Editorial
Scientific discovery, peak experiences and the Col-oh-nell Flastratus! phenomenon
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 69: 475-477
***
Summary
Once I had a bizarre dream in which I was vouchsafed a secret which would ensure my wealth and success. It was the title for a comic novel; one supposedly so funny that it would guarantee classic status for any book: Oh Colonel Flastratus! The distinctive feature about my dream was its quality of profound significance, which felt akin to the Eureka moment of a scientific discovery. This led me to question whether the ‘peak experience’ (PE) of scientific discovery might be as delusional as my dream. On the one hand, euphoric elation attached to a discovery does not guarantee that insights objective truth – implications must be spelled-out and checked. The easy induction of pseudo-profound insights by intoxicants serves as a warning of the potential pitfalls. An arbitrary object becomes labeled with an obscure sense of delight and personal relevance in a process that could be termed the Colonel Flastratus! phenomenon. But neither are peak experiences irrelevant. A scientific PE is some kind of personal guarantee of the subjective truth of an insight – a signal that states: ‘This is high quality stuff, by your standards. Do not ignore it, do not forget it, try to understand it’. Peak experiences in science could therefore be considered the result of a ‘significance alarm’ going off in the brain and their objective value depends on the specialized cognitive quality of that specific brain. So scientists may be correct to take peak experiences seriously. Perhaps the best approach is to regard the scientific PE as a signal from the self to the self, a subjectively evaluated and auto-administered emotional reward for good thinking.
***
Once I had a bizarre dream in which I was vouchsafed a secret which would ensure my wealth and success [1].
I will share the secret. It was the title for a comic novel – a title so loaded with humorous potential, so funny even in its own right, that it would (I was assured) guarantee classic status for any book to which it was attached. The title was Oh Colonel Flastratus!
The important factors about this title were twofold. Firstly that the word ‘Colonel’ should be spelled conventionally but pronounced in three syllables – Col-oh-nell. Somehow this had to be communicated to the potential audience through advertising. And secondly the exclamation mark at the end was vital in order to demonstrate the correct tone of exasperation.
The distinctive feature about my dream was not its silliness but that for several minutes, at least, the event possessed a quality of profound significance. On awakening I wrote down the title and puzzled over its meaning and consequences. Quite abruptly it dawned on me that, whatever its numinous quality, the objective validity of my experience was nil. The only ‘funny’ thing about Oh Colonel Flastratus! was the surrealist absurdity of my having attached significance to it.
Scientific discovery and the peak experience
But if it had not been for this absurdity, my dream had a weird similarity to the psychological experience of making a scientific discovery – a Eureka moment. Yet the information was nonsense. This led me to question whether the ‘peak experience’ (PE; [2] and [3]) of a scientific discovery and overwhelming conviction of being right, might be as delusional as my dream.
There are psychological similarities between many scientific discoveries. A memorable example was that of the mathematician Andrew Wiles when he finally solved ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ after working on the problem for seven years in solitude and secrecy, announcing success, finding a flaw in the reasoning, then… ‘Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation… It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I just stared in disbelief [4].
Leo Szilard, discoverer of the principle of nuclear fission, wrote: ‘I remember that I stopped for a red light… As the light changed to green it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element… which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron [this] could sustain a nuclear chain reaction’ [5]. Thus was discovered the concept which led directly to the atom bomb.
I have also experienced these moments. For example, one evening I had stayed behind to examine some new microscope slides of the human adrenal gland which had been stained to show both the cholinergic and adrenergic nerves. The cholinergic nerves were dark brown, while the adrenergic nerves glowed green under a fluorescent lamp. When I flipped the microscope back and forth between natural light and fluorescent light I suddenly realized that the slender, knobbly green nerves were winding over and around the thick trunks of brown nerves. The two systems were entwined, but the cholinergic nerves were passing through the gland while the adrenergic nerves were releasing their noradrenaline into the substance of the cortex. It suddenly dawned that nobody had ever seen this before.
I felt that I was the first person in human history to know this new thing about the natural world – or at least the world of human adrenals.
Scientific significance of the peak experience
So far as I know, my anatomical insight [6] is still regarded as correct. But if I am candid, I have also had peak experiences from making a discovery [7] which I later regarded as mistaken [1] or about which [8] I changed my mind [9] soon afterwards. Clearly, a peak experience related to making a discovery does not validate that study: a profound sense of insight does not guarantee that insights objective truth – the implications must be spelled-out and checked.
But neither are peak experiences irrelevant. My hunch is that a scientific PE is some kind of personal guarantee of the subjective truth of an insight. In other words, scientific PEs are a marker which the mind attaches to those of its insights the mind considers most profound – a signal that states: ‘This is good stuff, by your standards. Do not ignore it, do not forget it, try to understand it’.
The PE seems to function as a means of focusing attention – the characteristic emotion asserts that the marked insight is something we should dwell upon, puzzle over, sort out – do something about. It seems to me that a vital component of the PE is exactly this sense of a call to action. The PE is not – or should not be – simply a passive feeling of euphoric fulfillment.
Whatever the role of inspiration, scientific breakthroughs do not come from those who are ignorant and uneducated concerning the matter in hand. Science requires knowledge and skill as well as the right state of mind. The probable objective validity of a scientific peak experience is affected by the quality of the scientist’s thinking and preparation, and how well he has internalized the processes and constraints of his discipline.
The objective validity of the scientific peak experience is eventually determined, if at all, not by a psychological imprimatur, but by its public dimension – whether it stands up in peer usage [10] and [11].
Therefore, peak experience insights have the potential to mislead as well as enlighten. The easy induction of pseudo-profound insights by intoxicants serves as a warning of the potential pitfalls. When the mind is deranged by drugs, delirium or drowsiness, then this emotion may short-circuit and ‘spontaneously discharge’ to become attached to almost any event – such as an idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word ‘Coll-oh-nell’ or the importance of an exclamation mark.
Then an arbitrary – even nonsensical – information item becomes labeled with an obscure sense of delight and personal relevance. The process could termed the Colonel Flastratus! phenomenon [1] – portentous meaning projected onto an irrelevant stimulus.
Conclusion
Peak experiences in science could be considered the result of a ‘significance alarm’ going off in the brain. When the brain is working properly, this alarm will only be triggered when something potentially ‘important’ has happened, something worthy of sustained attention. The potential validity of the insight depends on the inner world of personal scientific understanding matching-up sufficiently with the outer world of science as it emerges over time from the interaction of many scientific communications.
So scientists may be acting correctly when they take peak experiences seriously, especially if they are expert in the field in which their apparently-significant discovery has occurred. But the content of peak experiences should not be taken at face value, because of the Col-oh-nell Flastratus! phenomenon.
Perhaps the best approach is to regard the scientific PE as a signal from the self to the self: a subjectively-evaluated and auto-administered emotional reward for good thinking.
References
[1] B. Charlton, Psychiatry and the human condition, Radcliffe Medical Press, London (2000).
[2] C. Wilson, New pathways in psychology: Maslow and the post-Freudian revolution, Gollancz, London (1972).
[3] A. Maslow, Motivation and personality (3rd ed.), Harper and Row, New York (1983).
[4] Horizon – BBC Television, Fermat’s last theorem – transcript, British Broadcasting Corporation, London (1996).
[5] L. Szilard, Leo Szilard: his version of the facts, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1978).
[6] A.B. Gilchrist, A. Leake and B.G. Charlton, Innervation of the human adrenal cortex: simultaneous visualisation using acetylcholinesterase histochemistry and dopamine-beta-hydroxylase immunohistochemistry, Acta Anatom 146 (1993), pp. 31–35. View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[7] B.G. Charlton, Cognitive neuropsychiatry and the future of diagnosis: a ‘PC’ model of the mind, Brit J Psychiat 167 (1995), pp. 149–153. View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[8] B.G. Charlton, Attribution of causation in epidemiology: chain or mosaic?, J Clin Epidemiol 49 (1996), pp. 105–107. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (329 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[9] B.G. Charlton, The scope and nature of epidemiology, J Clin Epidemiol 49 (1996), pp. 623–626. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (546 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[10] J. Ziman, Reliable knowledge: an exploration of the grounds for belief in science, Cambridge University Press, New York (1978).
[11] B.G. Charlton, Conflicts of interest in medical science: peer usage, peer review and ‘CoI consultancy’, Med Hypoth 63 (2004), pp. 181–186. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (157 K) |
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Psychological neoteny and delayed parenthood
Editorial
Psychological neoteny and higher education: Associations with delayed parenthood
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 69: 237-240
***
Summary
In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name psychological neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally associated with youth. I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies; because people need to be somewhat child-like in their psychology order to keep learning, developing and adapting to the rapid and accelerating pace of change. Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education. Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of this hypothesis of psychological neoteny. Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ‘settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. A sevenfold expansion of participation in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage and parenthood. Increasing number of years of education is quantitatively the most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth: among women college graduates about half are aged 30 or older at the time of their first birth – a rise of 400% in 25 years. Parenthood is associated with a broad range of psychologically ‘maturing’ and socially-integrating effects in both men and women. However, the economic effect is different in men and women: after parenthood men are more likely to have a job and work more hours while women change in the opposite direction. The conclusion is that psychological neoteny is indeed increasing, and mainly as a consequence of the increasing percentage of school leavers going into higher education. But at present it is unclear whether this trend is overall beneficial or harmful; and the answer may be different for men and women.
***
Causes and consequences of psychological neoteny
In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name Psychological Neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviours traditionally associated with youth [1]. ‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity.
I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies. Modern cultures are characterized by rapid and accelerating pace of change, which demands a much higher degree of cognitive flexibility than traditional societies of the past [2]. As a result, it helps if people retain a somewhat child-like psychology. Cognitive flexibility is useful when we need to keep developing, adapting and learning. Of course the positive benefits of maturity are also delayed, and the downside to PN includes some less desirable faults of youth – such as irresponsibility, short attention span, and novelty-seeking.
Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education, when an ever-increasing proportion of the school leavers go straight on to attend colleges and universities, and attend these institutions for increasing numbers of years. Formal education rewards youthful traits such as cognitive flexibility and the drive to acquire now knowledge and skills [3]. Higher education also delays key life experiences which tend to induce psychological maturity, such as marriage and parenthood.
Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of my hypothesis that psychological neoteny is mainly caused by higher education.
Analysis
It is obvious that an increasing proportion of school leavers are moving on to higher education in all modern liberal democracies, and in many countries the expansion of participation in higher education has been profound (Table 1).
Table 1.
Percentage of under 21 year old entrants to higher education (age participation index; API) for UK 1961–2001
Date API (%)
1961 5
1971 13
1981 13
1991 23
2001 33
From [4].
The sevenfold expansion of API in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage (Table 2) and parenthood (Table 3) with an increasing average age of mothers at the birth of their first child.
Table 2.
Social trends 34 – http://www.statistics.gov.uk – average age at marriage and divorce: England and Wales
Date Age males Age females
1971 24.6 22.6
1981 25.4 23.1
1991 27.5 25.5
2001 30.6 28.4
Average age in years at first marriage for males and females.
Table 3.
From social trends 34 – http://www.statistics.gov.uk – average age in years of mother by birth order: England and Wales, first child
Date Age (years)
1971 23.7
1981 24.8
1991 25.6
2001 26.5
Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ’settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. First marriage and age of first child are correlated [5], but parenthood has probably replaced marriage as the main transitional stage in modern societies like the USA [6].
The most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth is the number of years of education [7]. For example, in the USA the median age at first birth has increased rapidly among women with 12 or more years of education [8]. In 1969, 10.2% of college graduate women were age 30 or older at the time of their first birth but in 1994 this had risen over 400% to 45.5%. By contrast, among women with only 9–11 years of education this rise was just 50%, with only 2.5% of first births in 1994 occurred at age 30 plus.
It seems clear, therefore, that the proportion of school leavers going into higher education has increased massively, and also that these extra years of education lead to later marriage and parenthood.
The psychologically ‘maturing’ and socially-integrating effect of parenthood on attitudes and behavior of married parents is obvious and uncontroversial [9], especially for women – who remain the main carers for children [10]. But the effect of parenthood for men seems also to be significant, with reduced socializing with friends, and increased participation in extended family activities, service activities, churches, and hours at work [11].
There also seem to be significant differences between men and women. Men are more likely to have a job and work more hours after parenthood, while women’ behavior changes in the opposite direction (Table 4).
Table 4.
Effects of parenthood on employed work 1992–1993, USA
In paid employment (%) Hours of work/week (h)
Women – no children 78 39.2
Women – with children 68 34.6
Men – no children 88 46.4
Men – with children 92 47.3
From [12]. Expressed as mean averages.
So, delayed parenthood among college graduates will indeed tend to delay psychological maturity, and therefore be a cause of psychological neoteny.
It seems that PN is probably economically advantageous in women, because delayed parenthood results in women contributing more in the labour market. Conversely PN may be (to a lesser extent) economically detrimental in men. One possible implication is that, strictly in economic terms, it might be beneficial for women to have children at an older age than men – reversing the traditional pattern. Of course, such a shift may be unpopular and would have other disadvantages.
Conclusion
Clearly, this small and selective survey of the literature does not constitute a rigorous test of the hypothesis that higher education causes psychological neoteny, but is intended as a first look at some illustrative data to check that it is broadly consistent with the predications of the theory – which it is.
A more thorough investigation could address the literature in a systematic fashion, checking other plausible proxy measures of maturity (such as age of first marriage, job stability, social interactions); as well as focusing on more directly psychological measures of the effect of higher education (such as surveys of attitudes and behaviours). Most importantly, the hypothesized causal relationship between retention of youthful psychological traits and subsequent economic and social success needs to be measured directly.
In conclusion, it seems likely that psychological neoteny is increasing mainly as a consequence of the increasing percentage of school leavers going into higher education. The consequences of PN are most evident in relation to women because their participation has grown rapidly over fifty years until women usually constitute the majority of students in higher education. Also the economic effect of parenthood seems greater for women than for men. Psychological neoteny may on average significantly increase an average woman’s economic productivity, but somewhat reduce that of men.
At present it is unclear whether the trend for retaining youthful attitudes and behaviours is overall beneficial or harmful. There are probably social advantages from a population retaining the cognitive flexibility to cope with (or indeed enjoy) rapid change of jobs, locations and friends; and there are economic benefits from delayed parenthood in women. But there will also be social disadvantages from delayed maturity of adults, perhaps impairing social integration among men, and reducing population fertility levels. And, at the individual and personal level, the costs and benefits of PN may be different for men and women, and for people with different priorities.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Martin Trow, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Martin died February 24 2007 aged 80. For the past few years he was my frequent e-mail pen-friend; a delightful correspondent who combined youthful vitality and curiosity with the wisdom and knowledge of maturity. He was the acknowledged authority on the transition from elite to mass higher education, and its consequences. I got the idea of psychological neoteny from some of Martin’s off-the-cuff remarks about universities in relation to modern society.
References
[1] B.G. Charlton, The rise of the boy-genius: psychological neoteny, science and modern life, Med Hypotheses 67 (2006), pp. 679–681.
[2] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Imprint Academic, Thorverton (2003) p. 87.
[3] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Crit Quart) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39.
[4] K. Mayhew, C. Deer and M. Dua, The move to mass higher education in the UK: many questions and some answers, Oxford Rev Educ 30 (2004), pp. 65–82.
[5] M.M. Marini, Measuring the effects of the timing of marriage and first birth, J Marriage Fam 43 (1981), pp. 19–26.
[6] A.S. Rossi, Transition to parenthood, J Marriage Fam 60 (1968), pp. 26–39.
[7] R.R. Rindfuss and C. St John, Social determinants of age at first birth, J Marriage Fam 45 (1983), pp. 553–565.
[8] K.E. Heck, K.C. Schoendorf, A.M. Ventura and J.L. Kiely, Delayed childbearing by education level in the United States, 1969–1994, Matern Child Health J 1 (1997), pp. 81–88.
[9] K.M. Nomaguchi and M.A. Milkie, J Marriage Fam 65 (2003), pp. 356–374.
[10] K. Salmela-Aro, J.E. Numrmi, T. Saisto and E. Halmesmaki, Women’s and men’s personal goals during the transition to parenthood, J Fam Psychol 14 (2000), pp. 171–186.
[11] C. Knoester and D.J. Eggebeen, The effects of the transition to parenthood and subsequent children on men’s well-being and social participation, J Fam Issues 27 (2006), pp. 1532–1560.
[12] G. Kaufman and P. Uhlenberg, The influence of parenthood on the work effort of married men and women, Soc Forces 78 (2000), pp. 931–949.
Psychological neoteny and higher education: Associations with delayed parenthood
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 69: 237-240
***
Summary
In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name psychological neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally associated with youth. I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies; because people need to be somewhat child-like in their psychology order to keep learning, developing and adapting to the rapid and accelerating pace of change. Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education. Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of this hypothesis of psychological neoteny. Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ‘settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. A sevenfold expansion of participation in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage and parenthood. Increasing number of years of education is quantitatively the most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth: among women college graduates about half are aged 30 or older at the time of their first birth – a rise of 400% in 25 years. Parenthood is associated with a broad range of psychologically ‘maturing’ and socially-integrating effects in both men and women. However, the economic effect is different in men and women: after parenthood men are more likely to have a job and work more hours while women change in the opposite direction. The conclusion is that psychological neoteny is indeed increasing, and mainly as a consequence of the increasing percentage of school leavers going into higher education. But at present it is unclear whether this trend is overall beneficial or harmful; and the answer may be different for men and women.
***
Causes and consequences of psychological neoteny
In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name Psychological Neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviours traditionally associated with youth [1]. ‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity.
I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies. Modern cultures are characterized by rapid and accelerating pace of change, which demands a much higher degree of cognitive flexibility than traditional societies of the past [2]. As a result, it helps if people retain a somewhat child-like psychology. Cognitive flexibility is useful when we need to keep developing, adapting and learning. Of course the positive benefits of maturity are also delayed, and the downside to PN includes some less desirable faults of youth – such as irresponsibility, short attention span, and novelty-seeking.
Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education, when an ever-increasing proportion of the school leavers go straight on to attend colleges and universities, and attend these institutions for increasing numbers of years. Formal education rewards youthful traits such as cognitive flexibility and the drive to acquire now knowledge and skills [3]. Higher education also delays key life experiences which tend to induce psychological maturity, such as marriage and parenthood.
Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of my hypothesis that psychological neoteny is mainly caused by higher education.
Analysis
It is obvious that an increasing proportion of school leavers are moving on to higher education in all modern liberal democracies, and in many countries the expansion of participation in higher education has been profound (Table 1).
Table 1.
Percentage of under 21 year old entrants to higher education (age participation index; API) for UK 1961–2001
Date API (%)
1961 5
1971 13
1981 13
1991 23
2001 33
From [4].
The sevenfold expansion of API in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage (Table 2) and parenthood (Table 3) with an increasing average age of mothers at the birth of their first child.
Table 2.
Social trends 34 – http://www.statistics.gov.uk – average age at marriage and divorce: England and Wales
Date Age males Age females
1971 24.6 22.6
1981 25.4 23.1
1991 27.5 25.5
2001 30.6 28.4
Average age in years at first marriage for males and females.
Table 3.
From social trends 34 – http://www.statistics.gov.uk – average age in years of mother by birth order: England and Wales, first child
Date Age (years)
1971 23.7
1981 24.8
1991 25.6
2001 26.5
Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ’settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. First marriage and age of first child are correlated [5], but parenthood has probably replaced marriage as the main transitional stage in modern societies like the USA [6].
The most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth is the number of years of education [7]. For example, in the USA the median age at first birth has increased rapidly among women with 12 or more years of education [8]. In 1969, 10.2% of college graduate women were age 30 or older at the time of their first birth but in 1994 this had risen over 400% to 45.5%. By contrast, among women with only 9–11 years of education this rise was just 50%, with only 2.5% of first births in 1994 occurred at age 30 plus.
It seems clear, therefore, that the proportion of school leavers going into higher education has increased massively, and also that these extra years of education lead to later marriage and parenthood.
The psychologically ‘maturing’ and socially-integrating effect of parenthood on attitudes and behavior of married parents is obvious and uncontroversial [9], especially for women – who remain the main carers for children [10]. But the effect of parenthood for men seems also to be significant, with reduced socializing with friends, and increased participation in extended family activities, service activities, churches, and hours at work [11].
There also seem to be significant differences between men and women. Men are more likely to have a job and work more hours after parenthood, while women’ behavior changes in the opposite direction (Table 4).
Table 4.
Effects of parenthood on employed work 1992–1993, USA
In paid employment (%) Hours of work/week (h)
Women – no children 78 39.2
Women – with children 68 34.6
Men – no children 88 46.4
Men – with children 92 47.3
From [12]. Expressed as mean averages.
So, delayed parenthood among college graduates will indeed tend to delay psychological maturity, and therefore be a cause of psychological neoteny.
It seems that PN is probably economically advantageous in women, because delayed parenthood results in women contributing more in the labour market. Conversely PN may be (to a lesser extent) economically detrimental in men. One possible implication is that, strictly in economic terms, it might be beneficial for women to have children at an older age than men – reversing the traditional pattern. Of course, such a shift may be unpopular and would have other disadvantages.
Conclusion
Clearly, this small and selective survey of the literature does not constitute a rigorous test of the hypothesis that higher education causes psychological neoteny, but is intended as a first look at some illustrative data to check that it is broadly consistent with the predications of the theory – which it is.
A more thorough investigation could address the literature in a systematic fashion, checking other plausible proxy measures of maturity (such as age of first marriage, job stability, social interactions); as well as focusing on more directly psychological measures of the effect of higher education (such as surveys of attitudes and behaviours). Most importantly, the hypothesized causal relationship between retention of youthful psychological traits and subsequent economic and social success needs to be measured directly.
In conclusion, it seems likely that psychological neoteny is increasing mainly as a consequence of the increasing percentage of school leavers going into higher education. The consequences of PN are most evident in relation to women because their participation has grown rapidly over fifty years until women usually constitute the majority of students in higher education. Also the economic effect of parenthood seems greater for women than for men. Psychological neoteny may on average significantly increase an average woman’s economic productivity, but somewhat reduce that of men.
At present it is unclear whether the trend for retaining youthful attitudes and behaviours is overall beneficial or harmful. There are probably social advantages from a population retaining the cognitive flexibility to cope with (or indeed enjoy) rapid change of jobs, locations and friends; and there are economic benefits from delayed parenthood in women. But there will also be social disadvantages from delayed maturity of adults, perhaps impairing social integration among men, and reducing population fertility levels. And, at the individual and personal level, the costs and benefits of PN may be different for men and women, and for people with different priorities.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Martin Trow, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Martin died February 24 2007 aged 80. For the past few years he was my frequent e-mail pen-friend; a delightful correspondent who combined youthful vitality and curiosity with the wisdom and knowledge of maturity. He was the acknowledged authority on the transition from elite to mass higher education, and its consequences. I got the idea of psychological neoteny from some of Martin’s off-the-cuff remarks about universities in relation to modern society.
References
[1] B.G. Charlton, The rise of the boy-genius: psychological neoteny, science and modern life, Med Hypotheses 67 (2006), pp. 679–681.
[2] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Imprint Academic, Thorverton (2003) p. 87.
[3] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Crit Quart) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39.
[4] K. Mayhew, C. Deer and M. Dua, The move to mass higher education in the UK: many questions and some answers, Oxford Rev Educ 30 (2004), pp. 65–82.
[5] M.M. Marini, Measuring the effects of the timing of marriage and first birth, J Marriage Fam 43 (1981), pp. 19–26.
[6] A.S. Rossi, Transition to parenthood, J Marriage Fam 60 (1968), pp. 26–39.
[7] R.R. Rindfuss and C. St John, Social determinants of age at first birth, J Marriage Fam 45 (1983), pp. 553–565.
[8] K.E. Heck, K.C. Schoendorf, A.M. Ventura and J.L. Kiely, Delayed childbearing by education level in the United States, 1969–1994, Matern Child Health J 1 (1997), pp. 81–88.
[9] K.M. Nomaguchi and M.A. Milkie, J Marriage Fam 65 (2003), pp. 356–374.
[10] K. Salmela-Aro, J.E. Numrmi, T. Saisto and E. Halmesmaki, Women’s and men’s personal goals during the transition to parenthood, J Fam Psychol 14 (2000), pp. 171–186.
[11] C. Knoester and D.J. Eggebeen, The effects of the transition to parenthood and subsequent children on men’s well-being and social participation, J Fam Issues 27 (2006), pp. 1532–1560.
[12] G. Kaufman and P. Uhlenberg, The influence of parenthood on the work effort of married men and women, Soc Forces 78 (2000), pp. 931–949.
Revolutionary biomedical science 1992–2006 - NLG metric
Editorial
Measuring revolutionary biomedical science 1992–2006 using Nobel prizes, Lasker (clinical medicine) awards and Gairdner awards (NLG metric)
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 69: 1-5
***
Summary
The Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the Lasker award for clinical medicine, and the Gairdner international award are given to individuals for their role in developing theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of biomedical science. These distinctions have been used to develop an NLG metric to measure research performance and trends in ‘revolutionary’ biomedical science with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations from 1992–2006. I have previously argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field should be expanded to about nine per year and the NLG metric attempts to predict the possible results of such an expansion. One hundred and nineteen NLG prizes and awards were made during the past fifteen years (about eight per year) when overlapping awards had been removed. Eighty-five were won by the USA, revealing a massive domination in revolutionary biomedical science by this nation; the UK was second with sixteen awards; Canada had five, Australia four and Germany three. The USA had twelve elite centres of revolutionary biomedical science, with University of Washington at Seattle and MIT in first position with six awards and prizes each; Rockefeller University and Caltech were jointly second placed with five. Surprisingly, Harvard University – which many people rank as the premier world research centre – failed to reach the threshold of three prizes and awards, and was not included in the elite list. The University of Oxford, UK, was the only institution outside of the USA which featured as a significant centre of revolutionary biomedical science. Long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) probably requires a sufficiently large number of individually-successful large institutions in open competition with one another – as in the USA. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units.
***
I have previously argued that Nobel prizes (and other similar international awards and medals) may be used in scientometrics to measure research performance and trends in ‘revolutionary’ science [1]; with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations [2].
Nobel prizes are typically awarded for theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of a science. By contrast, most successful scientific research is ‘normal science’ which represents a more incremental improvement on already existing work: normal science takes science further in an established direction rather than starting a new direction [1], [2] and [3].
Biomedical research currently constitutes the dominant world science in terms of volume, funding and prestige. I have argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field (i.e. the prize in physiology or medicine, and sometimes chemistry) should therefore be expanded from the current maximum of three to a minimum of six, preferably nine, per year to recognize this dominance [2].
In the following analysis, I have attempted to predict the possible results of such expansion by creating a metric from Nobel prizes in physiology/medicine [4] and adding two other prestigious awards: the Lasker award for clinical medical research and the Gairdner international award; over a fifteen year time span of 1992–2006 inclusive.
The NLG metric
I recorded the national and institutional affiliations of Nobel laureates who received the prize for medicine or physiology during the period 1992–2006, affiliations were allocated for the time laureates received the prize [4]. Lasker and Gairdner awards were likewise noted for that period.
The approximately-annual Lasker Award for clinical medical research recognizes up to three scientists whose work pioneers a major improvement in clinical management or treatment [5]. Unlike the Lasker award for basic medical research, which frequently predicts a Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine, the clinical medical research award does not frequently overlap with the Nobel prize. The Gairdner international award [6] is given to about six outstanding biomedical scientists per year, so the Gairdner award contributes about half the weight to this metric.
My impression is that early Gairdner awards considerably over-represented Canada (the award is administered from Toronto), and even now this probably still remains a small bias because Canada got five Gairdner awards (from the sixty-two included in this analysis) from 1992–2006, but no Nobels or Laskers. Therefore, I restricted this analysis to the past 15 years when the Gairdner seems to have functioned as a more validly ‘international’ award for merit. I also considered including in the revolutionary science metric the one-winner-per-year Lasker award for basic medical research, but there was such a high degree of overlap with the Gairdner award that this was omitted for the sake of simplicity and clarity.
Credit for the prize or award was given to the institution and nation to which the winner was affiliated at the time of the award (except where it was clear that the winner had moved in the past few months while awaiting the award). It would certainly be more valid to award credit to institutions and nations on the basis of where the prize- or award-winning research was actually accomplished, and I hope that future researchers will be able to do the investigative work needed to accomplish this.
Each individual scientist was counted only once, because a scientist who won more than one of these prizes and awards was credited for just one on the assumption that the Nobel is senior to the Lasker, and the Lasker is senior to the Gairdner. Credit for the prize or award was therefore given to the institution or nation to which the winner was affiliated at the time of the senior award or prize. Sometimes a Lasker or Gairdner award winner had also received a Nobel prize for chemistry (rather than medicine/physiology) – such individuals affiliations were allocated for the time of winning either the Lasker or Gairdner.
This process created a pool of one hundred and nineteen winners, which (over fifteen years) represents an average of about eight winners per year – about the number of annual laureates I recommended for the Nobel prize in medicine. As in previous analyses [7] and [8], I set a minimum threshold of three prizes or awards before an institution or nation qualified as a centre of revolutionary science, on the basis that one or two might be luck or coincidence, but three prizes/awards probably indicates systematic strength.
Measuring revolutionary science by counting such rare and highly-selective prizes and awards, and also of setting a minimum of three prizes and awards before a nation or institution registers as a significant centre, means that the NLG metric inevitably generates many false negatives. It must be presumed that many valuable centres of revolutionary science are not picked-up by this metric.
However, for the same reasons, the NLG metric is unlikely to generate many false positives; and the listed centres of revolutionary biomedical science can be assumed to deserve their elite status with a high degree of confidence – subject to the above caveats about the method of counting affiliations at the time of winning, rather than accomplishing the work which led-to winning, see Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 1.
Number of Nobel, Lasker, Gairdner (NLG) winners 1992–2005 by nation
USA 85
UK 16
Canada 5
Australia 4
Germany 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion as a centre of revolutionary biomedical science.
Table 2.
Number of Nobel, Lasker, Gairdner (NLG) winners 1992–2005 by institution (all institutions are in the USA, excepting Oxford)
MIT 6
University Washington, Seattle 6
Caltech 5
Rockefeller University 5
NIH 4
UCSF 4
University Pennsylvania 4
Yale University 4
Columbia University 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 3
Johns Hopkins 3
Washington University, St. Louis 3
University of Oxford (UK) 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion as a centre of revolutionary biomedical science. UCSF, University of California at San Francisco; CRC, Cancer Research Center.
NLG metric national and institutional analysis
The NLG metric national distribution (Table 1) reveals a massive dominance of the USA in revolutionary biomedical science, confirming the previous results of US domination for revolutionary science generally, and provides further confirmation of a trend that this US domination may be increasing [7] and [8]. The UK is a clear second, with a number of prizes and awards that is broadly in proportion to the population difference between the UK and the US. Canada, Australia and Germany also feature (although I am suspicious that Canada only qualifies by winning the Canadian-administered Gairdner award).
The finding of overwhelming US domination is particularly interesting when contrasted with the probability that the ‘rest of the world’ is probably catching-up with the USA in terms of ‘normal science’ metrics (with these metrics presumably dominated by biomedical research) such as numbers of publications and citations. For instance, the European Union nations and China, and some smaller far eastern nations (e.g. Taiwan, Souh Korea, Singapore), are probably increasing normal science production faster than the USA [9] and [10]. The implication is that only the USA has a research system which actively supports revolutionary science at the highest level [7] and [8].
The University of Washington at Seattle comes joint-top of the league table (Table 2) for revolutionary biomedical science (with MIT) which may surprise those observers who have failed to notice the rise to international prominence of this institution [7]. In a separate analysis of total Web of Science citations per US university, we also found that University of Washington was ranked fourth (after Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford) [3]. So the clear implication is that University of Washington at Seattle should now be considered one of the truly elite research universities of the world, and that its pre-eminence is probably focused in biomedical science. Something similar also applies in relation to UCSF (University of California at San Francisco) [8]. It was also surprising to see the great strength of MIT in biomedical science, when this institution has traditionally been associated more with the physical sciences (and economics); and something similar applies to Caltech (joint second place) – which, unlike MIT (with Harvard), has no affiliated medical school.
Perhaps even more startling was the failure of Harvard to reach the threshold of three winners required in order to feature on this league table. During 1992–2006 Harvard achieved only two Gairdner awards and neither a Nobel prize for medicine nor a Lasker award. This confirms the relatively poor showing of Harvard in my previous analyses of performance in revolutionary science such as Nobel trends from 1947–2006 [7], and the analysis for the past 20 years which includes Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards [8].
Yet during the past three decades Harvard has massively dominated all other institutions in the world in terms of scientific research production such as numbers of papers published and number of citations earned ([3], and unpublished results from Web of Science by Peter Andras and Bruce G Charlton, Newcastle University, UK). Also Harvard has topped the authoritative Shanghai Jiao Tong university table of world universities by a large margin since its inception in 2003 http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm.
My interpretation of this overall picture is that, over recent decades, Harvard has failed to orientate its priorities towards the cutting-edge of the major dominant branch of world science. The institution has clearly been successful in maintaining massive productivity in very high quality ‘normal science’; but apparently has not encouraged the much riskier endeavours in the type of revolutionary biomedical science which wins major prizes, medals and awards.
Revolutionary biomedical science outside the USA
The University of Oxford is the only institution outside of the US which has won three prizes or awards in the past fifteen years and thereby ranks as a major centre of revolutionary biomedical science. This good performance of Oxford is in-line with that university’s increasingly emphasis on science (probably especially medical science) over recent decades, and its catching-up with its UK rival Cambridge and also with the US ‘Ivy League’ in terms of science production [11] and [12].
In the UK the other thirteen prizes and awards (outside of Oxford) are scattered across nine different institutions, so that less than twenty percent of UK NLGs were won by significant UK centres of revolutionary bioscience. This contrasts with the US picture where more than fifty percent of NLGs (fifty awards and prizes out of eighty-five) were won at major research institutions – representing a greater concentration of high level revolutionary science activity. This may well herald the evolutionary emergence of a separate research system of ‘pure medical science’, as we have previously advocated [13].
Due to the limitations of the Gairdner award more than fifteen years ago, I am unsure of the long-term UK trend in revolutionary biomedical science; but given that the UK seems to be declining as a centre of revolutionary science-in-general [7] it seems a plausible hypothesis that the US dominance in revolutionary science is a consequence of having revolutionary science concentrated in a relatively large number of individually significant and successful institutions. Furthermore, these elite US institutions are apparently in competition as judged by the rise to prominence of the University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF, and the decline of Harvard. Moreover, this is apparently an open competition since it has enabled new entrants to this status as well as relegation from this status.
However, it must be remembered that the NLG only measures the visible and most fully-validated tip of an iceberg of revolutionary science. These prizes and awards credit successful revolutionary science which has changed the direction of a discipline in a big way, and where credit for this can be allocated to a single person or a few individuals. It is almost certain, on general theoretical grounds derived from complex systems theory [14], that the process of generating major breakthroughs in revolutionary science must be supported by a much larger submerged base of revolutionary science research which is harder to identify with confidence, and where credit for achievements is more diffused between individuals.
The possible lesson for countries outside the US may be that long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) may require a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large and individually-successful institutions in open competition with one another. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units, such as the European Union.
Acknowledgement
Thanks are due to Peter Andras whose conversation and collaboration fuelled this work.
References
[1] T.S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago University Press, Chicago (1970).
[2] B.G. Charlton, Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 471–473. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (77 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[3] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva, [in press].
[4] Nobel foundation. Nobel prizes. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[5] Lasker foundation. Former winners – Clin Med Res www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/all_clinical. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[6] Gairdner foundation. Awardees. www.gairdner.org/winners. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[7] B.G. Charlton, Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 931–934. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[8] B.G. Charlton, Which are the best nations and institutions for revolutionary science 1987–2006? Analysis using a combined metric of Nobel prizes, Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards (NFLT metric), Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 1191–1194. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[9] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU–US race for leadership of science and technology: qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[10] Z. Ping and L. Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Res Policy 35 (2006), pp. 83–104.
[11] Charlton B, Andras B. Oxbridge versus the ‘Ivy League’: 30 year citation trends Oxford Magazine; 2006: 255, p. 16–7. (Available at: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. Accessed 09.01.07).
[12] Charlton B, Andras P. Best in the arts, catching-up in science – what is the best future for Oxford? Oxford Magazine; 2006: 256, p. 25–6. (Available at: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. Accessed 09.01.07).
[13] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, The future of ‘pure’ medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system, Med Hypotheses 65 (2005), pp. 419–425. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (98 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[14] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).
Measuring revolutionary biomedical science 1992–2006 using Nobel prizes, Lasker (clinical medicine) awards and Gairdner awards (NLG metric)
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 69: 1-5
***
Summary
The Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the Lasker award for clinical medicine, and the Gairdner international award are given to individuals for their role in developing theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of biomedical science. These distinctions have been used to develop an NLG metric to measure research performance and trends in ‘revolutionary’ biomedical science with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations from 1992–2006. I have previously argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field should be expanded to about nine per year and the NLG metric attempts to predict the possible results of such an expansion. One hundred and nineteen NLG prizes and awards were made during the past fifteen years (about eight per year) when overlapping awards had been removed. Eighty-five were won by the USA, revealing a massive domination in revolutionary biomedical science by this nation; the UK was second with sixteen awards; Canada had five, Australia four and Germany three. The USA had twelve elite centres of revolutionary biomedical science, with University of Washington at Seattle and MIT in first position with six awards and prizes each; Rockefeller University and Caltech were jointly second placed with five. Surprisingly, Harvard University – which many people rank as the premier world research centre – failed to reach the threshold of three prizes and awards, and was not included in the elite list. The University of Oxford, UK, was the only institution outside of the USA which featured as a significant centre of revolutionary biomedical science. Long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) probably requires a sufficiently large number of individually-successful large institutions in open competition with one another – as in the USA. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units.
***
I have previously argued that Nobel prizes (and other similar international awards and medals) may be used in scientometrics to measure research performance and trends in ‘revolutionary’ science [1]; with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations [2].
Nobel prizes are typically awarded for theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of a science. By contrast, most successful scientific research is ‘normal science’ which represents a more incremental improvement on already existing work: normal science takes science further in an established direction rather than starting a new direction [1], [2] and [3].
Biomedical research currently constitutes the dominant world science in terms of volume, funding and prestige. I have argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field (i.e. the prize in physiology or medicine, and sometimes chemistry) should therefore be expanded from the current maximum of three to a minimum of six, preferably nine, per year to recognize this dominance [2].
In the following analysis, I have attempted to predict the possible results of such expansion by creating a metric from Nobel prizes in physiology/medicine [4] and adding two other prestigious awards: the Lasker award for clinical medical research and the Gairdner international award; over a fifteen year time span of 1992–2006 inclusive.
The NLG metric
I recorded the national and institutional affiliations of Nobel laureates who received the prize for medicine or physiology during the period 1992–2006, affiliations were allocated for the time laureates received the prize [4]. Lasker and Gairdner awards were likewise noted for that period.
The approximately-annual Lasker Award for clinical medical research recognizes up to three scientists whose work pioneers a major improvement in clinical management or treatment [5]. Unlike the Lasker award for basic medical research, which frequently predicts a Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine, the clinical medical research award does not frequently overlap with the Nobel prize. The Gairdner international award [6] is given to about six outstanding biomedical scientists per year, so the Gairdner award contributes about half the weight to this metric.
My impression is that early Gairdner awards considerably over-represented Canada (the award is administered from Toronto), and even now this probably still remains a small bias because Canada got five Gairdner awards (from the sixty-two included in this analysis) from 1992–2006, but no Nobels or Laskers. Therefore, I restricted this analysis to the past 15 years when the Gairdner seems to have functioned as a more validly ‘international’ award for merit. I also considered including in the revolutionary science metric the one-winner-per-year Lasker award for basic medical research, but there was such a high degree of overlap with the Gairdner award that this was omitted for the sake of simplicity and clarity.
Credit for the prize or award was given to the institution and nation to which the winner was affiliated at the time of the award (except where it was clear that the winner had moved in the past few months while awaiting the award). It would certainly be more valid to award credit to institutions and nations on the basis of where the prize- or award-winning research was actually accomplished, and I hope that future researchers will be able to do the investigative work needed to accomplish this.
Each individual scientist was counted only once, because a scientist who won more than one of these prizes and awards was credited for just one on the assumption that the Nobel is senior to the Lasker, and the Lasker is senior to the Gairdner. Credit for the prize or award was therefore given to the institution or nation to which the winner was affiliated at the time of the senior award or prize. Sometimes a Lasker or Gairdner award winner had also received a Nobel prize for chemistry (rather than medicine/physiology) – such individuals affiliations were allocated for the time of winning either the Lasker or Gairdner.
This process created a pool of one hundred and nineteen winners, which (over fifteen years) represents an average of about eight winners per year – about the number of annual laureates I recommended for the Nobel prize in medicine. As in previous analyses [7] and [8], I set a minimum threshold of three prizes or awards before an institution or nation qualified as a centre of revolutionary science, on the basis that one or two might be luck or coincidence, but three prizes/awards probably indicates systematic strength.
Measuring revolutionary science by counting such rare and highly-selective prizes and awards, and also of setting a minimum of three prizes and awards before a nation or institution registers as a significant centre, means that the NLG metric inevitably generates many false negatives. It must be presumed that many valuable centres of revolutionary science are not picked-up by this metric.
However, for the same reasons, the NLG metric is unlikely to generate many false positives; and the listed centres of revolutionary biomedical science can be assumed to deserve their elite status with a high degree of confidence – subject to the above caveats about the method of counting affiliations at the time of winning, rather than accomplishing the work which led-to winning, see Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 1.
Number of Nobel, Lasker, Gairdner (NLG) winners 1992–2005 by nation
USA 85
UK 16
Canada 5
Australia 4
Germany 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion as a centre of revolutionary biomedical science.
Table 2.
Number of Nobel, Lasker, Gairdner (NLG) winners 1992–2005 by institution (all institutions are in the USA, excepting Oxford)
MIT 6
University Washington, Seattle 6
Caltech 5
Rockefeller University 5
NIH 4
UCSF 4
University Pennsylvania 4
Yale University 4
Columbia University 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 3
Johns Hopkins 3
Washington University, St. Louis 3
University of Oxford (UK) 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion as a centre of revolutionary biomedical science. UCSF, University of California at San Francisco; CRC, Cancer Research Center.
NLG metric national and institutional analysis
The NLG metric national distribution (Table 1) reveals a massive dominance of the USA in revolutionary biomedical science, confirming the previous results of US domination for revolutionary science generally, and provides further confirmation of a trend that this US domination may be increasing [7] and [8]. The UK is a clear second, with a number of prizes and awards that is broadly in proportion to the population difference between the UK and the US. Canada, Australia and Germany also feature (although I am suspicious that Canada only qualifies by winning the Canadian-administered Gairdner award).
The finding of overwhelming US domination is particularly interesting when contrasted with the probability that the ‘rest of the world’ is probably catching-up with the USA in terms of ‘normal science’ metrics (with these metrics presumably dominated by biomedical research) such as numbers of publications and citations. For instance, the European Union nations and China, and some smaller far eastern nations (e.g. Taiwan, Souh Korea, Singapore), are probably increasing normal science production faster than the USA [9] and [10]. The implication is that only the USA has a research system which actively supports revolutionary science at the highest level [7] and [8].
The University of Washington at Seattle comes joint-top of the league table (Table 2) for revolutionary biomedical science (with MIT) which may surprise those observers who have failed to notice the rise to international prominence of this institution [7]. In a separate analysis of total Web of Science citations per US university, we also found that University of Washington was ranked fourth (after Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford) [3]. So the clear implication is that University of Washington at Seattle should now be considered one of the truly elite research universities of the world, and that its pre-eminence is probably focused in biomedical science. Something similar also applies in relation to UCSF (University of California at San Francisco) [8]. It was also surprising to see the great strength of MIT in biomedical science, when this institution has traditionally been associated more with the physical sciences (and economics); and something similar applies to Caltech (joint second place) – which, unlike MIT (with Harvard), has no affiliated medical school.
Perhaps even more startling was the failure of Harvard to reach the threshold of three winners required in order to feature on this league table. During 1992–2006 Harvard achieved only two Gairdner awards and neither a Nobel prize for medicine nor a Lasker award. This confirms the relatively poor showing of Harvard in my previous analyses of performance in revolutionary science such as Nobel trends from 1947–2006 [7], and the analysis for the past 20 years which includes Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards [8].
Yet during the past three decades Harvard has massively dominated all other institutions in the world in terms of scientific research production such as numbers of papers published and number of citations earned ([3], and unpublished results from Web of Science by Peter Andras and Bruce G Charlton, Newcastle University, UK). Also Harvard has topped the authoritative Shanghai Jiao Tong university table of world universities by a large margin since its inception in 2003 http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm.
My interpretation of this overall picture is that, over recent decades, Harvard has failed to orientate its priorities towards the cutting-edge of the major dominant branch of world science. The institution has clearly been successful in maintaining massive productivity in very high quality ‘normal science’; but apparently has not encouraged the much riskier endeavours in the type of revolutionary biomedical science which wins major prizes, medals and awards.
Revolutionary biomedical science outside the USA
The University of Oxford is the only institution outside of the US which has won three prizes or awards in the past fifteen years and thereby ranks as a major centre of revolutionary biomedical science. This good performance of Oxford is in-line with that university’s increasingly emphasis on science (probably especially medical science) over recent decades, and its catching-up with its UK rival Cambridge and also with the US ‘Ivy League’ in terms of science production [11] and [12].
In the UK the other thirteen prizes and awards (outside of Oxford) are scattered across nine different institutions, so that less than twenty percent of UK NLGs were won by significant UK centres of revolutionary bioscience. This contrasts with the US picture where more than fifty percent of NLGs (fifty awards and prizes out of eighty-five) were won at major research institutions – representing a greater concentration of high level revolutionary science activity. This may well herald the evolutionary emergence of a separate research system of ‘pure medical science’, as we have previously advocated [13].
Due to the limitations of the Gairdner award more than fifteen years ago, I am unsure of the long-term UK trend in revolutionary biomedical science; but given that the UK seems to be declining as a centre of revolutionary science-in-general [7] it seems a plausible hypothesis that the US dominance in revolutionary science is a consequence of having revolutionary science concentrated in a relatively large number of individually significant and successful institutions. Furthermore, these elite US institutions are apparently in competition as judged by the rise to prominence of the University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF, and the decline of Harvard. Moreover, this is apparently an open competition since it has enabled new entrants to this status as well as relegation from this status.
However, it must be remembered that the NLG only measures the visible and most fully-validated tip of an iceberg of revolutionary science. These prizes and awards credit successful revolutionary science which has changed the direction of a discipline in a big way, and where credit for this can be allocated to a single person or a few individuals. It is almost certain, on general theoretical grounds derived from complex systems theory [14], that the process of generating major breakthroughs in revolutionary science must be supported by a much larger submerged base of revolutionary science research which is harder to identify with confidence, and where credit for achievements is more diffused between individuals.
The possible lesson for countries outside the US may be that long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) may require a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large and individually-successful institutions in open competition with one another. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units, such as the European Union.
Acknowledgement
Thanks are due to Peter Andras whose conversation and collaboration fuelled this work.
References
[1] T.S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago University Press, Chicago (1970).
[2] B.G. Charlton, Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 471–473. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (77 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[3] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva, [in press].
[4] Nobel foundation. Nobel prizes. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[5] Lasker foundation. Former winners – Clin Med Res www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/all_clinical. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[6] Gairdner foundation. Awardees. www.gairdner.org/winners. Accessed: 05.01.07.
[7] B.G. Charlton, Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 931–934. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[8] B.G. Charlton, Which are the best nations and institutions for revolutionary science 1987–2006? Analysis using a combined metric of Nobel prizes, Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards (NFLT metric), Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 1191–1194. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[9] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU–US race for leadership of science and technology: qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[10] Z. Ping and L. Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Res Policy 35 (2006), pp. 83–104.
[11] Charlton B, Andras B. Oxbridge versus the ‘Ivy League’: 30 year citation trends Oxford Magazine; 2006: 255, p. 16–7. (Available at: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. Accessed 09.01.07).
[12] Charlton B, Andras P. Best in the arts, catching-up in science – what is the best future for Oxford? Oxford Magazine; 2006: 256, p. 25–6. (Available at: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. Accessed 09.01.07).
[13] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, The future of ‘pure’ medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system, Med Hypotheses 65 (2005), pp. 419–425. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (98 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[14] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).
NFLT metric for revoutionary science - 1987-2006
Editorial
Which are the best nations and institutions for revolutionary science 1987–2006? Analysis using a combined metric of Nobel prizes, Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards (NFLT metric)
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 68: 1191-1194
***
Summary
I have previously suggested that Nobel prizes can be used as a scientometric measurement of ‘revolutionary science’; and that for this purpose it would be better if more Nobel prizes were awarded, especially in three new subjects of mathematics, medicine and computing science which have become major sciences over recent decades. In the following analysis of the last 20 years from 1987 to 2006, I use three prestigious prizes in mathematics (Fields medal), medicine (Lasker award for Clinical Medical Research) and computing science (A.M. Turing award) which are plausible surrogates for Nobel prizes. The combined Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing (NFLT) metric is strongly dominated by the USA. However the distribution implies that revolutionary science may be somewhat more broadly distributed than the pure Nobel metric suggests. The UK and France seem to be significant nations in some types of revolutionary science (although the UK has declined substantially as a centre of revolutionary science); and Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Denmark and Norway also feature. The top world institutions for revolutionary science according to NFLT are MIT, Stanford and Princeton – all in the USA – and the USA has 19 institutions with at least three prize-winners. Second is France, with three institutions having three or more winners; the UK and Norway have one each. The NFLT metric confirms previous observations that many public universities in the Western USA have now become a major focus of revolutionary science; and that Harvard has declined from its previous status as the top world centre of revolutionary science to about seventh-place. This analysis confirms the potential value of increasing the number of Nobel prizes as a means of identifying and monitoring centres of excellence in revolutionary science.
***
Introduction
Revolutionary science is a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his bookThe structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University Press, 1970) to describe research which changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies (ie. new ‘paradigms’). But most research is ‘normal science’, comprising checking, trial-and-error improvement and the more gradual and incremental extrapolation of already-existing paradigms.
I have previously suggested that Nobel prizes can be used as a scientometric measurement of ‘revolutionary science’; and that for this purpose it would be better if more Nobel prizes were awarded, especially in three new subjects of mathematics, medicine and computing science which have become major sciences over recent decades [1], [2] and [3]. My three disciplinary suggestions for Nobel expansion are here simply assumed to be valid, and in the following analysis of the last 20 years from 1987–2006, I have used three prestigious prizes in mathematics (Fields Medal), medicine (Lasker Award for Clinical Medical research) and computing science (A.M. Turing award) which are plausible surrogates for Nobel prizes.
The choice of the Fields medal [4] as a near-Nobel equivalent was also made by the well-respected Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings of the world’s best universities [5]. It is a highly prestigious prize awarded every four years (in batches of up to four winners – making the prize approximately annual) by the International Mathematical Union to a mathematician aged less than 40.
The approximately annual Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research [6] recognizes from one to three scientists whose work pioneers a major improvement in clinical management or treatment. Unlike the Lasker award for Basic Medical Research, which frequently predicts a Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine, the Clinical Medical Research (CMR) award does not frequently overlap with the Nobel prize. Only one person in the last twenty years (Barry Marshall) has received both a Lasker award for CMR and also a Nobel prize, and this particular award was removed from the Lasker statistic in the following tabulations.
The A.M. Turing Award is given annually to one or two individuals by the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions of lasting and major importance to the computer field [7].
Having identified the winners of Fields, Lasker and Turing prizes for the past twenty years; I discovered their national and institutional affiliation at the time the prize was awarded – either from the official web pages of the prize-awarding institutions, or by wider internet searching for references to these awards (e.g. Wikipedia entries, press releases, references to the prizes in other publications etc.). Each prize-winner was therefore credited to a single nation and institution. The data from Fields, Lasker and Turing winners were then pooled with the data from Nobel prize-winners and tabulated.
Since the aim of this study was to identify the strongest nations and institutions in revolutionary science, there was a minimum threshold of three Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners before a nation or institution was included in the tables.
Results
The national Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing (NFLT) metric (Table 1) is strongly dominated by the USA, confirming the pattern demonstrated by the previous analysis of Nobel prizes [3]. But inclusion of Fields–Lasker–Turing winners implies that revolutionary science may be more broadly distributed than the pure Nobel metric suggests. The UK and France, in particular, seem to be more significant nations in revolutionary science than suggested by Nobels alone; and other nations are identified as significant which are missed by the purely Nobel prize analysis: Russia, Denmark and Norway.
Table 1.
Number of Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners by nation 1987–2006
Nation Nobel prizes Other awards Total
USA 126 45 171
UK 9 10 19
France 5 7 12
Germany 9 0 9
Switzerland 7 0 7
Japan 3 1 4
Russia 2 1 3
Denmark 1 2 3
Norway 1 2 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion.
The top world revolutionary science institutions identified by the NFLT metric (Table 2) are MIT, Stanford and Princeton in the USA; and the USA has nineteen institutions with at least three prize-winners. Harvard stays in seventh place for the combined Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing metric, which is the same as its Nobel prize-winning rank, tending to confirm my previous observation [3] that Harvard has indeed declined as a centre of revolutionary science – although it remains dominant in ‘normal science’ as measured by metrics such as numbers of publications and citations.
Table 2.
Number of Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners by institution 1987–2006
US Institution Nobel prizes Other awards Total
MIT 11 2 13
Stanford University 9 1 10
Princeton University 6 4 10
Chicago University 7 1 8
University of California, Berkeley 4 3 7
Columbia University 7 0 7
Harvard University 5 1 6
CalTech 5 0 5
UCSF (University of California San Fransico) 3 2 5
Cornell University 2 2 4
Rockefeller Inst. & Univ. 3 1 4
UCLA 3 1 4
University of Colorado, Boulder 4 0 4
University of Pennsylvania 2 2 4
University of Washington, Seattle 3 1 4
NIH – National Inst. Health 0 3 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 3 0 3
University of California, Santa Barbara 3 0 3
University of California, Irvine 3 0 3
Non-US Institution
University of Cambridge, UK 2 3 5
College de France, Paris 3 0 3
University of Paris-Sud 0 3 3
IHES*, Paris, France 0 3 3
University Oslo, Norway 1 2 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion. IHES = Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.
In second place to the USA as a home of revolutionary science institutions is France, which has three institutions having three or more Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners. This particularly reflects French strength in mathematical research, with six Fields medallists in the past 20 years. University of Cambridge (UK) and University of Oslo (Norway) also emerge as significant.
Interpretation
In general, this analysis demonstrates the potential value of increasing the number of Nobel prizes [2], since otherwise the significant strength of France – and its three elite institutions – would be missed. The analysis also confirms the results of the pure-Nobel metric in suggesting that a high level of national performance in revolutionary science is probably a consequence of having elite institutions that win three or more prizes in a 20 year period.
Measured by the NFLT metric; outside of the USA (with its 19 institutions of revolutionary science), only France seems to have succeeded in supporting more than one centre of revolutionary science over the past 20 years. Up until the mid-1980s, the UK was a long-term clear second to the USA in Nobel prizes [3]; but from 1987 to 2006 three of its major prize-winning institutions (i.e. the University of Oxford, the Cambridge Molecular Biology MRC Unit, and Imperial College London) have declined as centres of revolutionary science, and now only the University of Cambridge achieves the three-winner NFLT threshold.
But the most significant result of this analysis is to demonstrate and confirm the massive US domination of revolutionary science [1] and [3], and the lack of any significant national competition for this status except in mathematics (France has six Fields medals to the USA’s eight). This contrasts with the general picture of European, East Asian and Chinese science ‘catching-up’ with the USA in terms of ‘normal science’ production (as measured by numbers of publications and citations [3] and [8]).
Looking into the long term, the lack of international competition in revolutionary science is somewhat worrying, since it means that world scientific progress may increasingly depend upon the US research system. In the US it is probably within-nation research competition between rival institutions that has so far maintained striving and standards in revolutionary science. But if US universities began to compete on the basis of ‘normal science’ instead of revolutionary science – as seems to have happened in the less-diverse, less competitive and more risk-averse Anglo-European research systems [9] – then we might expect to see a decline equivalent to that which has occurred over recent decades in mainland Europe and the UK [3].
The first signs of decline might be seen in previously-successful revolutionary science institutions which, like Harvard or Cambridge (UK), win progressively-fewer major research prizes [3] while maintaining a very high output of highly cited publications [1] and [10]. A more advanced state of decline might be harder to detect, since there would (presumably) continue to be Nobel-, Fields-, Lasker- and Turing-winners even in the absence of actual revolutionary science.
However, at present, the situation 1987–2006 looks healthy and competitive for revolutionary science in the USA, particularly in the elite of MIT, Stanford and Princeton and the recently-emerging Western US institutions [3] exemplified by UCSF with its three Nobels and two Lasker awards (Table 2).
Significance of the NFLT metric
The Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing metric only measures the tip of an iceberg of revolutionary science, and my assumption is that each successful example of revolutionary science which has led to a prize, medal or award must (on general theoretical principles [11]) have been supported by a very much larger and more complex system of revolutionary science comprising numerous people and institutions.
So, the NFLT metric will intrinsically register many ‘false negatives’ and systematically under-estimates the scale of revolutionary science. Despite this, the NFLT metric seems to have value, since these prizes apparently have a low false positive rate: impressionistically and anecdotally, the great majority of winners seem thoroughly to ‘deserve’ to win for their research, which has indeed been revolutionary in the sense of changing the direction of science.
It seems unlikely that scientists are frequently, primarily and specifically motivated to do high quality revolutionary science by the prospect of winning a Nobel prize or one of the other high medals and awards – although many would no doubt day-dream about the possibility. Indeed, there is vast variability in the personality types of scientists and their motivations. Rather, Nobels and the like can be seen as providing an after-the-fact identification of some of the clearest and best-validated examples of revolutionary science.
The NFLT metric can therefore be seen as analogous to a ‘top-down’ macroeconomic quantitative variable, such as national taxes and interest rates. Such a variable may have value for monitoring, evaluation and policy; but does not necessarily have a close relationship to individual motivations and behaviors [1]. The NFLT metric is suggestive, but its validity needs to be established by further empirical studies.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Jonathan Rees and Peter Andras for helpful comments.
References
[1] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva [in press].
[2] B.G. Charlton, Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 471–473. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (77 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[3] B.G. Charlton, Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 931–934. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[4] International Mathematical Union. Fields Medal, www.mathunion.org/Prizes/Fields [accessed 19 December 2006].
[5] Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Institute of Higher Education. Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006, http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking. [accessed 14 December 2006].
[6] Lasker Foundation. Former winners – Clinical Medical research, www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/all_clinical [accessed 19 December 2006].
[7] Association for Computing Machinery. A. M. Turing Award, http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?srt=all&awd=140. [accessed 19 December 2006].
[8] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU-US race for leadership of science and technology: Qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[9] P. Andras and B.G. Charlton, European science must embrace modernization (Correspondence), Nature 429 (2004), p. 699. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[10] Charlton B, Andras P. Oxford University’s research performance (four articles published in Oxford Magazine during 2006). www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. [accessed 14 December 2006].
[11] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).
Which are the best nations and institutions for revolutionary science 1987–2006? Analysis using a combined metric of Nobel prizes, Fields medals, Lasker awards and Turing awards (NFLT metric)
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 68: 1191-1194
***
Summary
I have previously suggested that Nobel prizes can be used as a scientometric measurement of ‘revolutionary science’; and that for this purpose it would be better if more Nobel prizes were awarded, especially in three new subjects of mathematics, medicine and computing science which have become major sciences over recent decades. In the following analysis of the last 20 years from 1987 to 2006, I use three prestigious prizes in mathematics (Fields medal), medicine (Lasker award for Clinical Medical Research) and computing science (A.M. Turing award) which are plausible surrogates for Nobel prizes. The combined Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing (NFLT) metric is strongly dominated by the USA. However the distribution implies that revolutionary science may be somewhat more broadly distributed than the pure Nobel metric suggests. The UK and France seem to be significant nations in some types of revolutionary science (although the UK has declined substantially as a centre of revolutionary science); and Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Denmark and Norway also feature. The top world institutions for revolutionary science according to NFLT are MIT, Stanford and Princeton – all in the USA – and the USA has 19 institutions with at least three prize-winners. Second is France, with three institutions having three or more winners; the UK and Norway have one each. The NFLT metric confirms previous observations that many public universities in the Western USA have now become a major focus of revolutionary science; and that Harvard has declined from its previous status as the top world centre of revolutionary science to about seventh-place. This analysis confirms the potential value of increasing the number of Nobel prizes as a means of identifying and monitoring centres of excellence in revolutionary science.
***
Introduction
Revolutionary science is a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his bookThe structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University Press, 1970) to describe research which changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies (ie. new ‘paradigms’). But most research is ‘normal science’, comprising checking, trial-and-error improvement and the more gradual and incremental extrapolation of already-existing paradigms.
I have previously suggested that Nobel prizes can be used as a scientometric measurement of ‘revolutionary science’; and that for this purpose it would be better if more Nobel prizes were awarded, especially in three new subjects of mathematics, medicine and computing science which have become major sciences over recent decades [1], [2] and [3]. My three disciplinary suggestions for Nobel expansion are here simply assumed to be valid, and in the following analysis of the last 20 years from 1987–2006, I have used three prestigious prizes in mathematics (Fields Medal), medicine (Lasker Award for Clinical Medical research) and computing science (A.M. Turing award) which are plausible surrogates for Nobel prizes.
The choice of the Fields medal [4] as a near-Nobel equivalent was also made by the well-respected Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings of the world’s best universities [5]. It is a highly prestigious prize awarded every four years (in batches of up to four winners – making the prize approximately annual) by the International Mathematical Union to a mathematician aged less than 40.
The approximately annual Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research [6] recognizes from one to three scientists whose work pioneers a major improvement in clinical management or treatment. Unlike the Lasker award for Basic Medical Research, which frequently predicts a Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine, the Clinical Medical Research (CMR) award does not frequently overlap with the Nobel prize. Only one person in the last twenty years (Barry Marshall) has received both a Lasker award for CMR and also a Nobel prize, and this particular award was removed from the Lasker statistic in the following tabulations.
The A.M. Turing Award is given annually to one or two individuals by the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions of lasting and major importance to the computer field [7].
Having identified the winners of Fields, Lasker and Turing prizes for the past twenty years; I discovered their national and institutional affiliation at the time the prize was awarded – either from the official web pages of the prize-awarding institutions, or by wider internet searching for references to these awards (e.g. Wikipedia entries, press releases, references to the prizes in other publications etc.). Each prize-winner was therefore credited to a single nation and institution. The data from Fields, Lasker and Turing winners were then pooled with the data from Nobel prize-winners and tabulated.
Since the aim of this study was to identify the strongest nations and institutions in revolutionary science, there was a minimum threshold of three Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners before a nation or institution was included in the tables.
Results
The national Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing (NFLT) metric (Table 1) is strongly dominated by the USA, confirming the pattern demonstrated by the previous analysis of Nobel prizes [3]. But inclusion of Fields–Lasker–Turing winners implies that revolutionary science may be more broadly distributed than the pure Nobel metric suggests. The UK and France, in particular, seem to be more significant nations in revolutionary science than suggested by Nobels alone; and other nations are identified as significant which are missed by the purely Nobel prize analysis: Russia, Denmark and Norway.
Table 1.
Number of Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners by nation 1987–2006
Nation Nobel prizes Other awards Total
USA 126 45 171
UK 9 10 19
France 5 7 12
Germany 9 0 9
Switzerland 7 0 7
Japan 3 1 4
Russia 2 1 3
Denmark 1 2 3
Norway 1 2 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion.
The top world revolutionary science institutions identified by the NFLT metric (Table 2) are MIT, Stanford and Princeton in the USA; and the USA has nineteen institutions with at least three prize-winners. Harvard stays in seventh place for the combined Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing metric, which is the same as its Nobel prize-winning rank, tending to confirm my previous observation [3] that Harvard has indeed declined as a centre of revolutionary science – although it remains dominant in ‘normal science’ as measured by metrics such as numbers of publications and citations.
Table 2.
Number of Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners by institution 1987–2006
US Institution Nobel prizes Other awards Total
MIT 11 2 13
Stanford University 9 1 10
Princeton University 6 4 10
Chicago University 7 1 8
University of California, Berkeley 4 3 7
Columbia University 7 0 7
Harvard University 5 1 6
CalTech 5 0 5
UCSF (University of California San Fransico) 3 2 5
Cornell University 2 2 4
Rockefeller Inst. & Univ. 3 1 4
UCLA 3 1 4
University of Colorado, Boulder 4 0 4
University of Pennsylvania 2 2 4
University of Washington, Seattle 3 1 4
NIH – National Inst. Health 0 3 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 3 0 3
University of California, Santa Barbara 3 0 3
University of California, Irvine 3 0 3
Non-US Institution
University of Cambridge, UK 2 3 5
College de France, Paris 3 0 3
University of Paris-Sud 0 3 3
IHES*, Paris, France 0 3 3
University Oslo, Norway 1 2 3
A minimum of three winners is required for inclusion. IHES = Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.
In second place to the USA as a home of revolutionary science institutions is France, which has three institutions having three or more Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing winners. This particularly reflects French strength in mathematical research, with six Fields medallists in the past 20 years. University of Cambridge (UK) and University of Oslo (Norway) also emerge as significant.
Interpretation
In general, this analysis demonstrates the potential value of increasing the number of Nobel prizes [2], since otherwise the significant strength of France – and its three elite institutions – would be missed. The analysis also confirms the results of the pure-Nobel metric in suggesting that a high level of national performance in revolutionary science is probably a consequence of having elite institutions that win three or more prizes in a 20 year period.
Measured by the NFLT metric; outside of the USA (with its 19 institutions of revolutionary science), only France seems to have succeeded in supporting more than one centre of revolutionary science over the past 20 years. Up until the mid-1980s, the UK was a long-term clear second to the USA in Nobel prizes [3]; but from 1987 to 2006 three of its major prize-winning institutions (i.e. the University of Oxford, the Cambridge Molecular Biology MRC Unit, and Imperial College London) have declined as centres of revolutionary science, and now only the University of Cambridge achieves the three-winner NFLT threshold.
But the most significant result of this analysis is to demonstrate and confirm the massive US domination of revolutionary science [1] and [3], and the lack of any significant national competition for this status except in mathematics (France has six Fields medals to the USA’s eight). This contrasts with the general picture of European, East Asian and Chinese science ‘catching-up’ with the USA in terms of ‘normal science’ production (as measured by numbers of publications and citations [3] and [8]).
Looking into the long term, the lack of international competition in revolutionary science is somewhat worrying, since it means that world scientific progress may increasingly depend upon the US research system. In the US it is probably within-nation research competition between rival institutions that has so far maintained striving and standards in revolutionary science. But if US universities began to compete on the basis of ‘normal science’ instead of revolutionary science – as seems to have happened in the less-diverse, less competitive and more risk-averse Anglo-European research systems [9] – then we might expect to see a decline equivalent to that which has occurred over recent decades in mainland Europe and the UK [3].
The first signs of decline might be seen in previously-successful revolutionary science institutions which, like Harvard or Cambridge (UK), win progressively-fewer major research prizes [3] while maintaining a very high output of highly cited publications [1] and [10]. A more advanced state of decline might be harder to detect, since there would (presumably) continue to be Nobel-, Fields-, Lasker- and Turing-winners even in the absence of actual revolutionary science.
However, at present, the situation 1987–2006 looks healthy and competitive for revolutionary science in the USA, particularly in the elite of MIT, Stanford and Princeton and the recently-emerging Western US institutions [3] exemplified by UCSF with its three Nobels and two Lasker awards (Table 2).
Significance of the NFLT metric
The Nobel–Fields–Lasker–Turing metric only measures the tip of an iceberg of revolutionary science, and my assumption is that each successful example of revolutionary science which has led to a prize, medal or award must (on general theoretical principles [11]) have been supported by a very much larger and more complex system of revolutionary science comprising numerous people and institutions.
So, the NFLT metric will intrinsically register many ‘false negatives’ and systematically under-estimates the scale of revolutionary science. Despite this, the NFLT metric seems to have value, since these prizes apparently have a low false positive rate: impressionistically and anecdotally, the great majority of winners seem thoroughly to ‘deserve’ to win for their research, which has indeed been revolutionary in the sense of changing the direction of science.
It seems unlikely that scientists are frequently, primarily and specifically motivated to do high quality revolutionary science by the prospect of winning a Nobel prize or one of the other high medals and awards – although many would no doubt day-dream about the possibility. Indeed, there is vast variability in the personality types of scientists and their motivations. Rather, Nobels and the like can be seen as providing an after-the-fact identification of some of the clearest and best-validated examples of revolutionary science.
The NFLT metric can therefore be seen as analogous to a ‘top-down’ macroeconomic quantitative variable, such as national taxes and interest rates. Such a variable may have value for monitoring, evaluation and policy; but does not necessarily have a close relationship to individual motivations and behaviors [1]. The NFLT metric is suggestive, but its validity needs to be established by further empirical studies.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Jonathan Rees and Peter Andras for helpful comments.
References
[1] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva [in press].
[2] B.G. Charlton, Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 471–473. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (77 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[3] B.G. Charlton, Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006, Med Hypotheses 68 (2007), pp. 931–934. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (91 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[4] International Mathematical Union. Fields Medal, www.mathunion.org/Prizes/Fields [accessed 19 December 2006].
[5] Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Institute of Higher Education. Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006, http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking. [accessed 14 December 2006].
[6] Lasker Foundation. Former winners – Clinical Medical research, www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/all_clinical [accessed 19 December 2006].
[7] Association for Computing Machinery. A. M. Turing Award, http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?srt=all&awd=140. [accessed 19 December 2006].
[8] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU-US race for leadership of science and technology: Qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[9] P. Andras and B.G. Charlton, European science must embrace modernization (Correspondence), Nature 429 (2004), p. 699. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[10] Charlton B, Andras P. Oxford University’s research performance (four articles published in Oxford Magazine during 2006). www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/oxmagarts. [accessed 14 December 2006].
[11] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).
Nobel prize trends 1947–2006
Editorial
Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 931-934
***
Summary
Most research is ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term: checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms. By contrast, ‘revolutionary science’ changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies. Science Nobel prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) have the potential to be used as a new metric for measuring revolutionary science. Nobel laureates’ nations and research institutions were measured between 1947 and 2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7). But the Western United States has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary science, generating a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle; and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine, UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle. Since 1986 the USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in the world only the College de France has achieved this. In the UK Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College have declined from 17 prizes in 1967–86 to only 3 since then. Harvard has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint sixth position. Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is apparently the only nation with a research system that nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.
***
Most of scientific production can be categorized as ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term to describe research which constitutes the checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms [1]. Normal science can be measured and analyzed using standard scientometric research outputs such as number and share of publications and citations [2]. But a different method is need to detect and measure the much rarer, but potentially more-important, examples of paradigm-transforming Kuhnian ‘revolutionary science’ [3].
Revolutionary science changes the fundamental structures of a whole science (as achieved by Einstein, Newton or Darwin) or, more often, a significant sub-speciality of a major science [1]. For example science can be transformed or re-directed by new theories, discoveries or major technologies. Revolutionary science is therefore the cutting-edge which allows each science to continue to grow in rapid bursts, and to become qualitatively more accurate and useful in its predictions [3] and [4].
The problem of discriminating between revolutionary and normal science has become more difficult since the advent of Big Science [5]. Big Science comprises quasi-industrial forms of research organization. It arose initially in physics and chemistry but now characterizes biomedical research, which is currently the dominant world science. Big Science is almost inevitably a type of normal science (since it needs to be predictable) and tends to be ‘applied’ in its aims, and similar to industrial Research and Development in its methods [4] and [6]. Normal science now overwhelms revolutionary science in terms of quantity, so that revolutionary science has become almost invisible when research production is measured using standard scientometrics.
Science Nobel prizes have the potential to be used in detecting and measuring revolutionary science [3] and [7]. This may allow identification of those nations and institutions where revolutionary science has happened in the past, and help understand the conditions which could encourage revolutionary science in the future.
Nobel prizes as a measure of revolutionary science
The award of a Nobel prize in one of the four recognized sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) seems to be the best current evidence of a significant achievement in revolutionary science. Although the small annual number of Nobel prize-winners (laureates) means that many significant achievements go unrecognized [7], nonetheless the perceived validity of these awards is high within the scientific community, and only a small proportion of awards are regarded as controversial or unjustified.
The number of science Nobel laureates in a nation and a research institution were measured between 1947 and 2006 in three 20 year segments of 1947–66, 1967–86 and 1987–2006 [8]. A maximum of three people can receive each prize, so there are a minimum of four and a maximum of 12 laureates per year (since 1969, when the economics prize was first awarded. Up to 1968 there were a minimum of three and a maximum of nine laureates).
A very large number of nations and institutions have won a single Nobel prize, but my interest was in those places which had won multiple prizes as evidence that they provided an environment conducive to revolutionary science. I set the threshold at three Nobel prizes during a 20 year period as the minimum number of laureates which counts as a significant national or institutional contribution to revolutionary science. (However, in 1965 the prize for Physiology/Medicine went to Jacob, Monod and Lwoff of the Pasteur Institute, Paris, France; who all researched the same general topic.)
Official statistics are only available on Nobel laureates’ institutional affiliation at the time they receive the prize [8]. Clearly, this is not as valid a measure of revolutionary science as knowing laureates’ affiliations at the time prize-winning work was actually accomplished; however such information is not readily available. I therefore allocated credit to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time they received their award.
By contrast with the general decline elsewhere in the world, the US system is increasingly successful in generating revolutionary science which leads to the award of a Nobel prize (Table 1). It can be seen that few countries have any research institutions which have earned three or more Nobel prizes over any of the defined 20 year time spans. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 such institutions (Table 2), the UK has four, France has two, and Sweden and USSR one each (Table 3).
Table 1.
Number of Nobel laureates by Nation – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Nation 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA 50 88 126
UK 20 25 9
Germany 8 7 9
USSR/Russia 7 2 2
France 4 3 5
Switzerland 3 7 7
Sweden 3 7 1
Japan 2 1 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 2.
Number of United States Nobel laureates by institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA
Harvard University 9 13 5
University of California Berkeley 7 3 4
Stanford University 4 5 9
CalTech 4 4 5
Columbia University 4 1 7
Rockefeller Institute & University 3 6 3
Chicago University 2 4 7
Princeton University 1 2 6
MIT 1 5 11
Cornell University 1 4 2
UCLA 1 0 3
Yale University 0 4 1
NIH – National Institute Health 0 4 0
University of Colorado, Boulder 0 0 4
University of Washington, Seattle 0 0 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 0 0 3
University of California, Santa Barbara 0 0 3
UCSF (U Cal San Fransico) 0 0 3
University of California, Irvine 0 0 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 3.
Number of Non-US Nobel laureates by Institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
University Cambridge, UK 3 7 2
MRC Cambridge, UK 3 3 1
University Oxford, UK 3 3 0
Imperial Coll. London, UK 0 4 0
Pasteur Inst, Paris, France 3 0 0
College de France, Paris 0 0 3
PN Lebedez Institute, Moscow, USSR 5 0 0
Karolinska Inst., Sweden 0 4 0
CERN (multi-national) 0 3 1
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 2 shows that there are only four institutions which have won three or more Nobel prizes in all three 20 year periods, all from the USA – Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Chicago and Columbia (7). But the Western United States has become the world dominant region for revolutionary science – with Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech now being amplified by a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Washington at Seattle, University of California at Santa Barbara, UCSF (University of California at San Fransisco), University of California at Irvine, UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) – also the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at Seattle.
In the past 20 years, the USA has 16 institutions which have won three or more prizes, but elsewhere in the world (Table 3) only the College de France has achieved three Nobel prizes. Since 1986 the previously Nobel-successful UK research institutions (University of Cambridge, the MRC Molecular Biology Unit at Cambridge, University of Oxford and Imperial College, London) have declined from seventeen prizes 67–86 to only three.
The USA demonstrates dynamic changes in ranking over the 60 year period (Table 2). New institutions have risen to prominence in the Western states. From one prize each in 1947–66, MIT and Princeton have both overtaken Harvard to become first and fifth among Nobel prize-winners. Columbia declined in the middle period, but recovered strongly to reach equal-third in the rankings. The NIH and Yale have significantly declined during the most recent 20 years. Such variation in rankings is probably indicative of a high level of competition between revolutionary research institutions.
Harvard is particularly interesting. In terms of conventional scientometric research measures, Harvard is currently by-far the top ranking university in the world. For example, Harvard has more than double the number of citations of Stanford (which is second) and about 65 percent more publications than UCLA (which is second) during 2000–2004 [9]. And Harvard has more elected Members of the US National Academy of Sciences than any other university (167 – Harvard; 129 – Berkeley; 128 – Stanford; 100 – MIT; 72 – Princeton; 71 – Cal Tech [10]). By a large margin, Harvard also tops the respected Shanghai Jiao Tong University world rankings [11].
Yet there are signs of a decline in revolutionary science at Harvard. From 47–86 Harvard was the top Nobel-prize-winning institution, but for the past 20 years it has been overtaken in prize numbers by MIT (11), Stanford (9), Columbia (7), Chicago (7) and Princeton (6) – all of which are considerably smaller. The implication may be that Harvard is evolving towards being a ‘normal science’ university – albeit unusually large and successful.
Conclusion
If this statistic of Nobel prizes is a valid measure of revolutionary science, then the main conclusion is that the USA has emerged to become the only nation that supports revolutionary science on a large scale. It seems that long-term strength in revolutionary science is mainly a product of a nation possessing numerous elite research institutions where revolutionary science thrives. A nation lacking such institutions will win relatively few Nobel prizes, and prizes will be spread around many institutions (e.g. in Germany, the various Max Planck research institutions sometimes win a single Nobel prize, but no specific institute has ever won two prizes in 20 years).
Over the past 60 years, the UK has declined from being the only non-US focus of revolutionary science, to joining Switzerland and Germany (with nine prizes) as the kind of place where normal science has been thriving but revolutionary science is thinly-distributed and sporadic in occurrence. Presumably, recent US improvement has therefore been driven mainly by within-nation competition.
In contrast to the picture of long term decline in Nobel-prize-winning revolutionary science; UK and European scientific production (also that of Chinese science) is probably catching up with the USA in terms of scientometric measures such as numbers of publications and citations [12] and [13]. This difference between national performance in normal and revolutionary science seems to suggest that the research systems of revolutionary science and normal science are evolving towards separation [3]. Clearly, growth of the two types of science does not always go-together.
In future, it would probably be beneficial if this increasing separation between revolutionary and normal science were made explicit, with institutional self-definition and specialization, and differentiated funding streams and evaluation criteria for the small number of elite revolutionary science institutions [4]. Part of this process would be the development of a distinctive set of scientometric measures for revolutionary science. Counting Nobel laureates could be a first step in this direction.
Acknowledgement
Thanks are due to Peter Andras, Andrew Oswald and Malcolm Young for comments and advice.
References
[1] T.S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago Univesrity Press, Chicago (1970).
[2] E. Garfield, Essays of an information scientist, ISI Press, Philadelphia (1977).
[3] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva [in press].
[4] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, The future of ‘pure’ medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system, Med Hypotheses 65 (2005), pp. 419–425. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (98 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[5] Solla D.J. Price de, Little science, big science and beyond, Columbia Univesrity Press, New York (1986).
[6] J. Ziman, Real science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) (2000).
[7] Charlton BG. Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions. Medical Hypotheses [in press].
[8] Nobel Foundation. Nobel prizes.; 2006 [accessed 07.12.06].
[9] Charlton B, Andras P. Oxford University’s research performance (four articles published in Oxford Magazine during 2006).
[10] National Academy of Sciences. Members.; 2006 [accessed 30.11.06].
[11] Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Institute of Higher Education. Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006.; 2006 [accessed 14.12.06].
[12] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU–US race for leadership of science and technology: qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[13] Z. Ping and L. Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Res Policy 35 (2006), pp. 83–104.
Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 931-934
***
Summary
Most research is ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term: checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms. By contrast, ‘revolutionary science’ changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies. Science Nobel prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) have the potential to be used as a new metric for measuring revolutionary science. Nobel laureates’ nations and research institutions were measured between 1947 and 2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7). But the Western United States has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary science, generating a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle; and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine, UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle. Since 1986 the USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in the world only the College de France has achieved this. In the UK Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College have declined from 17 prizes in 1967–86 to only 3 since then. Harvard has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint sixth position. Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is apparently the only nation with a research system that nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.
***
Most of scientific production can be categorized as ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term to describe research which constitutes the checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms [1]. Normal science can be measured and analyzed using standard scientometric research outputs such as number and share of publications and citations [2]. But a different method is need to detect and measure the much rarer, but potentially more-important, examples of paradigm-transforming Kuhnian ‘revolutionary science’ [3].
Revolutionary science changes the fundamental structures of a whole science (as achieved by Einstein, Newton or Darwin) or, more often, a significant sub-speciality of a major science [1]. For example science can be transformed or re-directed by new theories, discoveries or major technologies. Revolutionary science is therefore the cutting-edge which allows each science to continue to grow in rapid bursts, and to become qualitatively more accurate and useful in its predictions [3] and [4].
The problem of discriminating between revolutionary and normal science has become more difficult since the advent of Big Science [5]. Big Science comprises quasi-industrial forms of research organization. It arose initially in physics and chemistry but now characterizes biomedical research, which is currently the dominant world science. Big Science is almost inevitably a type of normal science (since it needs to be predictable) and tends to be ‘applied’ in its aims, and similar to industrial Research and Development in its methods [4] and [6]. Normal science now overwhelms revolutionary science in terms of quantity, so that revolutionary science has become almost invisible when research production is measured using standard scientometrics.
Science Nobel prizes have the potential to be used in detecting and measuring revolutionary science [3] and [7]. This may allow identification of those nations and institutions where revolutionary science has happened in the past, and help understand the conditions which could encourage revolutionary science in the future.
Nobel prizes as a measure of revolutionary science
The award of a Nobel prize in one of the four recognized sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) seems to be the best current evidence of a significant achievement in revolutionary science. Although the small annual number of Nobel prize-winners (laureates) means that many significant achievements go unrecognized [7], nonetheless the perceived validity of these awards is high within the scientific community, and only a small proportion of awards are regarded as controversial or unjustified.
The number of science Nobel laureates in a nation and a research institution were measured between 1947 and 2006 in three 20 year segments of 1947–66, 1967–86 and 1987–2006 [8]. A maximum of three people can receive each prize, so there are a minimum of four and a maximum of 12 laureates per year (since 1969, when the economics prize was first awarded. Up to 1968 there were a minimum of three and a maximum of nine laureates).
A very large number of nations and institutions have won a single Nobel prize, but my interest was in those places which had won multiple prizes as evidence that they provided an environment conducive to revolutionary science. I set the threshold at three Nobel prizes during a 20 year period as the minimum number of laureates which counts as a significant national or institutional contribution to revolutionary science. (However, in 1965 the prize for Physiology/Medicine went to Jacob, Monod and Lwoff of the Pasteur Institute, Paris, France; who all researched the same general topic.)
Official statistics are only available on Nobel laureates’ institutional affiliation at the time they receive the prize [8]. Clearly, this is not as valid a measure of revolutionary science as knowing laureates’ affiliations at the time prize-winning work was actually accomplished; however such information is not readily available. I therefore allocated credit to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time they received their award.
By contrast with the general decline elsewhere in the world, the US system is increasingly successful in generating revolutionary science which leads to the award of a Nobel prize (Table 1). It can be seen that few countries have any research institutions which have earned three or more Nobel prizes over any of the defined 20 year time spans. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 such institutions (Table 2), the UK has four, France has two, and Sweden and USSR one each (Table 3).
Table 1.
Number of Nobel laureates by Nation – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Nation 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA 50 88 126
UK 20 25 9
Germany 8 7 9
USSR/Russia 7 2 2
France 4 3 5
Switzerland 3 7 7
Sweden 3 7 1
Japan 2 1 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 2.
Number of United States Nobel laureates by institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA
Harvard University 9 13 5
University of California Berkeley 7 3 4
Stanford University 4 5 9
CalTech 4 4 5
Columbia University 4 1 7
Rockefeller Institute & University 3 6 3
Chicago University 2 4 7
Princeton University 1 2 6
MIT 1 5 11
Cornell University 1 4 2
UCLA 1 0 3
Yale University 0 4 1
NIH – National Institute Health 0 4 0
University of Colorado, Boulder 0 0 4
University of Washington, Seattle 0 0 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 0 0 3
University of California, Santa Barbara 0 0 3
UCSF (U Cal San Fransico) 0 0 3
University of California, Irvine 0 0 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 3.
Number of Non-US Nobel laureates by Institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
University Cambridge, UK 3 7 2
MRC Cambridge, UK 3 3 1
University Oxford, UK 3 3 0
Imperial Coll. London, UK 0 4 0
Pasteur Inst, Paris, France 3 0 0
College de France, Paris 0 0 3
PN Lebedez Institute, Moscow, USSR 5 0 0
Karolinska Inst., Sweden 0 4 0
CERN (multi-national) 0 3 1
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.
Table 2 shows that there are only four institutions which have won three or more Nobel prizes in all three 20 year periods, all from the USA – Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Chicago and Columbia (7). But the Western United States has become the world dominant region for revolutionary science – with Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech now being amplified by a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Washington at Seattle, University of California at Santa Barbara, UCSF (University of California at San Fransisco), University of California at Irvine, UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) – also the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at Seattle.
In the past 20 years, the USA has 16 institutions which have won three or more prizes, but elsewhere in the world (Table 3) only the College de France has achieved three Nobel prizes. Since 1986 the previously Nobel-successful UK research institutions (University of Cambridge, the MRC Molecular Biology Unit at Cambridge, University of Oxford and Imperial College, London) have declined from seventeen prizes 67–86 to only three.
The USA demonstrates dynamic changes in ranking over the 60 year period (Table 2). New institutions have risen to prominence in the Western states. From one prize each in 1947–66, MIT and Princeton have both overtaken Harvard to become first and fifth among Nobel prize-winners. Columbia declined in the middle period, but recovered strongly to reach equal-third in the rankings. The NIH and Yale have significantly declined during the most recent 20 years. Such variation in rankings is probably indicative of a high level of competition between revolutionary research institutions.
Harvard is particularly interesting. In terms of conventional scientometric research measures, Harvard is currently by-far the top ranking university in the world. For example, Harvard has more than double the number of citations of Stanford (which is second) and about 65 percent more publications than UCLA (which is second) during 2000–2004 [9]. And Harvard has more elected Members of the US National Academy of Sciences than any other university (167 – Harvard; 129 – Berkeley; 128 – Stanford; 100 – MIT; 72 – Princeton; 71 – Cal Tech [10]). By a large margin, Harvard also tops the respected Shanghai Jiao Tong University world rankings [11].
Yet there are signs of a decline in revolutionary science at Harvard. From 47–86 Harvard was the top Nobel-prize-winning institution, but for the past 20 years it has been overtaken in prize numbers by MIT (11), Stanford (9), Columbia (7), Chicago (7) and Princeton (6) – all of which are considerably smaller. The implication may be that Harvard is evolving towards being a ‘normal science’ university – albeit unusually large and successful.
Conclusion
If this statistic of Nobel prizes is a valid measure of revolutionary science, then the main conclusion is that the USA has emerged to become the only nation that supports revolutionary science on a large scale. It seems that long-term strength in revolutionary science is mainly a product of a nation possessing numerous elite research institutions where revolutionary science thrives. A nation lacking such institutions will win relatively few Nobel prizes, and prizes will be spread around many institutions (e.g. in Germany, the various Max Planck research institutions sometimes win a single Nobel prize, but no specific institute has ever won two prizes in 20 years).
Over the past 60 years, the UK has declined from being the only non-US focus of revolutionary science, to joining Switzerland and Germany (with nine prizes) as the kind of place where normal science has been thriving but revolutionary science is thinly-distributed and sporadic in occurrence. Presumably, recent US improvement has therefore been driven mainly by within-nation competition.
In contrast to the picture of long term decline in Nobel-prize-winning revolutionary science; UK and European scientific production (also that of Chinese science) is probably catching up with the USA in terms of scientometric measures such as numbers of publications and citations [12] and [13]. This difference between national performance in normal and revolutionary science seems to suggest that the research systems of revolutionary science and normal science are evolving towards separation [3]. Clearly, growth of the two types of science does not always go-together.
In future, it would probably be beneficial if this increasing separation between revolutionary and normal science were made explicit, with institutional self-definition and specialization, and differentiated funding streams and evaluation criteria for the small number of elite revolutionary science institutions [4]. Part of this process would be the development of a distinctive set of scientometric measures for revolutionary science. Counting Nobel laureates could be a first step in this direction.
Acknowledgement
Thanks are due to Peter Andras, Andrew Oswald and Malcolm Young for comments and advice.
References
[1] T.S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago Univesrity Press, Chicago (1970).
[2] E. Garfield, Essays of an information scientist, ISI Press, Philadelphia (1977).
[3] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva [in press].
[4] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, The future of ‘pure’ medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system, Med Hypotheses 65 (2005), pp. 419–425. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (98 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[5] Solla D.J. Price de, Little science, big science and beyond, Columbia Univesrity Press, New York (1986).
[6] J. Ziman, Real science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) (2000).
[7] Charlton BG. Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions. Medical Hypotheses [in press].
[8] Nobel Foundation. Nobel prizes.
[9] Charlton B, Andras P. Oxford University’s research performance (four articles published in Oxford Magazine during 2006).
[10] National Academy of Sciences. Members.
[11] Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Institute of Higher Education. Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006.
[12] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU–US race for leadership of science and technology: qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[13] Z. Ping and L. Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Res Policy 35 (2006), pp. 83–104.
Alienation and animism
*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*
Editorial
Alienation, recovered animism and altered states of consciousness
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 727-731
***
Summary
Alienation is the feeling that life is ‘meaningless’, that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things. Methods used to cure alienation and recover animistic modes of thinking involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality: for example, solitude, leisure, unstructured time and direct contact with nature. Many people also achieve similar results by deliberately inducing altered states of consciousness. Animistic thinking may emerge in meditation or contemplation, lucid dreaming, from self-hypnosis, when drowsy, in ‘trance states’ induced by repetitious rhythm or light, or when delirious due to illness, brain injury, psychoses, or intoxication with ‘entheogenic’ drugs – which is probably one reason for the perennial popularity of inducing intoxicated states. However, intoxication will typically damage memory processes making it harder to learn from any spiritual experiences; and even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required. Despite these constraints and limitations, recovering animism through seeking altered states of consciousness could already be considered a major world spiritual practice.
***
One of the distinctive features of Western contemporary life is that, while pleasures are widely available (albeit at a price), there is an almost universal sense of ‘alienation’. Alienation is the feeling that life is meaningless, that we do not belong in the world.
But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world. This perspective is a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers [1] and [2]. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a unified world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships [3] and [4].
We were all animistic children once, and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans, and it requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive socialization to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world [5]. It is learned objectivity that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things.
But objectivity is superficial: animism remains the basic underlying mode of human thinking, and animism can be recovered. When we are removed from the rational systems of civilisation, when learned patterns of socialised behaviour are stripped-away, and in altered states of consciousness, then animistic thinking can re-emerge and a sense of belonging in the world may return.
Animism
Animism is not a religious or philosophical doctrine, neither is it an ‘error’ made by people too young or too primitive to know better; animism is nothing less than the fundamental mode by which human consciousness regards the world [1] and [2]. Consciousness just is animistic [3] and [4]. And this perspective is a consequence of human evolutionary history.
Humans evolved sophisticated brain mechanisms for dealing with the complex social situations that formed a dominant selection pressure throughout primate evolutionary history [6] and [7]; and in animistic thinking these social mechanisms are flexibly applied to interpret complex aspects of the world in general. Information on animals, plants and landscape are fed-into a system that codes them into social entities with social motivations, and models their behaviour in social terms.
Human consciousness is therefore essentially a social intelligence, designed by natural selection for dealing with people, but accidentally highly applicable to understanding, predicting and controlling a wide range of phenomena. Unless suppressed during upbringing, this way of looking at the world is spontaneously generalised beyond the social sphere, so the significant world is seen as composed of ‘agents’, having dispositions, motivations and intentions. Humans see the world through social spectacles [3].
The significant features of the natural world are seen as sentient and evaluated using social intelligence modes of thinking. Therefore, for an animistic thinkers significant events do not ‘just happen’ – like inert billiard balls bouncing-off one another – instead events occur because some entity wants them to occur. Every significant event is intentional and has personal implications.
Animism is an extremely effective way of dealing with the natural world under the conditions of hunter–gatherer societies. For instance, each species of animal has its own nature, each member of a species its own character, knowledge of which enables behaviour to be predicted with considerable precision in real world situations [1] and [2]. Even with the advantages of scientific biology, ‘anthropomorphism’ still remains the best system for understanding, predicting and manipulating animal behaviour – especially among large social mammals: successful animal trainers usually develop and use elaborate anthropomorphic characterizations of dogs, cats and horses [8].
Furthermore, because other people were so important in evolutionary history [6] and [7] social information is especially vivid: it grabs and sustains our attention and mobilises our emotions. In an oral culture that depends on human memory, the best way of transmitting important information is by the medium of animistic stories and songs.
At home in the world
Animistic thinkers feel at home in the world [2]. Children and hunter–gatherers are not necessarily happy, of course – but they are not alienated: they have a relationship with the world. Animists are watched over, influenced, protected and punished, by the sentient powers that constitute the world.
Among tribal hunter–gatherers, although there are hostile powers, the relationship of each individual to the world is that of child and parent. The world is a ‘giving environment’ – fundamentally benign because it keeps us alive [9]. This is a beneficent ‘cosmic economy’ which cannot be controlled, planned or significantly shaped. Animists say ‘yes’ to the world, unconditionally [2] and [10].
By contrast, since the invention of farming and on through the industrial revolution into modernity, life has become akin to a state of siege, the individual (usually with a small gang of family and allies) against a mass of hostile strangers [2]. To survive and thrive planning is essential, yet most plans will fail. The natural world is raw material for the production of food and other necessities and luxuries. Production entails prolonged, dull, repetitive tasks to force nature into new and different shapes. The world is not a nurturing parent, but must be coerced into producing the necessities of life.
Mass alienation is therefore no accident, but an inevitable consequence of the kind of society we inhabit. Animism would be grossly maladaptive for decision-making in a complex society of politics, economics, law, science, technology and military organization – a society that depends on objective information and rational planning [5]. Returning to a thoroughgoing, society-wide animism would therefore be impossible without a return to hunter–gatherer lifeways; which is both impossible and undesirable since modern life is, in most material respects, vastly preferable to the Malthusian trap (of poverty, disease and starvation) which constituted most of recorded history [11].
Indeed, the most probable human future entails more complexity, more planning, more control – and, as a by-product, more alienation [12]. But although a shared and public animism is ruled-out as maladaptive, the situation for individuals is different. There may be niches for more-or-less wholly animistic individuals even in modern society, and there certainly are niches for a recovery of animistic thinking within many ordinary people’s private lives – especially during leisure time.
The problem is that, for a modern adult, recovery of animistic thinking entails undoing the effects of an exceptionally thorough and prolonged process of socialisation that has buried animism under a vast superstructure of abstraction and systematic thinking [13] and [14]. Modern adults cannot easily or quickly recover their animistic way of thinking at will, even temporarily.
Methods used to help in the recovery of animistic modes of thinking have been known since the Romantic era. They essentially involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality. For example, solitude (away from people), leisure (away from the economy) and unstructured time (as contrasted with technologically-measured time) – indeed holidays away from home are often a highly effective way of getting ‘in touch’ with life. Direct contact with nature is another classic strategy.
Under such conditions of contemplative detachment from societal constraints there tends to be a spontaneous recovery of animistic thinking. Those who can achieve this state often strive to do so, perhaps by setting aside a ‘sacred space’ of a special time or place for frequent meditation or personal rituals [15]. They may find that these cues and repetitions make flipping-into an animistic state straightforward and habitual.
But psychological detachment from social constraints is not possible for everyone due to their personality or situation, nor is it always effective. Some people find that it takes many clear days of vacation - or even longer – before they can ‘switch off’ their organised minds, forget their personal and practical worries and begin to live in the here-and-now. Such people cannot self-generate altered states, and may need some kind of ‘artificial’ or technological assistance to produce the desired effect.
Recovering animism through altered states of consciousness
It has also been noticed that altered states of consciousness, due to accidental or deliberate impairment in brain functioning, will sometimes cause the re-emergence of animistic modes of thinking [16].
For instance, animistic thinking emerges during meditation or contemplation, when drowsy (e.g. during hypnagogic states between sleeping and waking), during intoxication – whether accidental or deliberate, when delirious due to illness or brain injury’. We can also recall animistic thinking when remembering dreams, especially those rare ‘lucid’ dreams. For most people, most of the time, recovered animism must be a leisure-time pursuit. Even self-hypnosis or dreamy-reverie are states incompatible with optimal mental performance.
It is generally believed that hunter–gatherers included individuals called shamans who utilized altered states of consciousness to intensify their animistic thinking to the point where they transcended the barriers of time, space and species to undertake spirit journeys and transformations with aims such as healing individuals, seeking guidance on tribal decisions, or restoring good fortune [2] and [17]. Traditional shamans attained altered states by spontaneous psychological ability reinforced by training and practice; through various ordeals, dances, performances and rituals; or by their skill in ‘lucid dreaming’ (i.e. remaining aware while dreaming, and retaining some control over dream content and direction). Modern New Age spiritual practices include ‘Neo-shamanism’ in which (usually) rhythmic drumming, chanting or music is used to induce a trance state in which similar animistic experiences may be achieved [18].
Animism is also a feature of severe psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. ‘Paranoid’ delusions are characterised by ‘delusions of self-reference’ – which is a sense of being the focus of a world of hostile sentient powers [19]. Paranoid individuals may believe they are under constant observation, perceive the radio talking to them personally, or interpret media stories as containing coded allusions to their situation.
The nature of animistic thinking during altered states of consciousness depends on the emotional state [20]. A pleasant and healthy body state will usually lead to positive animistic experiences, and vice versa [3]. During the delirium of severe physical illness animistic experiences are almost always very unpleasant and involve the experience of a hostile (instead of nurturing) world, because the person is sick and suffering pain. For example, alcohol withdrawal (‘delirium tremens’) may involve terrifying persecutory delusions and perception of a threatening environment.
Mania, by contrast, may involve a blissful state of godlike one-ness with an animated world; because the energized and un-fatigued emotional tone of mania lends a euphoric colouring to delusions of self-reference [3]. Something similar applies with hallucinogenic drugs – whether someone has a good or bad ‘trip’ depends substantially on their emotional state, which may be influenced by the drug itself.
This emphasizes that there are two elements to recovered animism: alteration of consciousness, and maintenance of a positive emotional state.
The ‘entheogenic’ rationale for intoxication
Although intoxication may be rewarding in itself, probably one major explanation why so many people seem to seek so frequently to alter their consciousness with agents such as alcohol, marijuana, volatile organic solvents, opiates and hallucinogenic drugs [21] is that they are seeking to recover animistic modes of thinking, to cure alienation and feel at home in the world. When used in this spiritual-seeking way, psycho-pharmacological agents are sometimes called ‘entheogens’ (meaning ‘that which causes God to be within’) [22].
There are, of course, problems with using chemical intoxicants as an entheogen. There may be a risk of lasting damage to the brain or other aspects of health, there may be hangover or rebound phenomena, and the potential for addiction or other forms of chemical dependence. Intoxication does not have a specific effect in recovering animistic cognition, it also impairs other aspects of general brain function such as concentration, judgement, and reaction times. This means that intoxication is not an option for people who need to drive, operate machinery, look after children, or perform any kind of skilled or responsible function [22].
Furthermore, inducing animistic thinking by intoxication may be somewhat self-defeating, since intoxication will often significantly impair memory processes. Mystical or spiritual experiences may be induced by intoxication, but not be clearly remembered, so they can neither be learned-from nor integrated with the rest of life.
Despite such constraints and limitations, recovering animism through altered states of consciousness can be considered a major contemporary spiritual activity, especially in Neo-paganism [23] and New Age [24] movements, but probably also in some charismatic branches of Christianity – such as Pentecostalism (which is probably he fastest growing protestant denomination [25]). And it seems more than coincidence that the favourite English language fiction of the twentieth century in most surveys [26] was substantially a work of animism: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its non-human sentient beings, and its animate horses, eagles, trees, mountains and landscapes.
In an ever more rational, abstract and objective public world it may seem ironic, although it should not be altogether surprising, if many people privately practised some personalized version of Neo-shamanism in order to induce a sense of belonging [18]. Recovered animism could become the personal religion of the future.
References
[1] N. Bird-David, ‘Animism’ revisited, Curr Anthropol 40 (1999), pp. 567–591.
[2] H. Brody, The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers and the shaping of the world, Faber and Faber, London (2001).
[3] B. Charlton, Psychiatry and the human condition, Radcliffe Medical Press, Oxford (UK) (2000).
[4] B.G. Charlton, Theory of mind delusions and bizarre delusions in an evolutionary perspective: psychiatry and the social brain. In: Brune Martin, Ribbert Hedda and Schiefenhovel Wulf, Editors, The social brain – evolution and pathology, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2003).
[5] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Critical Quarterly) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39. Full Text via CrossRef
[6] R.W. Byrne and A. Whiten, Machiavellian intelligence: social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes and humans, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1988).
[7] G. Miller, The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, Heinemann, London (2000).
[8] V. Hearne, Adam’s task: calling animals by name, Knopf, New York (1986).
[9] N. Bird-David, The giving environment: another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters, Curr Anthropol 31 (1990), pp. 183–196.
[10] J. Campbell and B. Moyers, The power of myth, Anchor, New York (1991).
[11] Clark G. A farewell to alms:a brief economic history of the world. Princeton (USA): Princeton University Press (in press).
[12] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Imprint Academic, Thorverton (2003).
[13] Keith E. Stanovitch, The robot’s rebellion: finding meaning in the age of Darwin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2004).
[14] B.G. Charlton, Science as a general education: conceptual science should constitute the compulsory core of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 451–453. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (63 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[15] J. Campbell, A Joseph Campbell companion: reflections on the art of living, HarperTrade, New York (1991).
[16] C.T. Tart, Altered states of consciousness, Wiley, New York (1969).
[17] R. Hutton, Shamans: Siberian spirituality and the western imagination, Hambledon and London, London (2001).
[18] D.C. Noel, The soul of shamanism: western fantasies, imaginal realities, Continuum, New York (1997).
[19] W. Mayer-Gross, E. Slater and M. Roth, Clinical psychiatry (3rd ed.), Cassell, London (1969).
[20] A.R. Damasio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason and the human brain, Macmillan, London (1994).
[21] B.G. Charlton, Diazepam with your dinner, Sir? The lifestyle drug-substitution strategy: a radical alcohol policy, QJM 98 (2005), pp. 457–459. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[22] Erowid. Entheogens: spiritual and traditional use of psychoactives. www.erowid.org/entheogens. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).
[23] R. Hutton, Triumph of the moon, Oxford University Press, Oxford (UK) (2001).
[24] P. Helas, The new age movement, Blackwell, Oxford, UK (1996).
[25] Wikipedia. Pentecostalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacostalism. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).
[26] T.A. Shippey, JRR Tolkien: author of the century, HarperCollins, London (2000).
Editorial
Alienation, recovered animism and altered states of consciousness
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 727-731
***
Summary
Alienation is the feeling that life is ‘meaningless’, that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things. Methods used to cure alienation and recover animistic modes of thinking involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality: for example, solitude, leisure, unstructured time and direct contact with nature. Many people also achieve similar results by deliberately inducing altered states of consciousness. Animistic thinking may emerge in meditation or contemplation, lucid dreaming, from self-hypnosis, when drowsy, in ‘trance states’ induced by repetitious rhythm or light, or when delirious due to illness, brain injury, psychoses, or intoxication with ‘entheogenic’ drugs – which is probably one reason for the perennial popularity of inducing intoxicated states. However, intoxication will typically damage memory processes making it harder to learn from any spiritual experiences; and even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required. Despite these constraints and limitations, recovering animism through seeking altered states of consciousness could already be considered a major world spiritual practice.
***
One of the distinctive features of Western contemporary life is that, while pleasures are widely available (albeit at a price), there is an almost universal sense of ‘alienation’. Alienation is the feeling that life is meaningless, that we do not belong in the world.
But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world. This perspective is a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers [1] and [2]. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a unified world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships [3] and [4].
We were all animistic children once, and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans, and it requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive socialization to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world [5]. It is learned objectivity that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things.
But objectivity is superficial: animism remains the basic underlying mode of human thinking, and animism can be recovered. When we are removed from the rational systems of civilisation, when learned patterns of socialised behaviour are stripped-away, and in altered states of consciousness, then animistic thinking can re-emerge and a sense of belonging in the world may return.
Animism
Animism is not a religious or philosophical doctrine, neither is it an ‘error’ made by people too young or too primitive to know better; animism is nothing less than the fundamental mode by which human consciousness regards the world [1] and [2]. Consciousness just is animistic [3] and [4]. And this perspective is a consequence of human evolutionary history.
Humans evolved sophisticated brain mechanisms for dealing with the complex social situations that formed a dominant selection pressure throughout primate evolutionary history [6] and [7]; and in animistic thinking these social mechanisms are flexibly applied to interpret complex aspects of the world in general. Information on animals, plants and landscape are fed-into a system that codes them into social entities with social motivations, and models their behaviour in social terms.
Human consciousness is therefore essentially a social intelligence, designed by natural selection for dealing with people, but accidentally highly applicable to understanding, predicting and controlling a wide range of phenomena. Unless suppressed during upbringing, this way of looking at the world is spontaneously generalised beyond the social sphere, so the significant world is seen as composed of ‘agents’, having dispositions, motivations and intentions. Humans see the world through social spectacles [3].
The significant features of the natural world are seen as sentient and evaluated using social intelligence modes of thinking. Therefore, for an animistic thinkers significant events do not ‘just happen’ – like inert billiard balls bouncing-off one another – instead events occur because some entity wants them to occur. Every significant event is intentional and has personal implications.
Animism is an extremely effective way of dealing with the natural world under the conditions of hunter–gatherer societies. For instance, each species of animal has its own nature, each member of a species its own character, knowledge of which enables behaviour to be predicted with considerable precision in real world situations [1] and [2]. Even with the advantages of scientific biology, ‘anthropomorphism’ still remains the best system for understanding, predicting and manipulating animal behaviour – especially among large social mammals: successful animal trainers usually develop and use elaborate anthropomorphic characterizations of dogs, cats and horses [8].
Furthermore, because other people were so important in evolutionary history [6] and [7] social information is especially vivid: it grabs and sustains our attention and mobilises our emotions. In an oral culture that depends on human memory, the best way of transmitting important information is by the medium of animistic stories and songs.
At home in the world
Animistic thinkers feel at home in the world [2]. Children and hunter–gatherers are not necessarily happy, of course – but they are not alienated: they have a relationship with the world. Animists are watched over, influenced, protected and punished, by the sentient powers that constitute the world.
Among tribal hunter–gatherers, although there are hostile powers, the relationship of each individual to the world is that of child and parent. The world is a ‘giving environment’ – fundamentally benign because it keeps us alive [9]. This is a beneficent ‘cosmic economy’ which cannot be controlled, planned or significantly shaped. Animists say ‘yes’ to the world, unconditionally [2] and [10].
By contrast, since the invention of farming and on through the industrial revolution into modernity, life has become akin to a state of siege, the individual (usually with a small gang of family and allies) against a mass of hostile strangers [2]. To survive and thrive planning is essential, yet most plans will fail. The natural world is raw material for the production of food and other necessities and luxuries. Production entails prolonged, dull, repetitive tasks to force nature into new and different shapes. The world is not a nurturing parent, but must be coerced into producing the necessities of life.
Mass alienation is therefore no accident, but an inevitable consequence of the kind of society we inhabit. Animism would be grossly maladaptive for decision-making in a complex society of politics, economics, law, science, technology and military organization – a society that depends on objective information and rational planning [5]. Returning to a thoroughgoing, society-wide animism would therefore be impossible without a return to hunter–gatherer lifeways; which is both impossible and undesirable since modern life is, in most material respects, vastly preferable to the Malthusian trap (of poverty, disease and starvation) which constituted most of recorded history [11].
Indeed, the most probable human future entails more complexity, more planning, more control – and, as a by-product, more alienation [12]. But although a shared and public animism is ruled-out as maladaptive, the situation for individuals is different. There may be niches for more-or-less wholly animistic individuals even in modern society, and there certainly are niches for a recovery of animistic thinking within many ordinary people’s private lives – especially during leisure time.
The problem is that, for a modern adult, recovery of animistic thinking entails undoing the effects of an exceptionally thorough and prolonged process of socialisation that has buried animism under a vast superstructure of abstraction and systematic thinking [13] and [14]. Modern adults cannot easily or quickly recover their animistic way of thinking at will, even temporarily.
Methods used to help in the recovery of animistic modes of thinking have been known since the Romantic era. They essentially involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality. For example, solitude (away from people), leisure (away from the economy) and unstructured time (as contrasted with technologically-measured time) – indeed holidays away from home are often a highly effective way of getting ‘in touch’ with life. Direct contact with nature is another classic strategy.
Under such conditions of contemplative detachment from societal constraints there tends to be a spontaneous recovery of animistic thinking. Those who can achieve this state often strive to do so, perhaps by setting aside a ‘sacred space’ of a special time or place for frequent meditation or personal rituals [15]. They may find that these cues and repetitions make flipping-into an animistic state straightforward and habitual.
But psychological detachment from social constraints is not possible for everyone due to their personality or situation, nor is it always effective. Some people find that it takes many clear days of vacation - or even longer – before they can ‘switch off’ their organised minds, forget their personal and practical worries and begin to live in the here-and-now. Such people cannot self-generate altered states, and may need some kind of ‘artificial’ or technological assistance to produce the desired effect.
Recovering animism through altered states of consciousness
It has also been noticed that altered states of consciousness, due to accidental or deliberate impairment in brain functioning, will sometimes cause the re-emergence of animistic modes of thinking [16].
For instance, animistic thinking emerges during meditation or contemplation, when drowsy (e.g. during hypnagogic states between sleeping and waking), during intoxication – whether accidental or deliberate, when delirious due to illness or brain injury’. We can also recall animistic thinking when remembering dreams, especially those rare ‘lucid’ dreams. For most people, most of the time, recovered animism must be a leisure-time pursuit. Even self-hypnosis or dreamy-reverie are states incompatible with optimal mental performance.
It is generally believed that hunter–gatherers included individuals called shamans who utilized altered states of consciousness to intensify their animistic thinking to the point where they transcended the barriers of time, space and species to undertake spirit journeys and transformations with aims such as healing individuals, seeking guidance on tribal decisions, or restoring good fortune [2] and [17]. Traditional shamans attained altered states by spontaneous psychological ability reinforced by training and practice; through various ordeals, dances, performances and rituals; or by their skill in ‘lucid dreaming’ (i.e. remaining aware while dreaming, and retaining some control over dream content and direction). Modern New Age spiritual practices include ‘Neo-shamanism’ in which (usually) rhythmic drumming, chanting or music is used to induce a trance state in which similar animistic experiences may be achieved [18].
Animism is also a feature of severe psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. ‘Paranoid’ delusions are characterised by ‘delusions of self-reference’ – which is a sense of being the focus of a world of hostile sentient powers [19]. Paranoid individuals may believe they are under constant observation, perceive the radio talking to them personally, or interpret media stories as containing coded allusions to their situation.
The nature of animistic thinking during altered states of consciousness depends on the emotional state [20]. A pleasant and healthy body state will usually lead to positive animistic experiences, and vice versa [3]. During the delirium of severe physical illness animistic experiences are almost always very unpleasant and involve the experience of a hostile (instead of nurturing) world, because the person is sick and suffering pain. For example, alcohol withdrawal (‘delirium tremens’) may involve terrifying persecutory delusions and perception of a threatening environment.
Mania, by contrast, may involve a blissful state of godlike one-ness with an animated world; because the energized and un-fatigued emotional tone of mania lends a euphoric colouring to delusions of self-reference [3]. Something similar applies with hallucinogenic drugs – whether someone has a good or bad ‘trip’ depends substantially on their emotional state, which may be influenced by the drug itself.
This emphasizes that there are two elements to recovered animism: alteration of consciousness, and maintenance of a positive emotional state.
The ‘entheogenic’ rationale for intoxication
Although intoxication may be rewarding in itself, probably one major explanation why so many people seem to seek so frequently to alter their consciousness with agents such as alcohol, marijuana, volatile organic solvents, opiates and hallucinogenic drugs [21] is that they are seeking to recover animistic modes of thinking, to cure alienation and feel at home in the world. When used in this spiritual-seeking way, psycho-pharmacological agents are sometimes called ‘entheogens’ (meaning ‘that which causes God to be within’) [22].
There are, of course, problems with using chemical intoxicants as an entheogen. There may be a risk of lasting damage to the brain or other aspects of health, there may be hangover or rebound phenomena, and the potential for addiction or other forms of chemical dependence. Intoxication does not have a specific effect in recovering animistic cognition, it also impairs other aspects of general brain function such as concentration, judgement, and reaction times. This means that intoxication is not an option for people who need to drive, operate machinery, look after children, or perform any kind of skilled or responsible function [22].
Furthermore, inducing animistic thinking by intoxication may be somewhat self-defeating, since intoxication will often significantly impair memory processes. Mystical or spiritual experiences may be induced by intoxication, but not be clearly remembered, so they can neither be learned-from nor integrated with the rest of life.
Despite such constraints and limitations, recovering animism through altered states of consciousness can be considered a major contemporary spiritual activity, especially in Neo-paganism [23] and New Age [24] movements, but probably also in some charismatic branches of Christianity – such as Pentecostalism (which is probably he fastest growing protestant denomination [25]). And it seems more than coincidence that the favourite English language fiction of the twentieth century in most surveys [26] was substantially a work of animism: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its non-human sentient beings, and its animate horses, eagles, trees, mountains and landscapes.
In an ever more rational, abstract and objective public world it may seem ironic, although it should not be altogether surprising, if many people privately practised some personalized version of Neo-shamanism in order to induce a sense of belonging [18]. Recovered animism could become the personal religion of the future.
References
[1] N. Bird-David, ‘Animism’ revisited, Curr Anthropol 40 (1999), pp. 567–591.
[2] H. Brody, The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers and the shaping of the world, Faber and Faber, London (2001).
[3] B. Charlton, Psychiatry and the human condition, Radcliffe Medical Press, Oxford (UK) (2000).
[4] B.G. Charlton, Theory of mind delusions and bizarre delusions in an evolutionary perspective: psychiatry and the social brain. In: Brune Martin, Ribbert Hedda and Schiefenhovel Wulf, Editors, The social brain – evolution and pathology, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2003).
[5] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Critical Quarterly) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39. Full Text via CrossRef
[6] R.W. Byrne and A. Whiten, Machiavellian intelligence: social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes and humans, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1988).
[7] G. Miller, The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, Heinemann, London (2000).
[8] V. Hearne, Adam’s task: calling animals by name, Knopf, New York (1986).
[9] N. Bird-David, The giving environment: another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters, Curr Anthropol 31 (1990), pp. 183–196.
[10] J. Campbell and B. Moyers, The power of myth, Anchor, New York (1991).
[11] Clark G. A farewell to alms:a brief economic history of the world. Princeton (USA): Princeton University Press (in press).
[12] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Imprint Academic, Thorverton (2003).
[13] Keith E. Stanovitch, The robot’s rebellion: finding meaning in the age of Darwin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2004).
[14] B.G. Charlton, Science as a general education: conceptual science should constitute the compulsory core of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 451–453. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (63 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[15] J. Campbell, A Joseph Campbell companion: reflections on the art of living, HarperTrade, New York (1991).
[16] C.T. Tart, Altered states of consciousness, Wiley, New York (1969).
[17] R. Hutton, Shamans: Siberian spirituality and the western imagination, Hambledon and London, London (2001).
[18] D.C. Noel, The soul of shamanism: western fantasies, imaginal realities, Continuum, New York (1997).
[19] W. Mayer-Gross, E. Slater and M. Roth, Clinical psychiatry (3rd ed.), Cassell, London (1969).
[20] A.R. Damasio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason and the human brain, Macmillan, London (1994).
[21] B.G. Charlton, Diazepam with your dinner, Sir? The lifestyle drug-substitution strategy: a radical alcohol policy, QJM 98 (2005), pp. 457–459. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
[22] Erowid. Entheogens: spiritual and traditional use of psychoactives. www.erowid.org/entheogens. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).
[23] R. Hutton, Triumph of the moon, Oxford University Press, Oxford (UK) (2001).
[24] P. Helas, The new age movement, Blackwell, Oxford, UK (1996).
[25] Wikipedia. Pentecostalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacostalism. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).
[26] T.A. Shippey, JRR Tolkien: author of the century, HarperCollins, London (2000).
There should be more science Nobel laureates
*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*
Editorial
Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – And why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical hypotheses. 2007; 68: 471-473
***
Summary
The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology and economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. The prizes exist primarily to honour individuals but also have a very important function in science generally. In particular, the institutions and nations which have educated, nurtured or supported many Nobel laureates can be identified as elite in world science. However, the limited range of subjects and a maximum of 12 laureates per year mean that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized; and relatively few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different levels of quality. I advocate that the Nobel committee should expand the number of Nobel laureates and Prize categories as a service to world science. (1) There is a large surplus of high quality prize candidates deserving of recognition. (2) There has been a vast expansion of research with a proliferation of major sub-disciplines in the existing categories. (3) Especially, the massive growth of the bio-medical sciences has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in this area. (4) Whole new fields of major science have emerged. I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year should always be awarded in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and that two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures could increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase the range of scientific coverage. In future, the Nobel committee should also officially allocate proportionate credit to institutions for each laureate, and a historical task force could also award institutional credit for past prizes.
***
The Nobel prizes have since 1901 existed primarily to honour individuals, but the prizes also have a very important function in science generally, in particular providing a retrospective research quality evaluation for institutions and nations.
The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology, and – since 1969 – economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. (The literature and peace prizes, lacking objective and internationally-valid criteria for evaluation, have clearly failed to achieve the validity of the science prizes.) Although originally awarded to individuals, the science prizes are now awarded a maximum of once a year to a maximum of three laureates, which makes a maximum total of only 12 laureates annually. However this maximum number of laureates is not often reached due to the usual practice of awarding each year’s prize for achievements related to a single ‘theme’ of research – for which only one or two people may be responsible.
The science prizes serve not only to honour individuals retrospectively, but have also been used to evaluate the quality of universities and other research institutions by crediting the places that have been associated with the most ‘revolutionary’ science breakthroughs. For example, the Shanghai Jiao Tong academic rankings (http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2006) uses ‘alumni’ data of the university where Nobel Laureates studied, and also the institution where laureates were working at the time of award. This generates a mostly-US world elite of universities containing the likes of Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Colombia, MIT, Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley and Cambridge (UK).
But the maximum of only 12 science laureates per year means that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized. Outside of the research super-elite, few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different level of quality. Such small numbers create considerable statistical noise, over-valuing a ‘lucky’ institution and undervaluing other places where Nobel-quality work was accomplished but un-rewarded.
I suggest that the massive expansion and specialization of world science since the foundation of the Nobel Prizes implies that the number of Nobel laureates should be at-least doubled. It would also be a very useful service to science if the prize committee would – in future and retrospectively – proportionately allocate an official share of institutional credit for each person’s prize.
Reasons why more Nobel laureates are justified
1. While it is understandable that the Nobel Committee and existing laureates would not want to ‘inflate’ the value of the award, given the number of unrewarded major scientists there seems to be no shortage of very high quality candidates for Nobels. So there should be no problem that increasing numbers would reduce the quality of laureates.
2. The past century since the first Nobel Prize in 1901 has seen a vast, many-fold expansion of scientific research. Furthermore, there has been a continual process of specialization of research, as well as the generation of new hybrid categories (such as bio-chemistry). So, the meaning of a Nobel has changed. It is now appropriate that within a general category, several specialist prizes be awarded each year.
3. The relative importance of sciences have changed, and for the several decades the bio-medical sciences have dominated in terms of size and achievements. This has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in the area of physiology and medicine. For example, many major therapeutic advances in drug discovery and innovative procedures have not been recognized by Nobel prizes.
4. New fields of science have emerged and grown to maturity. Economics was recognized by a new Nobel Prize founded in 1968, but mathematics and computing science also seem worthy of new prizes. (The mathematical Fields Medal of the Royal Society is not a Nobel equivalent, since it only goes to candidates aged less than 40.)
5. An increase in the numbers of Nobel prizes would have great advantages for recognizing the scientific research institutions which have educated, nurtured and supported them. When there are so few laureates each individual award carries a disproportionate weight in terms of institutional associations. Only a handful of world universities have gathered enough laureates over sufficient years to eliminate chance effects. More laureates would mean that the contribution of institutions would be more precisely measurable, a wider range of scientific achievement would be rewarded, and also more up to date measures would become useable.
6. Related to this, it would be a great service to science if prizes were awarded not just to an individual, but if the official credit for each laureate was also proportionately allocated between any institutions that were considered significantly to have supported the achievement – this process could also be done retrospectively (e.g. by an historical task force constituted for the purpose).
In conclusion, I would advocate a progressive expansion of the number of science Nobel prizes. The exact mechanism by which this would be achieved is not critical, but here are some suggestions:
1. The maximum of three laureates per year in the physics, chemistry and economics categories should be awarded as a matter of routine; even when this means that prizes are being given for diverse and un-related achievements.
2. The number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine.
3. Consideration should be given to two new prizes to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science.
A combination of these measures would ensure that the number of laureates per year would increase from the current maximum of 12 to a minimum of 21–24. The situation could be monitored to ensure that this change did not lead to any sign of incipient decline in quality of laureates, and consideration could be given to further expansion or adjustment of disciplinary categories in future.
While it is understandable and laudable that the Nobel committee should be extremely cautious about devaluing the status of the award, in fact the real problem is exactly the opposite. By maintaining so few laureates when world science has expanded so much, there has been a deflationary extra-valuation of each award and an arbitrary element to the distribution of credit. As a service to world science, the Nobel Committee should seriously consider expanding the number of laureates to keep-up with the volume and quality of scientific activity.
Editorial
Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – And why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical hypotheses. 2007; 68: 471-473
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Summary
The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology and economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. The prizes exist primarily to honour individuals but also have a very important function in science generally. In particular, the institutions and nations which have educated, nurtured or supported many Nobel laureates can be identified as elite in world science. However, the limited range of subjects and a maximum of 12 laureates per year mean that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized; and relatively few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different levels of quality. I advocate that the Nobel committee should expand the number of Nobel laureates and Prize categories as a service to world science. (1) There is a large surplus of high quality prize candidates deserving of recognition. (2) There has been a vast expansion of research with a proliferation of major sub-disciplines in the existing categories. (3) Especially, the massive growth of the bio-medical sciences has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in this area. (4) Whole new fields of major science have emerged. I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year should always be awarded in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and that two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures could increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase the range of scientific coverage. In future, the Nobel committee should also officially allocate proportionate credit to institutions for each laureate, and a historical task force could also award institutional credit for past prizes.
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The Nobel prizes have since 1901 existed primarily to honour individuals, but the prizes also have a very important function in science generally, in particular providing a retrospective research quality evaluation for institutions and nations.
The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology, and – since 1969 – economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. (The literature and peace prizes, lacking objective and internationally-valid criteria for evaluation, have clearly failed to achieve the validity of the science prizes.) Although originally awarded to individuals, the science prizes are now awarded a maximum of once a year to a maximum of three laureates, which makes a maximum total of only 12 laureates annually. However this maximum number of laureates is not often reached due to the usual practice of awarding each year’s prize for achievements related to a single ‘theme’ of research – for which only one or two people may be responsible.
The science prizes serve not only to honour individuals retrospectively, but have also been used to evaluate the quality of universities and other research institutions by crediting the places that have been associated with the most ‘revolutionary’ science breakthroughs. For example, the Shanghai Jiao Tong academic rankings (http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2006) uses ‘alumni’ data of the university where Nobel Laureates studied, and also the institution where laureates were working at the time of award. This generates a mostly-US world elite of universities containing the likes of Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Colombia, MIT, Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley and Cambridge (UK).
But the maximum of only 12 science laureates per year means that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized. Outside of the research super-elite, few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different level of quality. Such small numbers create considerable statistical noise, over-valuing a ‘lucky’ institution and undervaluing other places where Nobel-quality work was accomplished but un-rewarded.
I suggest that the massive expansion and specialization of world science since the foundation of the Nobel Prizes implies that the number of Nobel laureates should be at-least doubled. It would also be a very useful service to science if the prize committee would – in future and retrospectively – proportionately allocate an official share of institutional credit for each person’s prize.
Reasons why more Nobel laureates are justified
1. While it is understandable that the Nobel Committee and existing laureates would not want to ‘inflate’ the value of the award, given the number of unrewarded major scientists there seems to be no shortage of very high quality candidates for Nobels. So there should be no problem that increasing numbers would reduce the quality of laureates.
2. The past century since the first Nobel Prize in 1901 has seen a vast, many-fold expansion of scientific research. Furthermore, there has been a continual process of specialization of research, as well as the generation of new hybrid categories (such as bio-chemistry). So, the meaning of a Nobel has changed. It is now appropriate that within a general category, several specialist prizes be awarded each year.
3. The relative importance of sciences have changed, and for the several decades the bio-medical sciences have dominated in terms of size and achievements. This has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in the area of physiology and medicine. For example, many major therapeutic advances in drug discovery and innovative procedures have not been recognized by Nobel prizes.
4. New fields of science have emerged and grown to maturity. Economics was recognized by a new Nobel Prize founded in 1968, but mathematics and computing science also seem worthy of new prizes. (The mathematical Fields Medal of the Royal Society is not a Nobel equivalent, since it only goes to candidates aged less than 40.)
5. An increase in the numbers of Nobel prizes would have great advantages for recognizing the scientific research institutions which have educated, nurtured and supported them. When there are so few laureates each individual award carries a disproportionate weight in terms of institutional associations. Only a handful of world universities have gathered enough laureates over sufficient years to eliminate chance effects. More laureates would mean that the contribution of institutions would be more precisely measurable, a wider range of scientific achievement would be rewarded, and also more up to date measures would become useable.
6. Related to this, it would be a great service to science if prizes were awarded not just to an individual, but if the official credit for each laureate was also proportionately allocated between any institutions that were considered significantly to have supported the achievement – this process could also be done retrospectively (e.g. by an historical task force constituted for the purpose).
In conclusion, I would advocate a progressive expansion of the number of science Nobel prizes. The exact mechanism by which this would be achieved is not critical, but here are some suggestions:
1. The maximum of three laureates per year in the physics, chemistry and economics categories should be awarded as a matter of routine; even when this means that prizes are being given for diverse and un-related achievements.
2. The number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine.
3. Consideration should be given to two new prizes to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science.
A combination of these measures would ensure that the number of laureates per year would increase from the current maximum of 12 to a minimum of 21–24. The situation could be monitored to ensure that this change did not lead to any sign of incipient decline in quality of laureates, and consideration could be given to further expansion or adjustment of disciplinary categories in future.
While it is understandable and laudable that the Nobel committee should be extremely cautious about devaluing the status of the award, in fact the real problem is exactly the opposite. By maintaining so few laureates when world science has expanded so much, there has been a deflationary extra-valuation of each award and an arbitrary element to the distribution of credit. As a service to world science, the Nobel Committee should seriously consider expanding the number of laureates to keep-up with the volume and quality of scientific activity.
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