When you think of a prize-winning scientist, do you picture a
young genius bursting with creativity and new ideas, or an
older, more seasoned researcher that has been slaving away at
the bench for decades? It turns out both images are pretty
accurate. According to a recent paper in PNAS, the average age
at which scientists complete Nobel Prize-winning work has varied
greatly over the history of the prize, depending on the era and
the scientific field. Curious about the relationship between
age, creativity, and scientific achievement, a group of
researchers analyzed data regarding the Nobel Prizes won in
physics, chemistry, and medicine between 1900 and 2008. They
determined how old each winner was when they completed their
prize-winning research, creating a dataset of 525 Nobel Prize
winners (182 in physics, 153 in chemistry, and 190 in medicine).
When data from all the fields was combined, there was a definite
pattern across the years: winners doing work in the very early
years of the Nobel Prize were far yo