Twelve Nobel laureates tell us about winning chemistry’s biggest prize

I have very clear memories of the moment when I received the Nobel Prize, as it was during the global pandemic… While I was of course delighted, very happy and very excited to have received the prize, the celebration was a bit low-key, as all the exchanges, press conferences and interviews took place remotely or behind closed doors with a mask, without any technical or administrative support. I also had to record my Nobel lecture in Berlin in front of a very small film crew! 

It was 2.30am in California, when any sane person is fast asleep. I was asleep too. I awoke and dropped the phone. They called back and convinced me it was real by putting three friends from Sweden on the line. By 3.30am the news organisations were there. 

The rest of the day was crazy: a high that I likened to 10 double espressos. To beat it all, 10 days after the announcement, I was invited onto the field during a Stanford American Football game and heard 50,000 voices screaming ‘Nobel Prize; Nobel Prize!’

I was at a structural biology meeting in Leicester. At 10am, I was sitting in the middle of the audience of around 100 people and my phone rang. So I just put it to silent. Then it rang again about 20 seconds later. I noticed [the call] was from Sweden and I thought then I’d better leave the lecture theatre. 

I sat in one of the offices and talked to the press conference and then I went back to carry on with the meeting, but hundreds of emails started to arrive. And then I thought the people back in Cambridge might be having a party, so after lunch I drove back to Cambridge and then they were indeed having a party without me, so I joined that at about 4 o’clock. 

People had been telling me for years I was going to win and now, finally I had. But the result of all that was that when the phone rang at 5.00am on that Wednesday, first of all, I didn’t hear it, because I sleep with earplugs, but my wife did. She answered the call and then sort of gave me a poke in the ribs and said, “There’s a call for you from Stockholm.”

So at that point, I immediately surmised what was going on. And interestingly, if you would ask me, what was your reaction, your initial gut reaction. Did you feel like jumping up on the bed and doing a jig, some of that stuff that you sometimes see in the movies? The answer is, frankly, no. It was more a quiet sense of satisfaction and almost a feeling of relief that the monkey’s off my back and flashing through my mind was the fact that never again would I ever have to answer the question, “Hey, Bob, when do you think you’re finally going to win the Nobel prize?” 

My car is out in front of the house. It’s just after 5am and very dark. I’m walking down the path from the front door. Already, somebody is walking up the path towards me. He asks, “Can I come in?” I answer, “Who are you?” He says, “I’m from Reuters, I just live round the corner.” I say I’d rather that I go into my office on the campus and he says, “Well, I’ll just follow you in my car.” This reporter from Reuters had a good 30–40 minutes on his own with me. He was rather privileged interviewing me before the whole office filled up with other reporters.

Even though I actively continue research in my lab with students and postdoctoral researchers, many aspects of my life have changed. Perhaps the biggest change is in the amount of emails that I receive daily asking for something or another, and much of my time is spent trying to handle this. A number of people somehow believe that I can be asked for my opinion on topics outside of my expertise, but I try hard to avoid being the Nobel laureate who pontificates in this way. As one might expect, since the prize I have received many more invitations than before to give lectures all over the world, and many of these have been very enjoyable and rewarding. However, some invitations are from people who don’t really care about my science, but rather simply want a ‘Nobel laureate’ on the stage. I have to work hard to filter out the latter category. 

One of the real unexpected benefits of having a Nobel – I get invited to give general talks, to talk more broadly about science than I ever was before I got the Nobel… I get invited to talk to a broader group of people, whether it’s high schools, colleges or the general public, and they don’t want a research talk they want to hear either about the material that was the basis for the Nobel prize, or, as I’ve done in recent years, given a much more general talk about the importance of what could be called discovery science.

The other thing in this regard is that I have been given a number of opportunities to participate in activities that I quite like but I think that the Nobel was a little bit of the entry ticket that allowed me to be considered. The other thing, and I consider this my second job, is that I was asked … if I would join the Committee on Human Rights for the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. This Committee on Human Rights or CHR, works on behalf of scientists and engineers, health professionals anywhere in the world whose human rights have been greatly abused. And [this gave me] the opportunity to work with some absolutely astonishing people that are amazingly committed, dedicated, brilliant, with regard to helping people really all over the world. Again, I don’t think I’d really get that chance if it hadn’t been for the visibility that the Nobel gave me.

I distinctly remember thinking: ‘This is ridiculous. I am exactly the same person as I was yesterday.’ Then I thought about the giants of science that that had influenced me … they also likely thought that they were normal but they played a huge role in making me become a scientist. Thus, I felt compelled to practice as much outreach as I could. Over the past decade, I have given hundreds of lectures worldwide and met very many young people. At the same time, I keep on working on new research. This is much easier for a theoretician like me who can do large-scale calculations on a laptop. I also feel particularly blessed in having a dedicated AI assistant (ChatGPT suits me best).  

People tend to think, wrongly, that I can be several people at once, an expert in every field and do several jobs at the same time. I now find it harder to recruit people for my laboratory. In Germany at least, some people are reluctant to apply knowing that I am a Nobel prize winner.

Mine it for all it’s worth. I mean, enjoy it, be in the moment, and appreciate the tremendous honour that’s been bestowed on you with the full realisation that there are many, many others who are equally deserving, but who will never get the prize. So you have been fortunate enough to be paid this tremendous honour with all the respect and admiration that comes with it, and as they say, be in the moment, enjoy it, and then when it’s all over, treasure the memories.

I was faced, as I guess every Nobel laureate is, with a huge amount of work to do. Within literally hours of the prize being announced I received a 36-page document outlining in detail what I had to do between the date of the announcement and going to Stockholm. Fortunately, I had a good support system and a wonderful personal assistant. You’re only really allowed to take 14 people as guests to Stockholm to share in the activities. Well, I had easily over 14 and, to finish this story, I decided that there were so many young people I had to recognise that I would invite some of them to Stockholm and pay for their hotel accommodation. So it ended up with around 80 people in total. This gesture used up a good proportion of my prize money!

So, to put a number on it during 2017, which of course followed very quickly in the footsteps of the Stockholm event, I flew roughly 365,000 miles around the world to at least 30 different countries. Maybe I overdid it, I don’t know. I felt that I had to thank so many people in the community and I had so many connections in different countries that I couldn’t easily not accept their invitations.

When we went to Stockholm … I thought we’d better invite the whole family. One of the grandchildren made the mistake of telling her chemistry teacher, who got far more excited than we did. So I had to go up to Harne Castle in Lincolnshire and give a talk to the chemistry sixth form there. And then of course I had to go to the other three schools of our other grandchildren.

[Each laureate] got about £250,000 and I decided the best thing is to give it away. So I [gave some] to all four schools that I’ve been to – some of them were quite surprised since they’d never had any visiting money before. 

Every once in a while there’s a student who would like to know, how does one go about doing the work that would get a Nobel prize? And my usual answer to that question is that I can prove that I don’t know. And that I suspect that the vast majority of people that get a Nobel also don’t know. And my proof goes as follows. The party, the celebration in Stockholm is wonderful. For one week, an entire country is celebrating academic achievement, which is quite remarkable just in itself. It’s a wonderful celebration and I’m pretty sure that almost everybody that goes through it, if not absolutely everyone, says ‘That was really great, I’d like to do that again.’ But the vast majority of us don’t, because we don’t know how to get back to win that second or third prize. If we really knew the secret, we’d be doing that.

One thing I’ve noticed from Chemistry World and the Royal Society of Chemistry and so on is that chemists are much more aware of their impact on the world than people from physics. What we do isn’t really chemistry, but it does have an impact on chemistry and has a lot of value. So my view is that the chemistry Nobel prize committee and all the chemistry societies and chemistry departments, they are like the Catholic Church: they welcome everybody, however much sin they have done in other areas … Whereas the physics community is continuing to try to be pure …  Science is very, very interdisciplinary. If Nobel was to start to make a new will now, it wouldn’t necessarily be physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. It might be something different, or it might have a changing horizon … The chemists are gregarious, open and welcoming. The physicists still haven’t quite decided which direction to go in, but I think they eventually they’ll do the same.

Many of us who have won [chemistry Nobels] are hardly what you would call card carrying chemists. I’m a physician scientist, but if you look over the list of chemistry laureates in the last 20 or 25 years, you’ll see many physician scientists – Rod McKinnon, Peter Agre, myself, Brian Kobilka, to name just several. So when our prize was announced, several of these pure chemists … were outraged. I remember there was one guy, I can’t remember who the hell he was, but he has a chemistry blog really into the Nobel prizes. So this guy stays up all night the night before the chemistry prize … spinning off comments about who he thinks is going to win. And he says, one minute to go until the announcement and then they announced Brian Kobilka and myself. And it reads, argh, another biology prize, what’s going on! And there were several other such posts … the President of the American Chemical Society felt compelled to go online and actually defend [the prize], even though he had nothing to do with it, that chemists needed to be more inclusive and to realise that biological chemistry is one of the branches. So I got a big kick out of that!

The Nobel is not a prize for the best scientist, or the smartest, or the one with the largest lab or the most papers in high-profile journals or any of that. I feel that what the Nobel recognises is work that has had consequences, whether it has been something that’s changed the way people do science or think about science, but it has had an impact in the field. It’s not a lifetime achievement award and, in fact, it can be something that people have not really spent their lifetime working on, but noticed and did something and it had some consequences. I think what this also means is that you can’t really tell where these ideas or these breakthroughs are going to come from. There’s a wonderful Enrico Fermi line that more or less says that if you do experiments and they confirm your hypothesis then you’ve made a measurement. But if they don’t confirm your hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.