125 Years of the Nobel Prize... The Boundaries of "Discovery" Are Shifting [Capturing 125 Years of the Nobel Era]

Thousands Collaborate, Joined by AI
Criteria for Credit Grow Complex as Validation Takes Even Longer

Over the 125 years that the Nobel Prize has documented the greatest achievements in science, the meaning of "discovery" has continually evolved, making the boundaries between discovery and credit increasingly complex.

According to a recent analysis published in the international journal "Nature," the time gap between Nobel laureates’ major scientific achievements and the moment they actually receive the award has increased from an average of 14 years before 1960 to an average of 29 years in the 2010s—more than doubling. For instance, Donna Strickland, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, was honored 33 years after developing the "Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA)" technology in 1985. This is because it takes considerable time to confirm the significance and impact of research achievements and to verify them through subsequent studies.

The gap is also widening between the Nobel Prize’s principle of awarding up to three individuals and the way scientific breakthroughs today are produced through the involvement of countless researchers, institutions, massive research infrastructures, and data. Large-scale collaborative projects such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015 involved thousands of scientists, while the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to protein structure prediction in 2020 solved a longstanding scientific challenge. Nevertheless, the Nobel Prize is only awarded to a maximum of three people, in accordance with its founding principles. Now that AI is entering domains like hypothesis generation and experimental design, a new issue has arisen: how to delineate the contributions of AI developers, scientists using AI, and researchers verifying the results.

The 125-year history of the Nobel Prize is not solely a record of glory. There are many cases where the contributions of women, non-Western researchers, and scientists working outside academic mainstreams have only been recognized long after the fact.

In the run-up to this year's Nobel Prize announcements, which will begin on October 5, The Asia Business Daily interviewed scientists directly involved in Nobel selection as well as distinguished scholars at institutions such as Yale University, Northwestern University, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, to ask how the meaning of "discovery" is changing in modern science.

Despite their diverse fields of research, their responses revealed a common thread: scientific discovery can no longer be explained as the brilliant insight of an individual alone. Instead, it emerges from the collaboration of many researchers and the accumulation of knowledge over a long period of time. The arrival of AI is bringing yet another transformation. There is a growing consensus that it is time to rethink the very standards for distinguishing between authorship and credit, as well as the methods for verifying and recognizing achievements.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.