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The Nobel for vainglory?

by
December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

The Beginner Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A life in science by Peter Doherty

Miegunyah Press, $34.95 hb, 299 pp, 0522851207

The Nobel for vainglory?

by
December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

We revere Nobel laureates – and rightly. Sometimes that admiration is not repaid well, and those eminences become prey to a variant of Lord Acton’s wisdom – ‘All fame tends to corrupt’ – and consider themselves intellectual Pooh-Bahs: ‘Lord High Everything Else.’ A consequential risk of such renown is that bystanders who can see and vouch for reality are commonly unable to tell the truth to the famous.

So, whose decision was it to give this book its title? I cannot really make up my mind whether the best word for it is ‘fey’, ‘imperceptive’ or simply ‘conceited’. Perhaps ‘ironic’, the reader suggests. I wondered about that, too, until I came to the last chapter, ‘How to win the Nobel Prize’: there is more hubris than irony here, more than a whiff of the opinion that Nobel Prizes and the areas of human activity where they may be won are, if not the most important ones, certainly close enough to them.

The Beginner Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A life in science

The Beginner Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A life in science

by Peter Doherty

Miegunyah Press, $34.95 hb, 299 pp, 0522851207

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