
The Dark Side of Nobel Prizewinning Research - dnetesn
http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-prizewinning-research
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rdancer
The problem is the idea that the worth of a scientist or their work can
somehow be established by a title, prize, medal. Much less that the Nobel
Committee members don't conform to the circa-2010s leftist/progressivist
political bias.

People are very quick to delegate the responsibility to decide whether things
are worth our while to somebody, anybody, lest we actually have to do the
evaluating ourselves. Has it won an Oscar? What is the most popular SQL
database? Which University has the highest ranking? Has his work been
published in a respectable journal? All of these questions are a sub-optimal
proxy for "is it the best?" or even a more modest "is it any good?"

But with the reverence to the Nobel Prize, it's maybe even something else.
It's the human longing for an ultimate authority, for some priest who would
tell us what is good, and what is evil. In that case, I'm glad the author
feels frustrated.

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aaronmck
I can't figure out what they're implying about Norman Borlaug's award at the
end... that it was a mistake too? Either way, the NYT had a much better
critique of why big scientific prizes are bad:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opinion/the-folly-of-
big-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opinion/the-folly-of-big-science-
awards.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur)

~~~
a_bonobo
Seeing that the French are one of the biggest opponents of GM technology and
this a French article, I assume that "genetic crossbreeding" (what does
"genetic" mean here? It's just "old" cross-breeding) is implied to be a bad
thing. It rather reflects badly on the author.

If you haven't heard of Borlaug, he's one of my scientific heroes - it's due
to his work that Mexico's food production turned completely around, from wheat
importing to wheat exporting. He did this by essentially reversing natural
selection: each wheat plant in a field competes with the other for light, so
while humans plant them close to each other each generation will grow higher
and higher. This removes resources normally used for the generation of seeds,
so you get less grain. He crossed dwarf-varieties with high-yielding
varieties, so you got smaller plants which had more resources left over to
make grains, thereby greatly raising the amount of grains you get out of each
plant. No modern GM needed for this one.

He's estimated to have saved roughly a billion people form starvation and IMO
fully deserved his Nobel Prize.

(As an addendum, DDT isn't as bad as initially thought - if you use it
indiscriminately in the outside like they did initially, then it's a huge
health concern as it accumulates in the food chain. But if you use it targeted
inside homes it's highly effective, and it's still used for that today)

Edit:

>Yet in November 1945, just three months after atomic bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel chemistry prize honoured the discovery of
nuclear fission.

This is an error that makes the article's point here moot - Hahn's Nobel Prize
is the Nobel Prize of _1944_ (so before the a-bombs were dropped), it was just
awarded in 1945.

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hchenji
Why should we care how the science was applied?

'"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down That's not my
department," \- says Wernher von Braun' \- Tom Lehrer

~~~
wodenokoto
If it can't be applied for anything useful, was it really a scientific
breakthrough?

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dang
We changed the URL from [http://phys.org/news/2015-10-dark-side-nobel-
prizewinning.ht...](http://phys.org/news/2015-10-dark-side-nobel-
prizewinning.html) to something more readable that appears more legit. If
there's a canonical URL for the article, please let us know.

~~~
lionsdan
I think

[http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-
prizewin...](http://www.france24.com/en/20151004-dark-side-nobel-prizewinning-
research)

may be the original.

~~~
dang
Ok, we changed to that from [http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-dark-side-of-
nobel-prizew...](http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/the-dark-side-of-nobel-
prizewinning-research-1225911).

