Why Does Anyone Care About the Nobel Prize?

“Just go to sleep,” Martin Chalfie’s wife told him late one October night in 2008. Chalfie, a Columbia University chemist, had co-authored an influential paper describing a new method for studying cells with green fluorescent protein, and he was anxiously waiting to see whether it would be recognized. His wife, a fellow academic, tempered his expectations. “It’s a wonderful tool, and lots of people use it,” he recalls her saying. “But, to tell you the truth, it will never win the Nobel.”

So when the call from Sweden came in, Chalfie was asleep. The beginning of his life as a Nobel laureate in chemistry had to wait until morning. He was still in his pajamas when the first journalist got him on the phone. He scolded her for asking whether he believed in God. Academics should not be asked like it either. The next thing he did was call his friend Bob—the 2002 Nobel laureate in medicine H. Robert Horwitz—to tell him he wanted to co-sign an open letter of Nobel laureates endorsing Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.