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Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

Here's 8 densely printed pages of contributors to a discovery that lead to a Nobel prize:

Guess how many of them were included in the prize. It's a shame that the Nobel committee shies away from awarding it to institutions, but the AlphaFold prize doesn't even make the top 10 in a list of most controversial omissions from a Nobel prize. It's a simple case of lab director gets the most credit.

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Perhaps it's time the prize goes to the discovery itself instead of a person.

How do you give $1M to a discovery?

$1M ain't what it used to be.

It's not a case of shying away from it: the rules of the prize don't allow it.

rules of the prize can be changed.

Can they? I mean, in the sense that you can yolo anything, sure, but the prizes were designed in a time when it was (more) reasonable to award them to individuals, and they are defined in a will. There may not be a mechanism for updating the standards.

Yes, they can. In 1901, science was not nearly as collaborative as it is today. Especially considering the need for a Nobel Prize to be experimental and the fact that most major labs today _need_ dozens of people.

That…has nothing to do with my question. It was a procedural and legal question, not an abstract moral one.

Well, it seems like amendments have been made before. [0] > Before the board ... votes on a proposal to amend the statutes ... with the first paragraph, the prize-awarding bodies shall examine the proposal.

https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-regulations-...

He asked _can_ not _should_: what is the legal mechanism for doing so? Personally I don't doubt there is one but I don't think you know it off the top of your head, so I don't see it as fair to disparage OP for not knowing either.

https://www.nobelprize.org/organization/special-regulations-...

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