Nobel Prize

Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.

The riddle of the fragmented Nobel prize

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Here’s a quick riddle for ya:

Back in 2016, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to a biologist named Yoshinori Ohsumi.

In 2015, however, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared between two scientists who had worked together, William Campbell and Satoshi Omura. Actually, they only got half of the prize. The other half went to a third scientist, Tu Youyou, for her work on a completely unrelated problem.

I’ll give you the riddle in just a second. But first, here’s a potentially useful bit of info:

The 2016 prize was for Ohsumi’s discovery of how “autophagy” works in the body. This topic is interesting and important. But as far as I understand, it’s also rather theoretical and abstract, and unlikely to save lives any time soon.

On the other hand, one of the scientists who shared the 2015 prize discovered a drug to treat malaria. The other two recipients discovered a drug to stop blindness-causing parasites. In other words, their work is extremely practical and immediately useful. In fact, it has already been responsible for hundreds of millions of saved lives and prevented disfigurements.

So here’s the riddle I want you to ponder:

Why did the Nobel Prize committee award the whole prize to Ohsumi in 2016… but feel they should “pad out” the recipient list in 2015, and split it among two unrelated groups?

I don’t have the definitive answer to this riddle. And it’s probably just a coincidence.

But it reminded me of a book I’d read a while back called Disciplined Minds.

This book was written by Jeff Schmidt, a PhD physicist and the former editor of a reputable physics journal.

In one chapter of the book, Schmidt asks a variation of the riddle above:

Why do theoretical physicists get more respect than experimental physicists, even though both types of physics require the same intelligence, are equally well-paid, and are equally important?

Schmidt’s rather Marxist answer is that this is just a deeply ingrained copy of the power structures in our society.

The people at the top of any hierarchy just do the thinking, the abstract work, and the ordering about.

The people lower down in the hierarchy are tasked with the manual work of carrying out those orders from up high.

And that’s why any association with manual, practical work is likely to lead to less respect, less prestige, and perhaps, less Nobel Prize.

Do you think this might be relevant for copywriters, too?

It seems like a lot of copywriters believe it. They relish being being blissfully impractical.

“I just write the magic words, don’t ask me about anything else!”

But while this might work for physicists and Nobel Prize-winning biologists, I think it’s the wrong way to go in the field of direct response.

The deeper I get into this game, the more I learn that you should get your hands dirty.

This doesn’t mean you have to offer a one-stop shop where you do the copywriting and the design and the media buying too.

But if you can give clear and smart recommendations on design and media buying, your clients will appreciate it…

Your projects will be more likely to succeed…

And you will wind up with more money, more interesting future projects, and maybe even some respect and prestige. ​​And if you get all that, then who needs a Nobel prize, or a third of one anyways?