).
Paulescu, N.C. Arch. Int. Physiol. 17, 85–109 (1921).
Zülzer, G.L. Dtsch. Med. Wochenschr. 33, 939–941 (1907).
Bliss, M. The Discovery of Insulin. (University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Elkin, L.O. Physics Today 55, 42–48 (2002).
Sime, R.L. Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. (University of California Press, 1996).
Bell Burnell, J. Nature 563, 168–169 (2018).
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