Curram Comments

The announcement of the 1978 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research has created two controversies. No one argues with the choice of the three winners-Solomon H. Snyder (Johns Hopkins University), John Hughes (Imperial College of Science and Technology. London), and Hans Kosterlitz (University of Aberdeen) —who were honored for the discovery of opiate receptors and enkephalins, opiate-like substances produced by the body. The controversies surround several other researchers who might ha. e appropriately shared the award with the three, The first dispute centers around the exclusion of a junior in~estigator from the award. The second arises from the exclusion of several independent investigators who had done similar or other essential research in the field. These disputes are worth discussing because they point up issues which are likely to become all too familiar to scientific awards committees in the future. The 1978 Lasker is merely a case in point. The Lasker’s honorarium ($ IS.OGO) and its prestige (28 winners have gone on 10 receive the Nobel) give the award great visibility within the biomedical community. Hence, disputes surrounding it get publicity. The first controversy over the Lasker was set off by Candace Pert, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), when she claimed she had been unfairly omitted from the award-winning group. As a graduate student and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow, she had worked with Snyder on much of the research for which he was honored. In a letter (quoted in Scierrcel ) to Mary Lasker, president of the Lasker Foundation, Pert claimed that she had “played a key role in initiating this research and following it up . ...” Snyder has supported Pert’s claims. He called members of the awards committee and asked them to consider including Pert among the recipients. He also stated publicly that “it would have been appropriate if Pert had shared the award with him. ”1 The dispute arouses suspicions of sex discrimination.l. ~ But if, for the moment, we absolve the commitlee of prejudice, we can discern another characteristic which is a likely source of the conflict: Pert was a junior member of a research team. Collaborative research is not new to science, but its increase since the 1950s has been phenomenal. In 1963, Derek de SolIa Price was already noting that the number of papers with three authors was increasing faster than those with two. And the number of four-author papers was increasing more rapidly than the number of those with three.3 (p 88) This growth is also reflected in the number of prize winners who are honored for collaborative research. Harriet Zuckerman, in her study of Nobel laureates, notes: “During the first 25 years of the awards.. just 41% of the