[Editorial] Gloomy Nobel season

For Koreans, the Nobel Prize season is a period that makes them feel modest and even humiliated about their academic and intellectual levels, which are far below the world’s best.

This year’s Nobel week kicked off Monday with the announcement of the medicine prize, which went to Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka and Britain’s John Gurdon for discovering that adult cells can be transformed back to early stem cells which can then be used to form any tissue type. No Korean name has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate this time as a Korean poet touted as a candidate for the literature prize in recent years seems to have been excluded from the list amid speculation the honor will go to a woman or a North American.

Since 1901 when the first Nobel prizes were awarded, 830 individuals and 23 organizations have received them. The only Korean winner of the prestigious award is late President Kim Dae-jung who was given the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to promote human rights and inter-Korean peace.

Eager for international appreciation of their accomplishments, including the rise of the country to the world’s 15th-largest economy, many Koreans seem to feel dwarfed during the Nobel Prize season. Such feelings tend to become more acute when Korea’s scant Nobel record is compared to Japan’s list of 19 laureates including 16 in the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine. This comparison has reminded Koreans of the still wide gap with Japan in basic scientific research despite overtaking their former colonial ruler in sovereign credit rating and the national competitiveness.

Heightening the country’s complex about the Nobel Prize, a local research foundation said in its study released in June that it was unlikely that a Korean scientist would win the award in the coming decade.

Nobel prizes may not be the absolute standard for the achievement of an individual and still less a nation. But it could also be said that Korea’s true advancement might at least partly be proved when more Koreans are among “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” as put in Nobel’s will drawn up in 1895, a year before his death, to stipulate his fortune was to be used to create the prize.

There is a lot of work to be done to promote education focusing on creativity and strengthen support for basic scientific research.

As with its other success stories, however, it could not be denied Korea has the potential to do the work and eventually see its scientists receiving the prize and saying their nation deserves the award, just as Yamanaka attributed his honor to the support of his country at a news conference.