Memoir

The Nobel for vainglory?

Item: The Beginner Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize
Author: John Carmody

by John Carmody •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

The Beginner Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A life in science by Peter Doherty

Miegunyah Press, $34.95 hb, 299 pp, 0522851207

Memoir

The Nobel for vainglory?

by John Carmody •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

We revere Nobel laureates – and rightly. Sometimes that admiration is not repaid well, and those eminences become prey to a variant of Lord Acton’s wisdom – ‘All fame tends to corrupt’ – and consider themselves intellectual Pooh-Bahs: ‘Lord High Everything Else.’ A consequential risk of such renown is that bystanders who can see and vouch for reality are commonly unable to tell the truth to the famous.

So, whose decision was it to give this book its title? I cannot really make up my mind whether the best word for it is ‘fey’, ‘imperceptive’ or simply ‘conceited’. Perhaps ‘ironic’, the reader suggests. I wondered about that, too, until I came to the last chapter, ‘How to win the Nobel Prize’: there is more hubris than irony here, more than a whiff of the opinion that Nobel Prizes and the areas of human activity where they may be won are, if not the most important ones, certainly close enough to them.

John Carmody

John Carmody studied Medicine at the University of Queensland: during that time he edited the student paper, Semper Floreat, for a year and co-edited the literary magazine, Galmahra. He then spent four decades as a physiologist and pharmacologist in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of NSW in Sydney. Over that time he also had several periods working in universities and research institutes in Germany.

In 1978 he succeeded David Malouf as the writer on opera and concert music for the National Times and, after that paper closed, wrote for the Australian Financial Review and the Sun-Herald. He has contributed extensively to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and to a number of substantial encyclopedias and reference publications. His book reviews and other articles have appeared in virtually every significant Australian publication and in a number overseas as well. He writes on opera for Opera [London] and Opernwelt [Berlin].

He has broadcast frequently on ABC radio, notably on music, religion, history, and medicine, and, later in 2011, will contribute to a symposium on modernism at the NGV Melbourne in association with the major exhibition on the Viennese Secession movement.