What Does a Clinician Have to Do to Win a Nobel Around Here?

A new study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine shows that clinicians are having a harder time winning Nobel Prizes, reports New Scientist magazine. Using the Nobel Institute's Web site, Imperial College London's Hutan Ashrafian examined prize winners over the past 100 years, New Scientist says. Ashrafian's study found that 79 percent of the prizes in physiology or medicine were awarded to clinicians during the first 30 years of the prize's history. In the last 30 years, though, that number has dropped to 26 percent. Ashrafian says the decline might be explained by the fact that people today tend to think that "proper science is done at the molecular level in the lab," considering clinical science mundane in comparison.