Nobel Prizes in the modern era are pretty misleading when it comes to the public's understanding of how scientific research and discovery is done in practice.
In this specific case, which revolves around a fundamental revision of the old central dogma of DNA replication, mRNA transcription and protein expression, billions of dollars of funding through over a dozen major government funding agencies in the US, Europe and Asia were required, involving hundreds of research groups scattered around the world over a few decades. Ask the following questions for more details:
(1) How much governmental funding in the United States and abroad has been directed to the study of this new model of complex and dynamic miRNA-based regulation of gene expression and function over the past few decades, and what are the main agencies supplying such funding, and to which research universities has most of the funding been directed?
(2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding?
Abolishing the scientific Nobel Prizes entirely makes a lot of sense from this viewpoint.
>(2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding?
Because these two were directly responsible for the discovery and the initial understanding of the mechanism of what was going on. The depth and quantity of the resulting research, funding, and all the other streams of new jobs or additional lines of research are follow-on results from the finding, which to me is a metric that highlights the enormity of their achievement and the richly deserved nature of this award.
Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA - AE Pasquinelli, BJ Reinhart, F Slack, MQ Martindale, MI Kuroda, B Maller, DC Hayward (Nature, 2000)
Limiting it to three people really doesn't make much sense, and the selection of winning candidates has far more to do with political maneuvering then it does with how scientific discovery works. Similar issues arise in many other Nobel Prize awards, eg the discovery of the mechanism of ribosomal protein synthesis.
You're being downvoted, but I think that you bring up an important point that I've seen debated a lot elsewhere: science is much more of a large, collaborative effort these days than it has been in the past, often involving huge teams and billions in government funding. The fact that Nobels are limited to I believe 4 recipients in a year gives the broader public the idea that it's "a couple of geniuses" that move science forward these days, and that's just not how it works.
In this specific case, which revolves around a fundamental revision of the old central dogma of DNA replication, mRNA transcription and protein expression, billions of dollars of funding through over a dozen major government funding agencies in the US, Europe and Asia were required, involving hundreds of research groups scattered around the world over a few decades. Ask the following questions for more details:
(1) How much governmental funding in the United States and abroad has been directed to the study of this new model of complex and dynamic miRNA-based regulation of gene expression and function over the past few decades, and what are the main agencies supplying such funding, and to which research universities has most of the funding been directed?
(2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding?
Abolishing the scientific Nobel Prizes entirely makes a lot of sense from this viewpoint.