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The new "Milner awards" do better where the Nobel fell short: >this short piece by Ian Sample (written for The Guardian) details that they recognise great research faster and reward it when it could most use the rewards. Indeed, the >average age of a medicine/physiology Nobel Prize-winner is 57 years, with the most frequent bracket being 60-64 years! At this stage, the winner is most likely contemplating retirement and savings and such.
On the other hand, $3 million at 30-40 years can go a long way in spurring the growth of institutions and encouraging the pursuit of new ideas - for added measure on a largely independent footing, too.
However, the Nobel Prizes retain their traditional dignity still. For the broader science-research community, winning one is an acknowledgment of long-term achievement that includes not just the contribution and its immediate practicability but also how it reshaped the attitudes of those within the industry itself and the epistemic legacy it left behind.
That said, the "Milner awards" - the >Fundamental Physics Prize and the >Breakthrough Prize for Medical Research in Life Sciences - are great news for two reasons despite being more "short-sighted". First, they don't seem reluctant to constrain their awardees according to their fields of research, but simply acknowledge their contributions themselves. Second: in doing so, they are going to highlight the sort of work that the Nobel Foundation has often overlooked in the past, such as in engineering.
As >this New Tork Times article states, "There are no age or other limits on who can win," and no limits on how many times one can win it. So, that's a lot of money coming the way of researchers, to incentivise research in socially, politically, and economically valuable areas.
