Square One

Muza Gondwe from Malawi is presently on a six-month fellowship at the Centre of African Studies on the Public Understanding of Science in Africa in Cambridge. She writes on BMJ Blogs about her project which seeks to develop ways of engaging science through communication in Malawi and to identify and celebrate distinguished black African pioneers of science. She was motivated to do this after reading these:

“It will be seen that when we classify mankind by colour, the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race.” – Dr. Arnold Toynbee, The Study of History, Vol. I, page 233. (Vol I: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations (Oxford University Press 1934).

“[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” James Watson, in 2007 in an interview with the Sunday Times.

And what does she find?

In my investigation I have learnt some startling facts: no black African has won any of the Nobel prizes in science; the UK has six times as many researchers as Sub-Saharan Africa; and, according to the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD), 0.1% of the total number of mathematicians in the world are of black African heritage.

The full post is here.

Muza Gondwe’s personal blog, “Communicating science, the African way” is here.

Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt, and other scientists E. O. Wilson, Larry Brilliant, Steven Pinker, Rodney Brooks, Peter Diamandis, David King, Lynn Margulis, Peter Raven and Frans de Waal want two new Nobel prizes for Global Environment and Public Health created. They also suggest expanding or adding to the Physiology or Medicine Prize “to recognise contributions from across the life sciences.” They publish an open letter to the Nobel Prize Committee in this week’s New Scientist:

We appreciate that the foundation is bound by Nobel’s will. But we also note that the foundation has shown flexibility in the past, the creation of the economics prize in 1968 being one example. With that in mind, we would like to recommend two changes that we feel would align the prizes with current challenges:

1. The creation of Nobel prizes for the Global Environment and Public Health. The new prizes would focus on applications of science rather than basic research. As with the existing peace prize, organisations would be eligible. The environment prize would recognise successes in promoting sustainability, mitigating climate change or reducing biodiversity losses. The public health prize would recognise improvements in global health, such as the reduction or eradication of disease. (We present these lists as examples; they are not intended to be complete).

2. The expansion of, or an addition to, the prize for physiology or medicine to recognise contributions from across the life sciences. Fields that are currently excluded, such as ecology, would become eligible. More emphasis would be placed on the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience. This could be achieved by expanding the existing prize for medicine or physiology or by the addition of new prizes for fundamental biology (including ecology, genetics and cellular, molecular and evolutionary biology) and behavioral science (including psychology and neuroscience).

Over the past century, progress in the basic sciences has transformed our world and our understanding of it. By recognizing the men and women that drove that progress, the Nobel prizes have made the public aware of the enormous contribution that science has made. Different forms of science and technology will transform our world during this century. We feel that these suggestions will enable the prizes to appropriately recognise future achievements, and to remain influential for another hundred years.

While I consider this an unnecessary venture, the near equivalent of asking for a separate Nobel Literature Prize for Africa, I think it is at least worthy of some discussion.

My take on it is that the Nobel Committee has often demonstrated flexibility, albeit inconsistently in deciding who wins the award and to how disciplinary boundaries are mapped. Take Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai, Al Gore and IPCC or even Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for example. Then again, the 1973 Prize in Physiology or Medicine that went to  Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen for work done in ethology.

We must accept, even if grudgingly that the Nobel Prize is only a prize, and that no prize can possibly be representative of the world’s intellectual output. There’s no need to push it any further.