The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize

Advice for Young Scientists

Peter Doherty

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780231138963
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511261
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher recounts his unlikely career journey in a memoir that "opens the vault to the world of science" ( Nature ).

Beginning with his humble origins in Australia, Peter Doherty tells how he developed an interest in immunology and describes his award-winning, influential work with Rolf Zinkernagel on T-cells and the nature of immune defense. In prose that is both amusing and astute, Doherty reveals how his nonconformist upbringing and search for different perspectives have shaped his life and work. Doherty offers an insider's look at the life of a research scientist. He lucidly explains his own scientific work and how research projects are selected, funded, and organized; the major problems science is trying to solve; and the rewards and pitfalls of a career in scientific research.He alsoexplores the stories of past Nobel winners and considers some of the crucial scientific debates of our time, including the safety of genetically modified foods and the tensions between science and religion. He concludes with some "tips" on how to win a Nobel Prize, including advice on being persistent, generous, and culturally aware.

1

The Swedish Effect

Stockholm in December: darkness falls early like a frozen curtain, the short days are dimmed by snowfall, and even weather-hardened Swedes grimace in the winds that cut across Strommen, the waterway straddled by the city. I grew up in a hot, humid, place where the sun shone pitilessly and I was always getting burnt. As a consequence, I’m energised by cold, bleak, misty weather. Perhaps it’s a heritage that goes back to ancestors who dug in dank Irish peat bogs, herded hill sheep in a Lancashire winter, or lived by a canal in Essex, but cold damp Stockholm in December suits me just fine. There is a freshness to the air, a sense of possibility.

Despite their impatience with the long winter, 10 December—Nobel Prize Day—is an exciting occasion for Swedes young and old. Like Australians on Melbourne Cup Day or Americans on Super Bowl Sunday, Swedes will stop whatever they are doing to watch television, or try to catch a glimpse of the proceedings at the Stockholm Concert Hall and the Town Hall—and it isn’t just the spectacle of the king and queen and hundreds of people in formal dress. Swedes are immensely proud of their culture and traditions, and there is a great identification among them with a Scandinavian tradition of democracy, consensus and fairness. So the ceremonies surrounding the annual Nobel Prize presentations are for most an important reminder of great human endeavours, and of their own nation’s place in promoting them. The awards have a high profile throughout the country: Swedish television carries live telecasts of the presentations and banquet, newspapers and radio programs feature the winners, and people talk about the prizes on the street.

Until they win, few laureates realise that the award ceremony is associated with an intense but exhausting week that thrusts them suddenly into the media spotlight, and requires a high level of energy and—unless they are teetotal—a reasonably tolerant liver. Neither would they anticipate the other accoutrements, including a chauffeur and a junior Swedish diplomat assigned as helper and advisor. Scientists, at least, don’t normally live in a world of minders and personal limousines—certainly not one of celebrities. However, when the king confers that award, handing the winner a gold medal and a leather-bound certificate in an atmosphere of solemn dignity, he also bestows a kind of celebrity status that has its own rewards and limitations.

The latter mainly involves the loss of personal and professional time that goes with public attention, but the compensations are the broader awareness of your work, gaining a public ‘voice’ and the opportunities to meet extraordinary people. I had a lot of media coverage in Memphis at the time of the award, and am on radio and television from time to time in Australia. A few people recognise me in the street. So far as popular celebrity goes, I’ve likened it to being equivalent to that for someone in a crowd scene in a television coffee commercial. It may be different for those few Nobel laureates who are recognised while they’re still young and handsome, but most of us tend to look more like the frog than the prince.

The presentation ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall is followed by the white-tie Nobel banquet—complete with gold-leafed plates and gold-plated cutlery—for 1200 in the town hall. Protocol is paramount: laureates are taught how to bow, and are told it is all right to turn their back on the king as they return to their seat (we were shown a video of a statuesque Pearl Buck, the 1938 literature winner, reversing very uncomfortably in a tight evening dress for what seems about a hundred feet). Laureates are also taught how to make the Scandinavian toast ‘skal’, and the men must wear full evening dress for the ceremony and dinners.

At the banquet wine is drunk from Orrefors crystal glasses, of course. The crash when large numbers of plates hit the table simultaneously is deafening. Waiters volunteer from all over Sweden and are thick on the ground, but as the Nobel Foundation is the host, the comperes and ushers for the evening are young, attractive university students. Places are set aside for both local and international students. There is classical music, a few songs from opera and one representative from each of the prize categories gives a short speech. Rolf Zinkernagel spoke with eloquence and charm for the two of us.

I may have been the only person at the dinner who didn’t have the famous Nobel ice cream. Not long before, I’d been diagnosed as having problems relating to the high blood cholesterol that shortened the lives of both my father and grandfather. We have a picture of me with a very elaborate pineapple concoction. Since then, as a consequence of the work that won Joe Goldstein and Mike Brown the 1985 Medicine Prize, I have been taking high doses of the very effective cholesterol-lowering statins. (It seems to be working: when all the laureates who were in good enough health were called back for a repeat dinner at the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes in 2001, I was finally allowed to taste the ice cream.)

After dinner there were photographs, dancing and an audience with the king and queen. The king has the royal prerogative of initiating any conversation and, though we had flown to Stockholm from Memphis, we were correctly identified as being Australian. As I recall, we spoke a little about the southern sky and their recent visit to the Paranal Observatory, which is part of the European Southern Observatory complex in Chile’s Atacarma desert. Unlike the Queen of England, the Swedish monarch no longer has any statutory role and his function is essentially symbolic and ceremonial. The royal couple were amiable, interested and interesting.

The following night, the king and queen hosted a spectacular dinner at the Royal Palace. This was only the second time I’d ever worn white tie and tails. Scientists live by Murphy’s Law (‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’), and I discovered that this extends to minor sartorial disasters. Just as we were stepping out of our stretch Volvo at the palace, the elastic holding the starched front that goes under the dark jacket snapped and it shot out like a white, horizontal flag. Perhaps for the first time in her life Penny, who was carrying a very small evening bag, did not have a safety pin. Our driver, Gretel Lundstrom, immediately recognising the emergency, sped us away from the palace grounds in a dramatic exit that apparently caused some alarm for the organisers. We made the short trip back to the Grand Hotel, rushed to our room and repaired the damage with safety pins on the way down in the elevator. Then back to the palace with a police escort and flashing blue lights, followed by a quick dash up the stairs to be the last arrivals.

We crept in to our correct place in the reception line: protocol requires that the medicine laureates and their spouses are behind the chemists, but preceding the literature laureate. Our escapade was an amusing diversion for the rather shy Polish poet Wislawa Zymborska. On the other hand, it taught me that members of the Nobel Foundation, like the Swedish people, are quite unflappable. Over the course of 100 years they have seen just about everything—including at least two laureates who turned up with three wives, past, present and future. Only in the fictitious plot of the 1963 Hollywood movie, The Prize, did they ever have to deal with a murder.

The setting for the royal dinner was again formal, though the atmosphere was a little more relaxed than at the awards. The king described it as ‘a family dinner’. The servers were dressed as footmen, the one standing behind the queen sporting an enormous feather projecting far above his head. This tradition was evidently started by an earlier king so that he could immediately find the queen in a crowded reception.

My dinner companions were the Swedish foreign minister, Lena Hjelm-Wallen, on one side and Princess Lillian of Sweden on the other. Princess Lillian, the wife of the king’s popular uncle, Prince Bertil, was born in Swansea, Wales, and is greatly loved in Sweden. She has a wicked and irreverent sense of humour and, at the age of 81, was a very enthusiastic ‘skaaler’, if there is such a word. We ate venison that had been shot on the royal estate by the king, and it was in every way an enjoyable evening. Talking with the Swedish heir apparent, Princess Victoria, during her recent visit to Australia, I was delighted to hear that Princess Lillian is still in fine fettle.

During the course of the Nobel week I delivered the lecture that every laureate is required to give, and in the evenings we were entertained by Swedish colleagues in the medical sciences. We had dinner with the Nobel medicine committee members, and spent another evening at the house of the immunologist Hans Wigzell, an old friend who is head of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden’s premier medical university which was founded in Stockholm in 1810.

We also found ourselves caught up in the celebrations for Santa Lucia Day, 13 December. This is the traditional beginning of the Swedish Christmas season and a moving example of how close the Swedes hold their customs and festivals. Just how or where the symbolic figure, Santa Lucia, came from is not completely clear. These days no one argues about origins, but in just about every house, office, school and club across Sweden, the Lucia—wearing a wreath of candles in her hair—leads a procession of white-clad girls and boys as they bring light and food and sing their Lucia carols in the early morning darkness. There were even fully lit Lucias, accompanied by choirs singing seasonal songs, at the airport as we headed off in the early morning to Lund on the south-west coast, where I was to repeat the Nobel lecture that I’d already presented at the Karolinska Medical School and the University of Uppsala, north of Stockholm.

Santa Lucia Day ends for the Medicine laureates, their families and friends at a final white-tie dinner with faculty and students from the Karolinska Medical School. Toasts are made, more ‘punch’ is drunk, there are speeches and Swedish drinking songs from a book printed in English. The Swedes don’t drink and drive, so everyone comes by cab or hire car and the punch is fairly lethal. The laureates are expected to cross hands and make a chair to carry in a Lucia girl selected from the first-year medical students.

The students had prepared an entertainment based on the assumption that an American would win but, faced with a Swiss and an Australian, went ahead with it anyway. In turn, with the Zinkernagels, the Australian ambassador, an Australian science journalist, some old friends and a few Karolinska faculty members who had ties to Australia, Penny and I sang a rather loud, but slightly woozy, version of Waltzing Matilda. At that stage of the evening, we all benefited from the fact that a complete version of it was in the songbook. The Nobel preparations cater for every possibility.

As new—and in some ways overwhelming—as it is, the experience of the Nobel week stands you in good stead for the reality of the very busy ‘Nobel year’ that all laureates face when the celebrations in Scandinavia end and they return home. You can avoid the endless rounds of engagements, of course, by either refusing invitations or by giving talks so appallingly bad that even the Nobel cachet cannot improve them—the word gets around. Most people take the responsibility seriously because it provides the opportunity to air issues they care about in a broad, public forum. The pressure generally tends to tail off after the next series of awards is announced, though there are always invitations that seem to relate purely to the status of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel year’s commitments consume a lot of time and take active scientists away from their research programs. Some, who are in the later stages of their careers, lose traction and never really get back to what had been their life’s work. All laureates, at any rate, lose a measure of the personal space required for introspection and creativity.

My year, however, like that of most senior scientists, was essentially booked and committed before the call came from Stockholm. Apart from my own ongoing work at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, I was serving on various national committees and was booked to give numerous seminars. The Nobel adds a further level of invitations, many of which cannot be refused. I received Australia’s highest civil award, the Companion of the Order of Australia, from the then Governor-General, Sir William Deane, and gave masses of lectures associated with visits ‘back home’, including an address to the National Press Club in Canberra that was broadcast over and over. I was constantly giving public talks and appearing at public events while in Australia. There was never a spare half-day, or so it seemed. The publicity also draws old friends back into contact, while the various institutions and groups that can claim some affiliation take pride in that and issue invitations accordingly. In order to cope, I chose to drop out of the time-consuming work of reviewing grants and manuscripts, and put off planned seminars at several universities. I also had to excuse myself from the review committee for the US Multiple Sclerosis Society, which was close to my heart. They had funded me in the past, and a dear friend had committed suicide years before because of her MS. It was all pretty exhausting, and even now I still have to be extremely judicious about the commitments I accept.

I am one of only two Australian Nobel laureates still living, and these days spend much of the year in Melbourne. Almost ten years on from the award, I continue to receive invitations to speak and appear at numerous functions. Australian laureates have been fairly scarce on the ground over the past 100 years: just seven grew up and at least completed high school here before leaving for places north.

Just about everyone has heard of the Nobel Prizes but, unless they are Scandinavian, most don’t know much about them. Deciding who should receive a Nobel is a considered and protracted process and is, even now, informed by the life and intentions of Alfred Nobel. The life of this wealthy industrialist and explosives manufacturer presents intriguing paradoxes. He invented the detonator, dynamite and a smokeless powder to propel cannon shells—all agents of destruction, in some sense—but many believe he intended all the prizes to operate to promote world peace. In that sense, they are all ‘peace prizes’ and clearly the words ‘peace’ and ‘Nobel’ go together in the broader public consciousness. This is driven home to me when I am occasionally introduced as a recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize. It is likely that Nobel the man—who never married and had no children—would now be largely forgotten if it were not for the extraordinary legacy he left, and the precision with which it has been administered.

Before he died on 10 December 1896, Nobel instructed that the majority of his estate should be invested so that the accumulating interest could be used to fund what we all know as the Nobel Prizes. In his will he also specified the disciplines to be recognised, the institutions that should be responsible for decision-making, and guidelines about who should win. The most important single factor determining the status of the Prizes is the statement in the last sentence of the extract from Nobel’s will that is published for all to read on the Nobel website. Translated from the Swedish, it reads: ‘It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not’. Here we have it. These are international awards that try to identify the most important, the most significant work in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature, economics and peace, by individuals who have contributed most substantially to benefit humanity.

Nobel’s executors were two young engineers who worked for his company—Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist. Sohlman was instrumental in establishing the Nobel Foundation that is responsible for both the investments and the awards. The intent and scope of the prizes generally follows the brief instructions in Nobel’s will, but practical considerations have required further interpretation by the Nobel Foundation. One consequence is that the award is given to a maximum of three people in each category, with the exception of the Peace Prize that can go to large organisations like the Red Cross or Médecins sans Frontières.

The Literature Prize is decided by a committee drawn from the Swedish Academy, founded in 1786; the Physics and Chemistry Prizes by separate committees from within the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739; the Prize in Physiology or Medicine by members of the Karolinska Institute, which boasts its own alumni of Nobel winners; the Peace Prize by a committee selected by the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting. Although there is no prize in mathematics, the Nobel Foundation added the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969. Responsibility for the Economics Prize—which some still consider to be controversial—was handed to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which sometimes chooses a mathematical economist.

Invitations to potential nominators go out in the later part of the year and they must forward any nominations they want to submit by the following February. The list of nominees is potentially enormous and varied, so there are strict rules around those eligible to nominate. For the science prizes, the general protocol is that major institutions and individuals prominent in particular areas are asked to provide names, a concise justification and background information. Though former laureates are always invited to submit nominations, they are restricted to the field for which they were recognised. I enquired during Nobel week if I could propose a name in another area, perhaps literature. The answer was a definite no. One experience that Nobel laureates share is the occasional letter from someone who is, to be polite, ‘way out in left field’ and believes he (it’s always a he) merits a Nobel Prize and should be nominated. I’ve kept these for posterity.

By October, the committees make their recommendations, and their decisions must be ratified by the broader body of the responsible academy. The discussions and deliberations involved in this painstaking process remain confidential, and are embargoed for fifty years. Whenever I read that someone has had the distinction of being ‘nominated for a Nobel Prize’, I wonder how the information emerged. Candidates in the sciences are most unlikely to be aware that they are being considered. They might be asked to provide an up-to-date curriculum vitae, or a list of what they consider to be their achievements, but the enquiry is likely to have come from a third-party source that would not normally spark the thought of a Nobel connection. The nominators are asked to be as circumspect as the committees that make the decisions. Though the scientific community gossips about possible future winners, and everyone assumes that the obvious people have been nominated, the details are generally known only to the proposers themselves.

The entire process is secretive, and the Swedes never leak. On the other hand, you do hear rumours that you’ve been nominated for a Nobel. I’d never tried to pursue this in any way—perhaps because, years ago, I was told by organisers I’d been nominated for another prestigious prize and became a bit fixated on it. Then nothing happened, so I’ve ignored anything like that since then.

Some people get very distressed about the Nobel because they think they should win. However, there is no ‘court of appeal’ and some never really recover from feeling they’ve been excluded. There is also the ‘rule of three’, which means that tough decisions must be made. At least in the medical area, people will have been nominated a number of times for different awards. Anyone who has a case will have been looked at pretty closely. I suspect that the same Nobel candidates come up year after year and, as I understand it, the leading cases are reviewed afresh each time.

Half the people who, like us, win a Lasker Basic science award later win a Nobel. American culture is very open, and being American, the Lasker committee leaks like a sieve. As I heard it, Rolf and I were added to a ‘Harvard ticket’ of Don Wiley, Jack Strominger and Emil Unanue after the immunologist on the committee said it would be outrageous to recognise them and omit us. Don and Jack provided the X-ray...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Scientific Terms
• Preface
• Preface to the American Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Swedish Effect
• 2. The Science Culture
• 3. This Scientific Life
• 4. Immunity: A Science Story
• 5. Personal Discoveries and New Commitments
• 6. The Next American Century?
• 7. Through Different Prisms: Science and Religion
• 8. Discovering the Future
• 9. How to Win a Nobel Prize
• Appendixes
• List of Abbreviations
• Recommended Reading
• Index