Word: prizes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Russian Chemist Dimitri Mendeleev, nominated for his formulation of the periodic law and the table of elements. The committee reasoned that Mendeleev's 1869 work had already been widely accepted as a basic part of chemical knowledge. Thus, because the will of Dynamite Inventor Alfred Nobel limited Nobel Prizes to "recent" discoveries, Mendeleev did not qualify. A Nobel historian later called the Mendeleev decision a regrettable error. More recently, Rockefeller Institute Biochemist O.T. Avery, who demonstrated in 1944 that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the carrier of heredity, was first denied a prize because of skepticism about his claims...
...Zuckerman, the Avery and Mendeleev cases are only two of many examples of committee actions that will lead to more and more "first-class scientists who are destined not to win a Nobel Prize." In part, she notes, these omissions are inevitable, because the number of scientists worldwide has grown some 30 times, while the number of science-prize recipients each year (seldom more than six) has remained more or less constant...
Another limit is imposed by the Nobel committees' own rules, which since 1901 have provided for annual Nobel science prizes in only three fields-physics, chemistry and physiology-medicine; in 1969 a fourth prize was added in economics. In addition, there are prizes for literary accomplishment and for contributions to world peace. Writes Zuckerman: "The prizes cannot go, however great the importance of their contributions, to mathematicians, earth and marine scientists, astronomers, and many kinds of geologists and behavioral scientists." She notes that the rules have been bent a bit-for Radio Astronomers Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish...
Zuckerman also dissents from the Nobel emphasis on empirical discoveries as opposed to theoretical contributions. Says she: "Darwin's principles of evolution would probably not have qualified." Indeed, Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize citation made only a cautious reference to his theory of relativity, first published 16 years before he became a Nobel laureate in 1921, while emphasizing the empirical consequences of his work on the photoelectric effect-the basis for "electric eyes," television cameras and motion picture sound equipment...
DIED. George Bliss, 60, award-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune; by his own hand, after apparently shooting and killing his wife; in Oak Lawn, Ill. A series on a scandal-infested municipal sanitary district won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1962; subsequently, he headed inquiries into election fraud and federal housing programs that garnered his paper two more Pulitzers. According to Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick, Bliss was a "perfectionist who agonized over details and in effect became a victim of his own intense devotion to journalism...