Discovery or Reputation? Jacques Loeb and the Role of Nomination Networks

A 2015 contribution to the Journal of the American Medical Association (jama) raised the question of why American Nobel Laureates outnumber those of any other nativity.1 Times are changing. About 100 years ago, when the Prize was quite new, the same journal asked why only European scientists were acknowledged.2 At that time, U.S. medical journals praised the Nobel Prize as ‘the ideal method of encouraging the best scientific research’3 and used it as a yardstick for other medical honours. Commentators repeatedly bemoaned that American research ‘of fundamental importance’4 had been disregarded. Whether for the prize money (corresponding to about one million usd) or the international competition in science and medicine, the Prize was perceived as a coveted trophy right from its inception.5 It is not as if Americans did not nominate domestic candidates. In fact, jama even published calls to name Walter Reed and James Carrol for their investigations into yellow fever.6 However, another American candidate would eventually come to play a larger role in the nomination cycle. The physiologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) was, according to the Nomination Database of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, nominated 78 times between 1901 and his death,7 which makes him one of the most nominated scholars in the first half of the 20th century.8 Nevertheless, Loeb was, as Robert Merton phrased it in his classical paper on the Matthew effect, an occupant of the ‘41st chair’.9