In the current "Nobel" week, there were no Russian scientists, as before.
Although a graduate of the University of Nizhny Novgorod, now a professor at the University of Southern California, Valery Fokin, was named among potential candidates for the award in chemistry, as a result, a British and two Americans will receive a million dollars.
Another American and Japanese will receive the Medical Prize. Physics - American, French and Canadian.
The committee decided not to award the Literature Prize in 2018: not because the new Sholokhovs and Brodskys did not appear in the last year, but because of the scandal around the spouse of one of the Nobel Committee members, the poetess Katharina Frostenson.
The short list of candidates for the Peace Prize will be announced today.
The award ceremony itself (except for the Peace Prize) will take place in Stockholm on December 10 in a boring gray-blue building, similar to the factory House of Culture.
After the collapse of the USSR, only four scientists with Russian citizenship became Nobel laureates: Zhores Alferov (2000), Alexey Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg (2003), and Konstantin Novoselov (2010). They all received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Three more scientists born in the USSR received the award in 2007, 2010 and 2015, but at the time of the awarding they did not have Russian citizenship: these are Leonid Gurvich (USA, economics), Andrey Geim (Netherlands, physics) and Svetlana Aleksievich (Belarus, literature).
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We tried to figure out what the reason for the absence of Russians in the Nobel lists is: is it connected with Russia's lagging behind in world scientific progress, or is it a matter of bias on the part of those who award this honorary prize.
Live long
For a scientist to be able to reach the top, which is the Nobel Prize, a huge number of factors must come together, says Valery Lunin, Dean of the Chemistry Department of Moscow State University.
American scientists receive Nobel Prizes more often than others, of course, not because they live long. Far more important is the funding of science in the United States, Lunin continues.
Today it is perceived as a historical anecdote, but Dmitry Mendeleev himself never received the Nobel Prize, although he was also nominated for it. The greatest chemist in history lacked one vote in the Nobel Committee - which, however, did not diminish its importance for world science.
Ten years later
The head of the laboratory at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Petrenko, worked for 15 years in the team of the German Nobel laureate (2012) Thomas Südhof and watched from the inside as the scientist “grows” to the scientific analogue of Olympic gold.
In order to qualify for the highest scientific award, a researcher must, during these approximately ten years, create his “portfolio” in the form of articles in scientific journals - and not in all, but those that the world scientific community recognizes as an indicator of quality. And not just publish the work, but for this work to then be reprinted, cited, so that other scientists refer to it as an authoritative source.
This is very similar to how the citation index of an author or media in the Internet community is calculated - however, the Nobel degree in blogging is unlikely to ever be instituted (Alfred Nobel forgot to mention such a nomination in his will).
Product face
The absence of Russians among the Nobel laureates in recent years, therefore, suggests that Russian scientists during this time either did not create anything that would interest their colleagues abroad, or are "modest" and do not try to promote their discoveries on the world stage.
For this, he continues, the scientist should not only sit in the laboratory, but also actively "hang out" at all kinds of scientific conferences - so that they begin to "recognize him by sight." Nobody will invite a little-known scientist to lecture at leading universities.
And "trading a face" (sorry for such an inappropriate expression in a scientific context), in turn, costs money - participation in international conferences can be expensive, given the payment of the trip itself, and often - registration fees.
Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the Nobel laureates are given by the country that does not skimp on funding science - the United States. Home-grown "Skolkovo" clearly cannot compete with such monsters.
For ethical reasons, he refused to name which of the Russians could qualify for the Nobel Prize in the 2020s.