Can the Nobel prize be fair today? I am not talking about the Peace prize, those are always something of a running joke (given the dates of the nominations, for example, and the awards, Pres. Barack Obama seems to have gotten a Peace prize for his inauguration speech) but the actual prizes based on merit and not simply not being George Bush.
Can there really be an Albert Einstein today? Even three-person awards are controversial because someone is likely to get slighted and a lot of science will be collaborative rather than a 'eureka' moment by one lab. The other end of the spectrum is a Nobel for giant groups, like Al Gore and the IPCC for marketing a science result, meaning hundreds of people can claim to be Nobel laureates from 2007 though they made no discoveries of any kind.
Some people believe that is the way to go; a team leader in astronomy, for example, was important in discovering universal expansion, but a whole lot of participants did the work as well..
Marlowe Hood at Agence France-Presse has the insight.
