5 Great Scientists Who Never Won A Nobel Prize

5 great scientists who never won a Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes can be as controversial as they are prestigious. It's very uncommon for a
scientist to make a discovery entirely on his or her own: Researchers collaborate, compete, and
construct new theories based on the work of others. Inevitably, choosing just up to three living
scientists to take credit for a pivotal find means some researchers are, arguably, unfairly left out
of the spotlight.
Some Nobel snubs were the product of personal grudges or general biases, particularly against
women scientists. Others were matters of bad timing; Rosalind Franklin, whose work was
essential to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, died four years before James
Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared a Nobel in 1962 — and the Nobels are
almost never awarded posthumously. Here are the stories of a few scientists who contributed
significantly to our understanding of the world, but who unfortunately never won top honors in
Sweden.
Annie Jump Cannon

Accomplishment: Classifying the stars
(Bettmann/CORBIS)
Cannon was an American astronomer hired by Edward Pickering, along with other women
(collectively referred to as "Pickering's Harem"), to work at the Harvard Observatory mapping
and classifying every star in the sky. Without these women, whom he called "computers,"
Pickering could not have catalogued all those stars.
(More from World Science Festival: The women who shaped the computer age)
Cannon was arguably the most accomplished of Pickering's computers. During her career she
observed and classified over 200,000 stars. But more importantly, she devised a star
classification system to categorize stars based on spectral absorption lines. Though her
contributions were not recognized during her forty-year astronomy career, her work lives on in
the mnemonic device "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!" which helps astronomy students remember
star types in order of decreasing temperature.
Gilbert Newton Lewis

Accomplishment: Understanding how chemical bonding works
If you've ever studied chemistry, you know the work of Gilbert Newton Lewis, an American
chemist. Lewis' contributions to chemistry in the 1900s include discovering the covalent bond
(where atoms share electron pairs), and explaining the nature of acids and bases as substances
that accept or give away a pair of electrons, respectively. He also introduced the "Lewis dot
structure," a way of representing chemical bonds and unbonded electrons in atoms and
molecules.
Much of Lewis's research laid the groundwork for our understanding of chemical bonding, and
he went on to make significant contributions in thermodynamics as well. But though he was
nominated 35 times, Lewis's criticism of his colleagues and hostile relationships with his
contemporaries kept him from winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That's not just idle gossip:
There's historical evidence that William Palmaer, a Swedish chemist who served as a voting
member of the chemistry committee from 1926 to 1942, had an agenda against Lewis. (Palmaer
was close friends with Walther Nernst, a chemist that Lewis nursed a grudge against and
frequently criticized).
Dimitri Mendeleev
Accomplishment: The periodic table of elements
(Bettmann/CORBIS)
Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor, well known for his periodic law stating that the
chemical properties of the elements reoccur periodically as their atomic masses increase. The
famous Periodic Table he created based on this law accurately described elements yet to be
discovered along with their physical and chemical properties, and was the first such table that
could make these predictions. Mendeleev was nominated for the 1906 Nobel Prize in chemistry,
but died in 1907 without that honor.
(More from World Science Festival: The biochemistry of autumn colors)
Carl Richard Woese

Accomplishment: Reshaping the tree of life
Woese was a molecular biologist who studied microbiology and evolution. In 1977, he published
a paper that described how to use RNA from the ribosome, a cellular organelle, to identify and
classify microbes. This technique, called molecular phylogeny, eventually revolutionized the
study of both microbiology and evolution.
Woese's first analysis using molecular phylogeny led to the discovery of the Archaea, a
previously-unheard of third domain of life on Earth. Before Woese's discovery, life was
classified into Five Kingdoms stemming from two major branches: prokaryotes, containing
bacteria, and eukaryotes, comprising animals, plants, fungi and protists. The only difference
between these branches was the presence (eukaryotes) or absence (prokaryotes) of a membrane-
bound cell nucleus. Microorganisms in Archaea do not have a nucleus, but have their own
characteristic membranes, enzymes, and ribosomes. Most Archaea are extremophiles, residing in
environments that most organisms would find intolerable: hot springs, volcanic vents, or
extremely salty places. Yet despite the fact that Woese literally reshaped the tree of life, he never
received a Nobel for his pivotal work.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Accomplishment: Proving the "handedness" of nature
(Bettmann/CORBIS)
In 1956 Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment that disproved a widely accepted law of
physics: the "Parity Law," which says that physical systems or objects that are mirror images of
each other should behave in an identical way — essentially, that fundamental laws of physics do
not distinguish between left and right.
While the law of parity does apply to the forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong
nuclear force, two other physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang thought that this would
not be true for the weak nuclear force. To prove this, Wu — enlisted by Lee, a colleague at
Columbia University, where she was an associate professor at the time — studied the decay of
supercooled atoms of the radioactive isotope cobalt-60 exposed to a strong magnetic field. If the
law of parity held true for the weak nuclear force that governs beta decay, the cobalt isotopes
should have emitted equal numbers of electrons in both directions. But Wu saw that as the
cobalt-60 decayed, electrons tended to fly off in a direction opposite from the spin of the cobalt
nuclei; the law did not hold.
(More from World Science Festival: There'd be no Steve Jobs without Grace Hopper)
Wu's work was later replicated, and became proof positive of parity violation. The 1957 Nobel
Prize in Physics was awarded to Lee and Yang for disproving parity violation, but Wu was
overlooked. Still, she is often remembered as "The First Lady of Physics."

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5 great scientists who never won a Nobel Prize

Annie Jump Cannon

Gilbert Newton Lewis

(More from World Science Festival: The biochemistry of autumn colors)

Carl Richard Woese

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