Afterword
W
hat comes with winning the Nobel Prize? There’s the gold—solid 23-karat before 1980 but since then made of an alloy plated with 24-karat gold. Then there’s the cash, with the first prize in 1901 giving winnings of 150,782 Swedish kronor (SEK), valued in 2020 currency at SEK 8,722,510. After 1901, the cash prize decreased for many years, depending on the performance of the invested funds, hitting a low in 1919 of only 28 percent of the original amount and staying below 40 percent until 1974. The prize money started a consistent climb in 1983 and has been nearly at, or exceeding, 100 percent of the original amount since 1991. The prize was set at SEK 10,000,000 in 2020 (approximately 1.17 million USD). The money is shared more often than not, with only six prizes in this quarter-century awarded to single individuals. Sometimes it was not shared equally. For example, in 1958 half the prize went to Joshua Lederberg while the other half was split between George Beadle and Edward Tatum. The Nobel Prize garners prestige, particularly scientific and academic prestige, which facilitated some winners to become administrators of illustrious institutions, like James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor and David Baltimore at Caltech. For others, the prestige gained them comfortable positions conducting dead-end research for the rest of their lives, such as Francis Crick, who didn’t manage any significant contributions in his twenty-eight years at the Salk Institute. In contrast, after winning his Nobel Prize, Har Gobind Khorana used his new position at MIT to lead the team that created the first man-made gene, and through the remainder of his career, he continued to contribute significantly to the understanding of gene control.
