With the 2020 Nobel prizes this week comes a recurrent question: has the world’s most prestigious awards for physics, chemistry and medicine — first conferred in 1901 — lost touch with the way modern science is conducted?
A century ago, landmark discoveries took place mostly in the mind or laboratory of a single individual.
More recently, big breakthroughs in the hard sciences are generally collaborations involving dozens, sometimes hundreds of researchers working in separate but interlocking fields. BSS/AFP