When Victor Ambros, a University of Massachusetts biologist, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for medicine on 7 October, the prize committee published its congratulations on X. The post showed a beaming Ambros alongside his wife, Rosalind Lee, who, the post revealed, “was also the first author on the 1993 ‘Cell’ paper cited by the Nobel Committee”. The tart replies questioned whether Lee had been unfairly overlooked.
How husband-and-wife geniuses apportion credit for joint discoveries worthy of a Nobel, is a rarefied predicament – but one that has precedent. In 1903, Pierre Curie heard he was about to share the Nobel Prize for physics with fellow Frenchman Henri Becquerel for the discovery and study of radioactivity. That would have short-changed his wife and laboratory partner, Marie Curie. He protested to the committee that, “I should very much like to share the honour with Mme Curie and for us to be considered jointly, in the same way that we have done our work.”
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