Nobel insulin two - Nature
When the Nobel Misses the Mark
Lessons from insulin, DNA and other disputed prizes
Every October, the Nobel Prizes ignite fresh waves of admiration — and controversy. The accolades, first awarded in 1901, remain science’s most visible marker of prestige. Yet many of the world’s most celebrated discoveries were born in collaborative, messy, and often inequitable conditions that a three-name award cannot capture.
This year’s Nobel season offers an opportunity to revisit the most famous disputes — from insulin to DNA and beyond — and to ask what these cases reveal about how science allocates credit.
Insulin: A triumph with contested authorship
The 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Frederick Banting and John Macleod “for the discovery of insulin.” The award recognized a medical breakthrough that transformed diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable condition. But the decision quickly provoked outrage.
Banting argued that his assistant Charles Best, not Macleod, should have shared the prize. He later split his winnings with Best, while Macleod quietly shared his portion with the biochemist James Collip — whose purification of pancreatic extracts made clinical use possible. The Nobel Foundation has since acknowledged that Best’s exclusion was a misjudgment¹.
Even before the Toronto work, other researchers had claimed success in isolating a pancreatic antidiabetic substance. Nicolae Paulescu, a Romanian physiologist, reported in 1921 that an aqueous pancreatic extract — which he named pancreine — reduced glycosuria and hyperglycaemia in diabetic dogs². He even attempted human trials, but his extracts were impure and caused side effects. Georg Zülzer (Germany) and Ernest L. Scott (USA) had made similar attempts in the 1910s, but their preparations were unstable or toxic³.
When Banting and Macleod received the Nobel, Paulescu wrote angrily to Stockholm asserting priority. The committee dismissed the claim, emphasizing the Toronto team’s successful, reproducible treatment in humans — the first that saved lives. Historians now generally conclude that while Paulescu’s biochemical insight was genuine, his methods lacked the refinement and translational success that defined insulin as a therapy⁴.
The insulin controversy remains a paradigm case: multiple claimants, overlapping discoveries, and the problem of credit in collaborative or cumulative science.
DNA and the invisible crystallographer
The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognized James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for revealing the double-helix structure of DNA. Absent was Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction photograph — “Photo 51” — had been pivotal. Franklin had died in 1958, and posthumous Nobels are prohibited.
Debate over her exclusion endures because it exposes deeper structural issues: gender bias in mid-century science, unclear data-sharing norms, and the Nobel rules themselves. As historian Lynne Osman Elkin noted, Franklin “provided the data, not the model,” but without her data, the model might never have appeared.
Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and others left behind
Lise Meitner’s role in explaining nuclear fission was overlooked when Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Meitner, an Austrian-Jewish physicist forced to flee Nazi Germany, was doubly marginalized — by war and by gender. Similarly, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student, yet her supervisor Antony Hewish received the 1974 Nobel in Physics. Both women later became icons of scientific fairness precisely because of their omission.
Cultural Nobels and political signalling
Controversy is not limited to science. When Bob Dylan received the Literature Prize in 2016, critics asked whether songwriting met the Academy’s literary criteria. When Barack Obama was awarded the Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year into his presidency, many saw it as aspirational rather than earned. Such episodes underscore the committee’s dual role as cultural arbiter and moral signaler — functions that invite scrutiny when the signals feel premature or politicized.
Why these disputes persist
The Nobel architecture itself almost guarantees contention.
Three-person rule. No more than three individuals can share a prize — an outdated limit in an age of multi-author discovery.
No posthumous awards. Pioneers who die before recognition (Franklin, Meitner) are automatically excluded.
Disciplinary silos. The Nobel statutes, rooted in early-20th-century science, struggle to honor interdisciplinary or collaborative achievements.
Opacity. Nomination records remain sealed for 50 years, frustrating contemporary accountability.
Together, these rules amplify historical inequities — favouring senior men in well-networked institutions — and ensure that each Nobel season reopens old wounds.
Toward a fairer future
Reform proposals abound: relax the three-person limit, allow limited posthumous recognition, and increase transparency. Others urge the creation of parallel honours recognizing collaborative science, akin to the Breakthrough Prizes or Lasker Awards.
Yet controversy is also part of the Nobel’s allure. As sociologist Harriet Zuckerman observed, “The Nobel Prize is a mirror of science as much as its crown.” The debates it provokes — from Paulescu’s pancreatic extracts to Franklin’s diffraction images — remind us that discovery is a social process, not a solitary epiphany.
References
de Leiva-Hidalgo, C. The Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine, 1923: A centenary review. Diabetologia 66, 1734–1742 (2023).
Paulescu, N.C. Recherche sur le rôle du pancréas dans l’assimilation nutritive. Arch. Int. Physiol. 17, 85–109 (1921).
Zülzer, G.L. Über die Behandlung des Diabetes mit pankreatischen Präparaten. Dtsch. Med. Wochenschr. 33, 939–941 (1907).
Bliss, M. The Discovery of Insulin. (University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Nobel Foundation archives, “Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.”
Elkin, L.O. Rosalind Franklin and the double helix. Physics Today 55, 42–48 (2002).
Sime, R.L. Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. (University of California Press, 1996).
Bell Burnell, J. Reflections on the discovery of pulsars. Nature 563, 168–169 (2018).
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