Scientific Elite

Nobel Laureates in the United States

William T. Golden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781560008552
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351306867
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Scientific Elite is about Nobel prize winners and the well-defined stratification system in twentieth-century science. It tracks the careers of all American laureates who won prizes from 1907 until 1972, examining the complex interplay of merit and privilege at each stage of their scientific lives and the creation of the ultra-elite in science.

The study draws on biographical and bibliographical data on laureates who did their prize-winning research in the United States, and on detailed interviews with forty-one of the fifty-six laureates living in the United States at the time the study was done. Zuckerman finds laureates being successively advantaged as time passes. These advantages are producing growing disparities between the elite and other scientists both in performance and in rewards, which create and maintain a sharply graded stratification system.

Chapter 1

NOBEL LAUREATES AND SCIENTIFIC ELITES

When Alfred Nobel died in 1896, he left what was then a princely estate: more than thirty-three million kroner, or about nine million American dollars.¹ It was a legacy destined to become one of the most famous of its kind in modern history. His will specified that the bulk of the estate be put aside in a fund, its annual income to be divided among five prizes: three in science, one in literature, and one to advance the cause of world peace. Nobel could not, of course, have foreseen that his prizes in the sciences would become the ultimate symbol of excellence for scientists and laymen alike and that those in literature and peace, although more controversial than the others, would also carry their share of international prestige.

Nobel, the ingenious inventor of dynamite, blasting gelatin, and smokeless powder, was paradoxically a pacifist and a self-styled idealist. It was therefore in character that he provide in his will for prizes that would honor “the most important discoveries or inventions” in physics, chemistry, and the composite field of physiology or medicine, “the most outstanding work in literature of an idealistic tendency,” and “the best work for fraternity among nations” (Nobelstiftelsen, 1972, p. 10). He also specified that the prizes in science should be distributed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Caroline Medico-Surgical Institute, in literature by the Swedish Academy at Stockholm (the literary counterpart of the Academy of Sciences), and in peace by the Norwegian Storting (parliament). The complex details involved in establishing the Nobelstiftelsen (Nobel Foundation) and the other institutional arrangements for distributing the prizes took no less than four years to settle. (See chapter 2 for more extended discussion of the statutes and customs governing the allocation of prizes.) Not until December 10, 1901, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, were the first prizes in science and literature awarded, in a splendid ceremony held at Stockholm, one that has been repeated on that date every year since except for wartime interruptions.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE STUDY

My research on the scientific elite began with my doctoral dissertation in 1963. I had decided to work in the thinly populated sociology of science, for it seemed to me then, as it does now, that science was a major social institution of our time and one largely neglected by sociologists. (See Merton, 1973, pp. 210-20, for some reasons for this neglect.) The investigation started with several specific questions that were central then but were destined to become subsidiary as the work developed. Is it true, as many observers of science have claimed, that important contributions to contemporary science are more often made by individual investigators than by teams? (See, for example, Eaton, 1951; Whyte, 1957; Jewkes, 1958; Jewkes, Sawers and Stillerman, 1959.) Are the outstanding scientists typically “lone wolves” who resist working in collaboration? And, if so, what were the effects on the advancement of scientific knowledge of the strong trend toward collaborative research in all the sciences and most notably in those exhibiting most rapid growth? I planned to interview a stratified sample of scientists about their research practices to find out whether the outstanding scientists tended to engage in solo research and whether this was especially true of their best work.

Before moving ahead with this program of research, I plainly needed to decide upon appropriate criteria for stratifying the sample of interviewees. It seemed sensible to assume that Nobel prize-winners constituted a small sample of the most accomplished American scientists making up the scientific elite. They could be compared with a larger sample of scientists from universities and research laboratories representing various strata in the community of science.

That spring, the detailed interview guide was pretested on a number of surprisingly uncomplaining members of the Columbia science faculty. (See appendix A for detailed analysis of the interview procedure.) It soon became evident that the value of the interviews increased when I reviewed the scientist’s work and biography beforehand. This preliminary work became increasingly elaborate as the study progressed. Ultimately it amounted to reading everything accessible to a layman that each scientist had published as well as a highly selective sample of his scientific papers. Where the public record was fairly complete, preparation for each interview required scores of hours. By way of further groundwork, I read review papers and more popular accounts of the fields I had to cover, histories of science, and scientific memoirs. In the process, I learned a fair amount of science and a great deal of scientific terminology.

It was summer when I set out for California for the first round of interviews. Four laureates and a dozen or so other scientists in the San Francisco Bay area agreed to see me on that trip. The initial interviews turned out to be decisive. By and large, those with the laureates were richer and more instructive than most of the others. Evidently, the laureates were accustomed to talking about themselves and their work to visiting outsiders. Since more information about them and their research was publicly available, my questions could be more specific. The laureates also tended to be more reflective about the training and fostering of scientific talent and the organization of scientific work than were the others.

By the time I returned home from that first field trip, I had decided to confine the interviews to Nobelists and to try to talk to all those at work in the United States. My sense of the research problem had also changed by then. Although the agenda for my dissertation remained much the same, I began to plan a more comprehensive investigation of stratification in science: how scientists became members of the elite, why the gap in accomplishment between the elite and the rank and file is as great as it appears to be, and how the stratification system in science and the development of scientific knowledge are interrelated.

The interviews stretched on for more than a year. In the end, I had traveled to California twice, to the Midwest once, and up and down the eastern seaboard. I interviewed forty-one of the fifty-six laureates then at work in the United States and tape-recorded all but one of them. (Transcripts of interviews were deposited in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University with the proviso that they would be kept confidential for a period of years after the laureates’ deaths. I still have no way of knowing whether my promise to keep the laureates’ remarks confidential was decisive in securing the interviews. But those were the terms to which they agreed, and that is why the sources of so many of the quotations from the interviews in the pages that follow are unattributed.)

In 1965 I finished the dissertation, which dealt primarily with the somewhat modified questions about collaborative research in science (Zuckerman, 1965), and moved on to other work on stratification in science, the cultural structure of science, and processes of evaluation of scientific contributions.

Since then, I have gotten to know some of the forty-one Nobelists I interviewed a great deal better, and the same is true for a number of the more recent prize-winners. I have also worked jointly with two Nobelists, Andre F. Cournand and Joshua Lederberg, on investigations quite unrelated to this one (Cournand and Zuckerman, 1970; Lederberg, Zuckerman, and Merton, forthcoming). My encounter with Arne Tiselius was important in another way for the development of the investigation. As president of the Nobel Foundation, laureate in chemistry, and chairman of the Nobel Chemistry Committee, which awards prizes in that field, Tiselius embodied the Nobel establishment. He had read some of my preliminary reports on Nobel laureates and asked to see me when he was in New York. After a series of discussions, he invited me to the ceremonies at Stockholm and gave me the chance to talk off the record with many officials of the Nobel Foundation probably because rather than in spite of my papers having critically dealt with the unanticipated consequences of the prize. That trip renewed my interest in developing my study of the scientific elite further.

As I reviewed my work on elites, it became clear that more data on the careers of laureates and other scientists would be required if I was to begin to understand the larger question of elite formation in science and its system of stratification.² It seemed wise to enlarge the scope of the inquiry to include all American Nobel laureates from the first, Albert A. Michelson, who won the award in physics in 1907, to those who had won prizes by 1972. There was also a clear need for new data on the more extended scientific elite, members of the National Academy of Sciences and rank-and-file scientists as well. Thus, what was originally a study of collaboration and individual research in science was transformed over the years into a broader investigation of the American scientific elite—how they are educated, recruited, sustained, and what contribution they have made to the advancement of science, which amounts to collective biography or what historians now call prosopography (Stone, 1971, pp. 48-57).

Although the study focused on scientific elites, I found myself drawing upon varying intellectual traditions, including contemporary studies in political theory and in social stratification, most particularly on the reward system of science. I also turned to “classical” treatments of elites by Saint-Simon, Mannheim, Michels, Mosca, and, of course, the Italian economist and social theorist, Vilfredo Pareto.

PARETO AND ELITES

The history of social thought has its own variety of paradoxes. So it is that while Vilfredo Pareto neither originated the basic distinction between social classes and social elites nor did much to develop the distinction in his massive Treatise on General Sociology (1916), that work has nonetheless done more than any other to stimulate reflection and research on elites in the half century since it appeared. Pareto’s informing idea held that the gradation of capacity and performance exhibited by people in every department of culture and social life resulted in socially identifiable hierarchies, and that the higher strata within each of these hierarchies could conveniently be described as “elites.”

He put this idea graphically in the language that, as an acerbic engineer and economist, he found most congenial:

Let us assume that in every branch of human activity each individual is given an index which stands as a sign of his capacity, very much the way grades are given in the various subjects in school examinations. The highest type of lawyer, for example, will be given 10. The man who does not get a client will be given 1—reserving zero for the man who is an out-and-out idiot.

To the man who has made his millions—honestly or dishonestly as the case may be—we will give 10. To the man who has earned his thousands we will give 6; to such as just manage to keep out of the poor-house, 1, keeping zero for those who get in.. .. To a poet like Carducci we shall give 8 or 9 according to our tastes; to a scribbler who puts people to rout with his sonnets we shall give zero. For chess-players we can get very precise indices, noting what matches, and how many, they have won. And so on for all the branches of human activity.... So let us make a class who have the highest indices in their branch of activity, and to that class give the name of elite.³

Pareto’s conception of the elite harbors a fundamental ambiguity, as Coser (1971, p. 397), among others, has noted. And since this is an ambiguity that often persists in current discussions of elites, leading to an untenable doctrine of biological and social elitism, it needs to be examined at the outset of any study of the scientific elite.

In the passage I have quoted, Pareto makes the strong double assumption that the members of any elite are there by virtue of their outstanding performance, and that this, in turn, is a “sign of [their] capacity.” In short, the various elites are here thought of as the product of a meritocracy, with their members achieving lofty status through an efficient process of social selection among the unequally endowed. Pareto leaves unexamined the question whether these assumed differences in capacity are altogether biological or represent differences in trained capacity. Yet elsewhere (1935, vol. 3, p. 1424) he takes another tack and allows for errors in the process of social selection such that membership in this or that elite need not invariably testify to great capacity or outstanding performance. Thus,

in the concrete, there are no examinations whereby each person is assigned to his proper place in these various [elites]. That deficiency is made up for by other means, by various sorts of labels that serve the purpose after a fashion. Such labels are the rule even where there are examinations. The label “lawyer” is affixed to a man who is supposed to know something about the law and often does, though sometimes again he is an ignoramus. So, the governing elite contains individuals who wear labels appropriate to political offices of a certain altitude—ministers, Senators, Deputies, chief justices, generals, colonels, and so on—making the apposite exceptions for those who have found their way into that exalted company without possessing qualities corresponding to the labels they wear. Such exceptions are much more numerous than the exceptions among lawyers, physicians, engineers, millionaires (who have made their own money), artists of distinction, and so on; for the reason, among others, that in these latter departments of human activity the labels are won directly by the individual, whereas in the elite some of the labels—the label of wealth, for instance—are hereditary.

Here, Pareto comes to recognize that elites are not all of a kind: that the relationship of capacity, performance, and status may differ among varieties of human activity. In effect, he thus raises a question about differences in the efficacy of processes of social selection in the various functional spheres of complex society. Like much else in the comparative study of elites, this issue has not yet received the sustained attention it requires.⁴

The amount of scholarly attention paid to elites in the major institutional spheres has varied greatly. Political elites have received the greatest attention, and there is also a growing literature on economic and religious elites. But scientific elites have been systematically investigated hardly at all—reflecting the lack of interest in science as a social institution among sociologists until recently. To be sure, much of the recent work in the developing sociology of science deals with those scientists to whom Pareto would give high marks in his scheme of things, but this focus is largely by inadvertence rather than by design since it is the more productive scientists who disproportionately turn up in the readily available rosters of scientists. With the growing interest in the stratification of science,⁵ there may develop a basis for the sociological comparison of scientific elites not only with the rank and file of scientists but also with elites in other fields of activity. This would allow us to gauge what elites have in common by way of social origins, patterns of recruitment, training, career mobility, and linkage with other parts of the social structure just as it would allow us to identify what is distinctive of each elite. These are precisely the problems that Pareto edged up to but did not clarify or, of course, investigate empirically.

SCIENTISTS AS AN ELITE AND ELITES WITHIN SCIENCE

In one sense, all scientists constitute an elite in complex industrial societies. Compared with other occupational groups, they rank high by any of the criteria ordinarily used to stratify populations socially. In the United States they are, on the average, in the top fifth of the income distribution (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1974, pp. 390, 540). They are also accorded great social prestige. What is more, studies of occupational standing in this country show a d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Nobel Laureates and Scientific Elites
• Chapter 2 The Sociology of the Nobel Prize
• Chapter 3 The Social Origins of Laureates
• Chapter 4 Masters and Apprentices in Science
• Chapter 5 Moving into the Scientific Elite
• Chapter 6 The Prize-Winning Research
• Chapter 7 After the Prize
• Chapter 8 The Nobel Prize and the Accumulation of Advantage in Science
• Appendix A Interviewing an Ultra-elite
• Appendix B Nobel Laureates in Science, 1901-76
• Appendix C Prize-Winning Research: Specialty and Year of Award
• Appendix D Official Occupants of the Forty-first Chair: “Honorable Mentions” for Nobel Prizes
• Appendix E Age-Specific Annual Rates of Productivity of Laureates and a Matched Sample of Scientists Who Survived to Each Age
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects