How to Win Your Nobel

Winners share tips and the keys to their successes. Many cite luck as a factor.

Winning a Nobel Prize may seem like an absurdly ambitious goal for most scientists to even contemplate, but some researchers will admit to daydreaming about it.

So, how do you achieve this accolade? Is it a matter of intelligence, hard work or just sheer luck? Can researchers really take practical steps toward achieving science’s greatest honor, which has been bestowed on fewer than 700 people since the first awards were made in 1901?

Those who are likely to know best are the Nobel laureates alive today -- perhaps the most elite club in global science, whose members number fewer than 300 people, even after the Swedish Academy named the latest clutch of winners in Stockholm last week.

As part of a unique survey by Times Higher Education, we asked 50 Nobel winners in science and economics -- about 20 percent of all living laureates in these fields -- to offer the best advice they could give to early-career researchers to maximize their chances of making a Nobel-worthy breakthrough.

Some laureates were, of course, highly skeptical that any useful advice could be offered.

“My big tip is to be lucky,” said Richard J. Roberts, the English biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1993 for work on gene splicing. “There is no strategy that you can adopt to win a Nobel prize -- a lot depends on whether you end up in the right place at the right time.”

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