THE PROLIFERATION OF PRIZES: NOBEL COMPLEMENTS

AND NOBEL SURROGATES

IN THE REWARD SYSTEM OF SCIENCE

HARRIET ZUCKERMAN Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Columbia University, 140 East 62nd Street, N e w York, N Y 10021, USA

ABSTRACT. In the last two decades, prizes in the sciences have proliferated and, in particular, rich prizes with large honoraria. These developments raise several questions: Why have rich prizes proliferated? Have they greatly changed the reward system of science? What effects will such prizes have on scientists and on science? The proliferation of such prizes derives from marked limitations on the numbers and types of scientists eligible for Nobel prizes and consequent increases in the number of uncrowned laureateequivalents. These would-be surrogates for Nobel prizes extend the reward system of science in its upper reaches but this change is not fundamental. The spread of rich prizes to new fields provides added incentives to potential winners, which has its own disutilities; it reinforces competitiveness, concern for priority and attendant secrecy, all this amplifying ambivalence toward the reward system in science. There may also be modest positive effects of such new awards in the form of heightened popular esteem for science and interest in it. Key words: forty-first chair, Nobel prize, prizes, reward system of science, science,

scientific elite, sociology of science

1. INTRODUCTION The last two decades have witnessed a spate of new scientific prizes. Indeed, some 3,000 prizes in the sciences are available now in North America alone, five times as many as twenty years ago [1, 2]. 1 Like their predecessors, most of the new awards are designed to honor those who have done significant research and have the by-product of honoring those who award them. Unlike most of those predecessors, a number of these new prizes provide rich, one might say, very rich honoraria. More than two dozen of the awards for scientific work established in the last decade or so have purses of more than $100,000. A m o n g the half-dozen richest and most conspicuous of these rich awards are the Fiuggi International Prize for medicine and biology established at 500 Million Lire (about $400,000), [3] 2 the Draper Award for engineering ($375,000) [4], 3 the Japan Prize for science (50 Million Yen or about $370,000) [5], 4 the Kyoto Prize for basic science and advanced technology (45 Million Yen or some Theoretical Medicine 13: 217-231, 1992. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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$330,000) [6] 5 and the Bower Awards of $300,000 [7]. 6 The list does not stop here; an additional half-dozen new awards are equally lavish but differ from the purely honorific awards in that they are designed to provide support for future research. Thus the Donald Bren Fellowships at the University of California, Irvine [8, 9] provide a million dollars for research and the Prix Louis Jeantet, $60,000 to each recipient plus $1.36 million in research funds to be divided among each year's winners [10]. 7 Notably, there are the MacArthur Fellows Awards, given annually since 1981, which vary between $160,000 and $375,000, depending on the age of the Fellow. Intended to foster future achievement, these awards may not seem large when compared to research grants made by government agencies in the United States and other industrial nations, but since the recipients do not apply for them and need not spell out in advance what they will do with the money, such awards confer a measure of freedom far beyond that provided by conventional research funding. These awards appear to have set an entirely new standard for prizes in science. As far as honoraria go, they exceed all but the Nobel prizes, which in 1991 amounted to just short of $1 million. The proliferation of these new opulent prizes raises three general questions: Why have such prizes multiplied? Do they signify major changes in the reward system of science? What effects will they have on scientists and on science?

2. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS IN THE REWARD SYSTEM OF SCIENCE The recognition of scientific achievement through awards and prizes has ample historical precedent. The first of such prizes appeared early in the eighteenth century - in 1719, in France when the Acad6mie des Sciences introduced annual prize competitions to encourage scientists to find solutions to problems in astronomy and navigation and, in 1736, in Britain, when the Royal Society of London decided to use its Copley fund for a medal to create ' " a laudable emulation ... among men of genius ... who, in all probability may never be moved for the sake of lucre"' ([11], p. 11), [12, 13] (The lauding of collegial recognition of scientific achievement and the expression of contempt for 'merely' material rewards are parallel themes persisting in science to the present day) ([14] sec. I/I).) As it happens, the different terms of these two premier awards have provided models for all those that would follow. On the one hand, the French awards were to provide incentives for new scientific work and the British, rewards for past scientific accomplishment. By the early nineteenth century, the Acad6mie des Sciences had evolved an elaborate system of prizes, far more elaborate than the Royal Society or other honorific groups, but it was not until the later part of the century that a number

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of truly substantial monetary prizes were established. The largest awards actually given by the Acad6mie (some were, so to speak, on the books but never awarded) were Les Prix Le Conte which ran to 50,000 francs, about five times the salary of a Parisian professor at the time [11, 12, 15]. The richest award then conferred by the Royal Society of London, the Darwin Medal, brought its recipients a silver medal and 100 British sterling - then the equivalent of about 2,500 francs or about a fourth of the prevailing professorial salary. Plainly, the French believed it took more to support new scientific work than the British, to reward past accomplishments. It was not until the turn of the century and the establishment of the Nobel prizes that the scale of monetary awards for scientific achievement changed dramatically. It was then that, in his will, Alfred Nobel established five prizes, three for the sciences, one for literature and one for "champions of peace" [16]. 8 First awarded in 1901, the Prizes, as they have come to be known, amounted to $42,000 - eighteen to twenty times the average professorial salary in the United States at the time ([17]; [18] pp. 42, 60) 9 although, from the beginning, the Nobels could be shared) ° (It says much about the inflation of currencies and the investing prowess of the Nobel Foundation that the current award is just short of a million dollars and is 1.45 times larger in constant dollars than the first Nobel award. Thus, it is still about twenty times the salary of the average U.S. professor of science but probably only ten times that of outstanding faculty members) [19]. Nobel was not alone in establishing a prize which would substantially multiply the incomes of recipients. The French investor, Daniel Iffia (also known as Osiris), donated the Prix Osiris set at 100,000 francs to the Institut de France in 1899 [11, 15] - scarcely insignificant at eight times the prevailing professorial salary but less than half of the value of the new Nobel prizes. 11 Since then, the Nobel prizes have come to occupy a unique place in both the public mind and the reward system of science [17, 20]. The prizes have continued to be the richest of scientific awards but what marks them off far more is their immense prestige; so much so, that they have become a prevailing worldwide metaphor for supreme achievement - of all sorts. The film actor, Walter Matthau, has been described as so profligate a gambler that he should "have won a Nobel prize for masochism", [17] while the American director and comedian, Woody Allen, who has consistently refused to attend Academy Award ceremonies when his films have been nominated, admits that even he would show up for a Nobel prize. "A Nobel prize would be different", Allen observed, "apart from everything else ... it carries an interesting amount of cash". 12

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As the ne plus ultra anaong awards in science, the Nobel prizes still serve as the gold standard for gauging the visibility, prestige, and affluence of all other awards. How they have come to represent the summit of emulative ambition among prize-giving institutions (and prize-recipients) is reasonably clear. No one attribute of the prize accounts for it being the acme among science awards. "Rather", as I noted some years ago, "this appears to derive from its uniformly high ranking on a composite of interacting attributes, although it may be matched or outranked on any particular one such as its comparative venerability, wealth, [the accumulated eminence of its winners] or the standing of the awarding body. In this respect, it appears that the unplanned and tacit contest for prestige among awards is something like the planned and explicit contest of the decathlon in sports, with the Nobel emerging as champion through its high ranking in a variety of attributes making for prestige" [17]. Indeed, the lofty standing of the Nobel prizes has itself helped to generate the proliferation of prizes; first by inviting competition - not alone in science but in various other spheres of accomplishment, including religion - and second by precipitating an array of would-be Nobel surrogates, that is, prizes specifically intended to fill gaps left by the very limited number and scope of Nobels. As such, they have become reference points not only for gauging the standing of prizes a/ready established but in specifying the characteristics of those about to be established.

3.1. Nobel Complements The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion provides the most arresting but far from the only instance of an avowedly Nobel-inspired complement, that is, an award for high achievement in a field other than the five covered by Nobel prizes and intended to equal or surpass them in prestige. Founded in 1972, the Templeton Prize "grew out of Sir John's [that is, its founder, John Marks Templeton's] dissatisfaction with the Nobel Prizes. He believed that they failed to recognize spiritual achievements ... The religion prizes should help focus more attention on people doing these inspiring things" [21]. In a persisting effort to match or overtake the Nobels, Templeton has increased the honorarium of the award six times since its founding and intends to do so a seventh time, raising the 1991 honorarium of $820,000 to $1 million in 1992. The Templeton prize is given to individuals "whose original and pioneering ways advanced the knowledge and love of God"J22], with the most recent winner being Lord Jakobovits, Britain's Chief Rabbi and the first rabbi to sit in the House of Lords, who received the prize at Buckingham Palace from Prince Philip.

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Templeton apparently believes that very large amounts of profane cash and quite a lot of publicity are enough, even in the domain of the sacred, to attract public respect - and to enter into competition with the Nobels. Drawing on our analysis of the preeminence of the Nobel awards, however, it would appear that large infusions of money are far from enough to guarantee parity with the Nobels. As we know from the social process of accumulated prestige, much more is required. More consequential than large sums of money, are a distinguished and venerable awarding body, a roster of eminent recipients, and few if any publicly defined mistakes in choosing them. The criteria for choice in the domain of religion (or literature or the championing of peace), for example, seem far more ambiguous than those in the domain of the sciences. And choices can readily backfire. The selection of Inamullah Khan as the Templeton winner for 1988 has been severely criticized - his anti-Semitic activities being at issue.

3.2. Nobel Surrogates In the sciences, however, none of the new prizes is explicitly intended to outdo the Nobels. The Nobel prizes have, after all, been at the unchallenged apex of the reward system of modem science throughout the century. And their prestige is reinforced each year as it "contributes to the worldwide publicity that ... renews the public awareness ... [That] visibility and prestige in turn make for intense international competition that further reinforces the visibility and prestige of the prize as the mass media (and not infrequently scientists themselves) anxiously await the annual announcements" ([17], p. 22). Rather, the new prizes spawned by the Nobels are surrogate awards, substitutes designed to honor scientists whose contributions have not or could not win Nobels owing to their very scarcity or to the array of rules which govern the prizes. These rules, laid down early in the history of the prizes, have barely changed even though the disciplinary contours of the sciences and the practice of science have since been transformed. 1. The Scarcity of Prizes. Each year, "more scientists are eligible to win Nobel prizes than can get them". There has always been a shortage of prizes and "an accumulation of 'uncrowned' laureates, who are the peers of prizewinners in every sense except that of having the award. These scientists, like the 'immortals' who happened not to have been included among the cohorts of forty in the French Academy, may be said to occupy the forty-first chair in science" ([17], p. 42). These include investigators such as Mendeleev and Willard Gibbs in the physical sciences and O.T. Avery, W. B. Cannon, C. R. Harington and S. Freud, in the biomedical sciences, to cite just a few from the early years 13 when, presumably owing to the vast increase in the sheer number of scientists, there were fewer scientists of 'Nobel class'[23] than there are now. Put hyperbolically

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by Arne Tiselius, once President of the Foundation, chairman of the Chemistry Committee, and himself a laureate, "'The world is full of people who should get the Nobel prize but haven't got it and won't get it'" ([17], p. 42). In Scientific Elite [17], I examined at some length the ways in which the very scarcity of Nobel prizes helped convert them into the most esteemed honorific recognition of scientific accomplishment by demanding scientific peers. But that same scarcity - no more than three prizes awarded each year, each shared by a maximum of three scientists - has long created its own limitations so that contributions accorded Nobel prizes are far from an adequate representation of truly significant work in modern science, with the further result that the list of laureates is far from an adequate representation of great contributors to science [24]. The scarcity of Nobel prizes alone has therefore provided ample room for awards designed as Nobel surrogates. 2. The Constraining Rules. The rules governing the awarding of Nobels has also created occupants of the forty-first chair. The limit on recipients to no more than three for a given prize arbitrarily eliminates co-workers of laureates whose contributions knowing peers would want to have recognized. This has meant, particularly in this age of Big Science, that major contributors to large experiments have been passed over, as several laureates have acknowledged. It has also had the odd consequence of ruling out of consideration scientific work which is of unquestioned importance but has 'too many' independent contributors. This was apparently the case in the work on the binding and transport of oxygen and carbon dioxide in blood, a fundamental contribution never honored by an award and one which produced a truly stellar assortment of occupants of the forty-first chair including J.B.S. Haldane, J. G. Priestly and L. J.Henderson. The rules also restrict awards to "recent work" which means, even with the relaxation in Nobel Committees' definition of 'recent', that scientists of the first rank become ineligible as their work becomes incorporated into the accepted body of scientific knowledge, all this, while the queue of credible contenders for a prize is lengthening. Other classes of scientific work are also not in contention owing to Nobel's stipulation that the awards go for "a discovery", "improvement" or "invention". In practice, this has led to the exclusion of large theoretical ideas which do not lend themselves to specific empirical confirmation (or if one prefers, have withstood efforts at falsification). Further, research on 'controversial subjects' such as cancer which might lead Nobel Committees to choices later demonstrated to be erroneous, is quite unlikely to be chosen. Since it often takes some time for such work to become widely accepted, the "recency" rule often intervenes; when it does not, scientists responsible for such work had better be long-lived as was Peyton Rous, whose prize came when he was 87 years old.

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(The requirement that the Nobel cannot be given posthumously provides still another ultimately constraining condition.) The most consequential source of exclusion, however, - and the most consequential spur to the establishment of surrogates for Nobel awards - is the unchanging rule which limits Nobel prizes to physics, chemistry, and the biological composite, "physiology or medicine". The expansion of this trio in 1969 to include the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics does not go very far toward making the prizes more scientifically ecumenical or toward reducing the population of occupants of the forty-first chair. This now obsolescent constraint on fields eligible for awards, of course, omits much of contemporary science. Geology, marine science, astronomy (in spite of occasional prizes in physics having gone to astronomers), plant science, zoology and its successor sciences (in spite of one prize in physiology having been awarded in ethology), the social and behavioral sciences (aside from economics) and perhaps most dramatically, mathematics are all excluded by statute from the Nobel circle. This constraint on 'prizable' fields thus leaves ample room for other major awards which are specifically intended to be surrogates for the Nobels, these being designed to provide peer recognition to eminently worthy scientific work and thus to provide symbolic justice to equally worthy scientists in fields excluded by Nobel rules. The Crafoord Prizes are perhaps the most striking example of awards explicitly designed to honor and make more visible research in fields ineligible for Nobel awards. The scope of these prizes includes astronomy, mathematics, geosciences and biosciences with an emphasis on ecology and on suitable occasion, the distinctly limited field of research on rheumatoid arthritis [25]. 14 As the co-founder of these prizes, Holger Crafoord, observed, "I wanted to help the areas of science not covered by the Nobels" [26]. Named for and funded by Anna-Greta and Holger Crafoord, he, a Swedish businessman, the Crafoord prizes derive authority and a measure of kinship with the Nobel prizes from being awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the institution which has responsibility for the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. First given in 1982, each Crafoord prize amounted to some $400,000 in 1992. So too in engineering. The absence of a Nobel in this field is the explicit source of the Charles Stark Draper Prize, established in 1985. Funded by the Draper Laboratory, the award is intended to honor great achievement in engineering. As Robert M. White, president of the National Academy of Engineering, observed on its founding, "We hope that in years to come the Charles Stark Draper Prize will be just as well known and respected an award in engineering as the Nobel Prizes are today for chemistry, physics and medicine" [27]. 15 With its honorarium of $350,000, the monetary component of the Draper Prize is symbolically notable. Correlatively, it is also authoritative by virtue of

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being conferred by the U. S. National Academy of Engineering. Whether these attributes will be sufficiently reinforced by a continuing roster of luminaries to provide prestige of Nobel-like magnitude is a question too early to call. Whatever the outcome, the phenomenon of occupants of the forty-first chair produced by the scarcity of Nobel prizes and the rules which greatly constrain their award are at this telling prime sources of the proliferation of prizes at the upper reaches of the reward system. Even awards established without reference to the Nobels in fields excluded from consideration can come to be defined by them. Thus the Fields Medals in mathematics have been widely identified by mathematicians as Nobel surrogates, equivalents in prestige though not in cash (they are worth $15,000 Canadian) while the Balzan Foundation Prizes, one of three going to the sciences each year, after an uneven start, are also taken to be Nobel equivalents in the diverse fields (including geophysics and psychology) which they honor but the Nobels do not. That they now provide cash prizes of about $230,000 no doubt contributes to their visibility in the fields eligible for them. So too, the Vetlesen Prizes in the earth sciences [28] 16 and the Tyler Ecology Award are thought to be Nobel surrogates. They meet the criteria of having considerable prestige in the fields they cover while providing a sizable honorarium to boot.

4. CHANGES IN THE REWARD SYSTEM OF SCIENCE Do the new awards represent a major change in the reward system of science? In absolute numbers of rich awards, to be sure. More awards with substantial honoraria are available now than ever before in fields which did not have them earlier. Whether there are more, relative to the number of scientists who might win them is more difficult to assess since defining the pool of potential candidates is far from simple, especially since major awards usually cover broad fields of science and are rarely limited to scientists from particular nations. The array of awards is also richer than the earlier standard - in both absolute and relative terms, especially compared with those available before 1970s and, o f course, excluding the Nobel prizes. It was in the 1970s that a number of large awards came into being, including the Tyler Prize in ecology of $150,000, the three General Motors Prizes [29] 17 of $100,000 each and the five Wolf Prizes also carrying honoraria of $100,000. The larger prizes of the 1980s therefore continue the trend established a decade earlier but represent something quite new in comparison with earlier historical periods. There are not only more of them and richer ones, but the fields in which such prizes are now available have been considerably diversified, in no small part, as I have noted, in reaction to the severe limitation of fields eligible for the Nobel prizes. In these important

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respects then, the new awards have reshaped the reward system of science in its upper reaches. At the same time, they are small in number; not many scientists can win them. Nor do they differ much in structure from earlier prizes. Decision criteria, procedures of choice and the composition of prize juries (with appropriate allowances made for the fields being honored) are much the same. This does not surprise since the founders of the prizes seek prestige for them and thus emulate earlier prizes in designing the process of selection. Most of the new awards are for significant contributions to fundamental science, most involve competitions with nominations sought world-wide, most are awarded by prize juries composed of eminent scientists. It is not uncommon to turn the selection process over to professional bodies which themselves have great prestige and generally acknowledged high standards. In this regard, it was something of a coup for Anna-Greta and Holger Crafoord to have placed the awards they donated under the stewardship of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, the rosters of winners of most of the new large prizes are much like the rosters of older prize-winners, and for the same reasons. Since the standing of prizes soon derives from the standing of their winners, new awards acquire luster from being accepted by scientists of great standing. Thus, many of the new major awards have gone to scientists who have already been amply honored. For example, the British molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, who has won both the Kyoto Prize and the Prix Jeantet, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a member of the Deutsche Academy der Naturforscher, Leopoldina, the recipient of an array of medals, prizes, awards and honorary degrees; in short, he lends eminence to the prizes he has accepted. The 'cascade effect' in scientific awards was noted by the Harvard chemist, Frank Westheimer, when he received the Welch Award which came close on the heels of the Cope Award, the Nichols Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences and a half-dozen others. He tells the story about the general whose chest was covered with medals. 'Oh tell us the marvelous exploits you did to deserve those medals', the general was asked. 'I got the small bronze one by mistake ... The silver one next to it came because I had the bronze'. And so on [30]. The tendency for awards to be heaped onto those who have many of them is perhaps most readily observed in the post-Nobel careers of laureates but it is far from limited to them [17]. In short, this is but another instance of the Matthew Effect, which, following the Gospel of St. Matthew, has recognition accruing to those who already have it [14, 31]. Thus there is much about the new awards that mirrors older ones. It would appear that the upper reaches of the reward system of science have changed in

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scale and scope but otherwise not a lot. There have been no fundamental changes in the values the new prizes exemplify, in the mode of their operation or in the attributes of scientists they honor.

5. EFFECTS ON SCIENTISTS AND ON SCIENCE In the long run, what does this proliferation of large awards presage for scientists and science? Some think they do not bode well. Writing in Science, the biologist, Philip Siekevitz, responded emphatically to the first announcement of the $100,000 General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Prize: I am not surprised that the Mammon-indoctrinated business world does not see the obscenity of all this, but I am still continually surprised that seemingly the scientific community takes all these prizes seriously, without giving any thought as to what is implied in their giving and receiving ... Is it not about time that the scientific community try to put a stop to the prostitution of its procedures and goals and aims by a moneyoriented segment of our society that recognizes no other achievements than those which can be monetarily inspired? [32] The perceived difficulty, it seems, lies not with awards which underwrite new research (at least when the choice of recipients is legitimated by scientist-peers or established scientific organizations), but rather with those prizes with large honoraria designed to honor past contributions. For Siekevitz, and others, such awards mistakenly reinforce the heroic conception of scientific discovery which sees great advances in science as feats of single investigators working alone, with no notice being given to collaborators or to the many other investigators on whose work the prize-winning contributions depended. The multiplication of big-money awards evidently also seems to suggest that scientists work for prizes and prize money rather than for the excitement and satisfaction of extending knowledge. The nonpareil, Einstein, himself amply rewarded, put his own twist on this view, telling the National Academy of Sciences that awards should not be showered on those who discover the fundamental laws of nature. 'When a man after long years of searching chances upon a thought which discloses something of the beauty of this mysterious universe, he should not therefore be personally celebrated. He is already sufficiently paid by his experience of seeking and finding' [33]. Still, the notion that scientists are or should be immune to primarily pecuniary incentive is scarcely new. The new monied prizes also seem to be designed to buy respectability for corporate and individual donors by associating their names with the prestige of science. This, too, is scarcely new - the Nobel prizes being just one case in point.

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Past experience with earlier major awards provides further grounds for anticipating the probable effects of their latter-day counterparts. Recipients will, for the most part, continue to derive psychic as well as monetary income from the awards, with the extent of the psychic income being a function of the prestige of the awards in the significant part of the scientific community. However, many of the newer, and, for that matter, many of the continuing awards have no public identity at all for the majority of scientists. In their study of some 1300 American academic physicists, Jonathan and Stephen Cole found that the Nobel prize and memberships in the Royal Society of London and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences could be identified by practically all queried, but that many other awards in physics were simply not known. Prestige cannot accrue from awards with little visibility and only a dozen awards out of almost a hundred listed were known to at least three-fourths of the physicists surveyed, none but the Nobel having sizable honoraria ([34] pp. 270-275). Evidently, the eminence and visibility of awards do not rest wholly on their providing lavish purses. As I have noted, for prizes to acquire real stature in the scientific community and the world outside, they must satisfy a number of criteria; a large honorarium helps but experience suggests that it is far from sufficient. Whether the new awards will do more for their recipients than bring a moment of pleasure and a non-negligible increase in their bank accounts will depend on the kinds of scientists who receive them. For scientists who are already well-established, yet another prize will do little to advance their careers, enhance their access to research funds, or much improve their standing with university deans or research administrators. Furthermore, such scientists have deeply ingrained habits of work, their research is usually (not always) funded even in hard times though perhaps not at the level they would prefer, and they almost always have respectable incomes. Still moderate effects are not entirely absent. Awards by scientist-peers provide symbolic confirmation that their recipients' work has mattered to science. As Peter Medawar observed: ... elections and nominations depend upon the good opinion that scientists are most eager for - the high opinion of their peers. The effect of gaining an award [and Medawar should know] is a great moral boost - this expression of the confidence and esteem of others will.., perhaps help them do better than before. Very likely, too, the prizewinner will want to show everyone that it wasn't all a fluke ([35] p. 80). Prizes offer incentives to candidates as well as to winners. When scientists become aware that they are credible contenders for an award, they are spurred on, perhaps to more work, to more effective presentation of it, and, often, to more assiduous claims to their priority. Such effects depend on whether the award expresses that "high opinion" of peers to which Medawar refers and that, in turn, depends on the peer-assessed magnitude of the scientific contributions

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being honored. These effects are marginal for established scientists with longsettled patterns of work, they may be more marked for the young and lessknown who become candidates for such awards. There are less benign aspects of prizes and of their role in science. They also reinforce competitiveness, encourage "sharp elbows', heighten disappointment and envy, encourage excessive claims to individual credit for essentially collaborative work and, on occasion, claims to credit for work done entirely by others. The institutionalized quest for recognition in science is as old as modern science itself. These new awards may increase the long-persisting strong emphasis on collegial recognition but they do not introduce a new element in the reward system of science [14]. Robert Merton, long a student of the behavior of scientists, observes that they are often ambivalent about their own deep concern with priority and consequent rewards, apparently without recognizing that this concern is structurally induced. Concern with priority and recognition in science over the centuries derives, he has written, from the reward system of science which puts the ultimate premium on being first in making a scientific contribution. At the same time, the culture of science also places a premium on humility and the advancing of knowledge for its own sake. This is a combination fated to produce ambivalence about rewards in general and about rich ones in particular [14]. The probable effects of rich awards on the pace of science and its directions are also apt to be diverse. Although awards are often intended to affect science as well as scientists, to stimulate discovery as well as to honor discoverers, effects of this sort are far from clear. Major awards may once have "codified schools of thought and legitimated scientific paradigms" [13] 18 but the practice of conferring awards on scientists whose contributions have already passed muster means that many prizes no longer have this result since the work they honor has long since been accepted. To some extent, major prizes may impede rather than advance scientific development by diverting scientists' energies from research on deep intractable problems to those whose solutions come more readily and will attract prize juries' attention. Prizes may focus collective effort on a limited range of relatively tractable problems. Since the reward system of science confers esteem for problems solved, not for valiant but unsuccessful attempts to solve them, it tends to create 'bandwagon effects', even in the absence of prizes. So much for the potential effects of rich prizes on the development of knowledge. What of their effects on the public image of science and of public interest in it? Again, drawing on past experience, and particularly on the model of the Nobel prizes, these new prizes enlarge occasions for celebrating scientific excellence, make scientific work more visible, confer an aura of social importance and prestige on it, and, in ways yet to be investigated, may increase the

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number o f young people who enter scientific occupations. 19 By and large, then, the proliferation o f prizes in the sciences probably has only m i n o r consequences for scientists and for science. Their utility for most scientists is probably small because their effects, positive and negative, are concentrated among the few who believe they might win them and the even fewer who actually do. Their effects on science are also apt to be mixed - rather than being significant inducements to scientific advancement they serve mainly to reinforce more robust effects o f the reward system as a whole. Their main symbolic role is in the world at large as ceremonial affirmations o f excellence and public markers that science matters, even if it is not well understood. Their principal effects m a y paradoxically lie outside rather than inside the boundaries o f science.

NOTES 1 The increase in the number of scientific awards is estimated by comparing the number of listings in the first edition (1969) and ninth edition (1991) of the directory, Awards, Honors & Prizes which covers the United States and Canada [1, 2]. Volume 2, "International & Foreign" awards, appears to be far less complete and therefore was not used in these estimates. Overall, the number of prizes available in the sciences, broadly defined, have increased 4.8 times over the approximately two decades covered by the North American directory. However, the number of prizes in medicine have multiplied 6.4 times as compared with 4.1 times for those in the sciences and engineering. 2 A silver plate comes along with the 500 million lire. Established in 1987, the Fiuggi is awarded by the Foundation which supports it [3]. 3 Endowed by the Draper Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts and named for their founder, Charles Stark Draper, who developed the navigational system used by Apollo astronauts to go to the moon, these awards are given by the U. S. National Academy of Engineering. According to a staff member of the Academy, it is designed "'to get people to notice' the profession of engineering" [4]. 4 The Japan Prize is given by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, which is operated under the auspices of the Prime Minister's office, and funded by Kohnosuke Matsushita, the founder of the electronics firm that bears his name [5]. 5 The three Kyoto Prizes given by the Inamouri Foundation include one given in the sciences. The prizes "honor individuals or groups 'who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual development of mankind'" [6]. 6 The Bower Award, founded by Henry Bower in a bequest of $7.5 million, is intended to honor the "application of science for the benefit of mankind" [4]. It is given by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia "to that scientist whose brilliant discovery has significantly advanced a field of science and made a humanitarian impact on society" [7]. 7 One of the few large awards having geographical limitations (here to scientists from Western Europe), the first Jeantet Foundation prizes were shared by three scientists, Sydney Brenner, Walter Gehring and Dominique Stehelin [9]. 8 The language is from Nobel's will [16]. 9 Then as now, professors' salaries were supplemented by outside income; at that time by 20-25%, Stigler reports [18]. 10 Nobel rules provide that the awards can be divided at most among three scientists; one, to receive half the award and the other two, to share the remainder equally. In practice,

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this means that the size of the award can be far more modest than first appears. By way of example, in •950, when the size of the award had shrunk to $32,000, the award in physiology or medicine was shared by Tadeus Reichstein, Edward C. Kendall and Philip S. Hench. Reichstein's share came to some $16,000 and Kendall's and Hench's to half that. As time has passed, the prizes in the sciences have been shared increasingly often. 11 As Crawford notes, "The difference in size between existing prizes and the Nobel prizes, however, was highly significant: In France, for instance, one Nobel prize was equivalent to all the money paid out annually from the prize funds of the French Academy of Sciences in the period 1901-1910" ([11], p. 206). 12 NBC TV Interview, 1978, April 4. 13 Appendix D of Scientific Elite, lists "honorable mentions" for Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine, that is scientists who the relevant Nobel Committee deemed worthy of the prize but who did not receive it [ 17]. 14 The awards are given annually in four fields: mathematics, the geosciences, the biosciences with an emphasis on ecology, and astronomy, with each field being honored according to a specified rotation [25]. 15 Although the Nobel awards in physics and chemistry may be given for" a discovery or invention", in practice, inventions have not often been chosen and those few have largely been inventions of equipment for research. 16 When the honorarium of the Vetlesen Prizes was doubled in 1978 to $50,000, a trustee of the foundation which sponsors it remarked "It has been the intent of the foundation, that in time this award will rank in significance and prestige with the Nobel Prizes ..." [28]. 17 The General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Prizes were explicitly designed as Nobel surrogates. When the first awards were given in 1979, the president of the Foundation noted: "I think that unfortunately recognition, in terms of Nobel prizes, has not been enough for cancer researchers" [29]. The Foundation was endowed with $2 million, enough for five years of prizes. The awards are listed in the most recent directory of prizes [2] and are still given. 18 This is especially marked in the early history of the Nobel prizes as Crawford [11] and Friedman [36] have noted. 19 In typically ironic style, the inveterate economist and Nobel laureate, George Stigler, notes that the number of young people drawn to the fields in which Nobel prizes are given may increase slightly (even though their chances of winning such prizes are minuscule) and thus have the effect of slightly lowering the average earnings in these fields ([37] pp. 88-89).

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8. Pendlebury D. Billionaire Bren Funds UC-Irvine Program. The Scientist 1989 Aug 7:18. 9. Phillips K. Hot team: busy boss leads atmospheric chemistry group. The Scientist 1991 May 27:14 (col 1), 10. Anonymous. 3 win European biomed prize. The Scientist 1987:Nov 13: 25. 11. Crawford E. The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution. The Science Prizes, 1901-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 12. Crawford E. The prize system of the Academy of Sciences, 1850-1914. In: Fox R, Weisz G, eds. The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808-1914. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1980:283-307 13. MacLeod R. Of medals and men: a reward system in Victorian science, 1826--1914. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 1971;26:81-105. 14. Merton RK. The Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. [Storer NW, ed]. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973. 15. G auja P. Les fondations de l'Acaddmie des Sciences (1881-1915). Paris: Hendaye, 1917. 16. Nobel Foundation, ed. Nobel: The Man and His Prizes. 3rd ed. New York: American Elsevier Publishing Co, 1972. 17. Zuckerman H. Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York: Free Press, 1977. 18. Stigler GJ. Employment and compensation in education. National Bureau of Economic Research Occasional Paper 1950;(33). 19. National Science Foundation. Biennial PhD Survey, 1989. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1991. 20. Crawford E. Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 18801939: Four Studies of the Nobel Population. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 21. Teltsch K. Prize for religion will exceed $1 million in 1992. The New York Times 1991 Feb 1:10 (cols 2-5). 22. Teltsch K. Jersey monk wins Templeton Award. The New York Times 1987 Mar 8:C5. 23. Garfield G. Are the 1979 prizewinners of Nobel class? In: Garfield G, ed. Essays of an Information Scientist. Vol 4. Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1981:609-17. 24. Zuckerman H. The sociology of the Nobel Prize: further notes and queries. American Scientist 1978; 66:420-5. 25. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Anna-Greta and Holger Crafoord Fund. Stockholm, nd:iii. 26. Davis M. Filling the Nobel gap. Discover 1981; (Jan):55. 27. Byrne G. NAE creates new prize. Science 1988;242:665. 28. Columbia University. Record 1978 Feb 28:1 (col 2). 29. Wade N. Dynamite prizes. Science 1979;204:487. 30. Anonymous. Harvard Magazine 1982; (Nov-Dec): 77. 31. Merton RK. The Matthew Effect in science. II: cumulative advantage and the symbolism of intellectual property. ISIS 1988;79:606--23. 32. Siekevitz P. On prizes. Science 1978;202:574 33. Anonymous. Seeker. The New York Times 1978 Nov 19:18E. 34. Cole JR, Cole S. Social Stratification in Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973. 35. Medawar PB. Advice to a Young Scientist. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. 36. Friedman RM. Nobel physics prize in perspective. Nature 1981;292:793-8. 37. Stigler GJ. Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. New York: Basic Books, 1985.