Palin should present the Nobels
The Nobel Prize season is over. All that remains for the scientific winners is to receive their prizes from the king of Sweden in Stockholm on Dec. 10. I have a revolutionary suggestion: The king should step down, and Sarah Palin should present the medals.
There is method in my madness. It has to do with public perception of the prizes. As well as being rewards for discovery, they have become flagships for science — an emblem for originality, creativity and a promotion for the value of science.
But it’s not working. People in positions of influence continue to denigrate science. One example is Palin’s declaration to a Pittsburgh audience that “[Tax] dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”
This example, from a 2008 speech, is now being quoted with relish by scientists because this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three U.S. researchers for their work on the humble fruit fly.
OK, let’s be fair. It’s a different fruit fly. Palin was talking about Bactrocera oleae, the olive fruit fly, an endemic pest in the olive groves of the Mediterranean, and a real threat to the Californian olive industry. The USDA had invested a paltry sum at the time to investigate it in its native habitat, which hardly seems a big deal. To new Nobel laureates Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young, the vinegar fly
Drosophila melanogaster was the key to an understanding of how our body clocks work, with wide-ranging medical implications.
But there is an even bigger deal with the Nobel Prizes — to help people to understand why science is worth their support. Here I have a great deal of sympathy for Palin. She may have been speaking in ignorance, but she spoke for many people when she displayed her puzzlement at why scientists do many of the things that they do.
Why, for example, would someone think of feeding Prozac to clams? It’s not as if clams are particularly depressed. But that wasn’t why Peter Fong from Gettysburg College tried. He had noticed that the chemical structure of the relatively cheap Prozac was similar to the expensive chemicals that U.S. clam farmers were using to get their clams to spawn in synchrony, and wondered if Prozac might have the same effect.
It did, and as well as making a practical contribution to the clam farming industry, Peter made the news in a way that he didn’t expect. He received a widely publicized spoof “Ig Nobel” prize for “contributing to the happiness of clams.”
The intention of the Ig Nobel prizes, according to founder Marc Abrahams of Harvard, is to get people thinking about science, with the slogan: “First, they make you laugh; then, they make you think.”
My dream is to get people like Palin thinking about the value of science, and to promote it as an integral part of our culture. If she were to present the Nobel Prizes, then she could use her undoubted talents in public speaking to help share and promote the science that is now central to our society, rather than denigrating it as irrelevant.
Surely that’s something worth thinking about.