8 Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize

Nobel prize winning ideas are not always accepted by the community. By definition, they are paradigm shifting, revolutionary. Accordingly, many breakthroughs that are in our textbooks today were initially rejected, if not ridiculed, by the scientific community. Howard Temin proposed a reversal of the central dogma, wherein RNA could create DNA. It was called "ludicrous" and his Nobel "came after a lonely battle to overcome derisive criticism from scientific leaders who refused to believe in his theory that some viruses carry their genetic information in the form of RNA, which is then copied into DNA in infected cell." Similarly, Werner Arber, the scientist who discovered restriction enzymes worked, "in a climate of almost total indifference, notably that of the committees and organizations tasked with allocating funds for research" Jacob 1998.

Here we outline 8 Nobel prize papers that were initially rejected by anonymous pre-publication peer review and ask, "What Nobel ideas are we rejecting and/or delaying today?"

1. Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1997) awarded to Paul Boyer for: Identification of the mechanism for the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)

Rejection: Boyer had been greeted with disbelief when he theorized that the previously mysterious process is the work of a "beautiful little machine" that operates within enzymes on the molecular level. His proposed resolution of a major unsolved problem in biochemistry threatened to "change the paradigm," Boyer remembers, and "the leading journal" in his field -The Journal of Biological Chemistry-declined to publish his work. 

Paul Boyer

2. Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1991) awarded to Richard Ernst for: The development of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy

Rejection: "The paper that described our achievements was rejected twice by the Journal of Chemical Physics to be finally accepted and published in the Review of Scientific Instruments"

Richard Ernst

3. Nobel Prize in Physics (1969) awarded to Murray Gell-Mann for: "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions"

Rejection: That was not my title, which was : Isotopic Spin and Curious Particles. Physical Review rejected "Curious Particles". I tried "Strange Particles", and they rejected that too. They insisted on : "New Unstable Particles". That was the only phrase sufficiently pompous for the editors of the Physical Review. I should say now that I have always hated the Physical Review Letters and almost twenty years ago I decided never again to publish in that journal, but in 1953 I was scarcely in a position to shop around.

Murray Gell-Mann

4. Nobel Prize in Medicine (1953) awarded to Hans Krebs for: The discovery of the citric acid cycle (aka the Krebs cycle)

Rejection letter from Nature to Hans Krebs. 

5. Nobel Prize in Physics (2000) awarded to Herbert Kroemer for: "Developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronics"

Rejection: "I wrote up the idea and submitted the paper to Applied Physics Letters, where it was rejected. I was talked into not fighting the rejection, but to submit it to the Proceedings of the IEEE, where it was published, but ignored. I also wrote a patent, which is probably a better paper than the one in Proc. IEEE."

Herbert Kroemer

6. Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1986) awarded to John Polanyi for: elucidating the dynamics of chemical elementary processes.

Rejection: "Physical Review Letters rejected the paper as lacking scientific interest. Shortly thereafter they rejected T. Maiman's report of the first operating laser, on the same grounds. Polanyi read about this second rejection, quite by chance, while holidaying on an island in Georgian Bay. On returning to Toronto in September of 1960 he submitted the identical manuscript to the Journal of Chemical Physics, where it was promptly published."

John Polanyi

7. Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1993) awarded to Kary Mullis for: invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method

Rejection: "And Dan Koshland would be the editor of Science when my first PCR paper was rejected from that journal and also the editor when PCR was three years later proclaimed Molecule of the Year."

8. Nobel Prize in Medicine (1977) awarded to Rosalind Yalow for: invention of the radioimmunoassay (RIA).

Rejection: "For years after winning the Nobel Prize, Yalow proudly showed this rejection letter in her public presentations."

Rejection letter received by Dr. Bradley and Dr. Yalow. 

Today, authors have the ability to upload their manuscript to places like Authorea and communicate their ideas prior to formal publication. This allows new and potentially breakthrough ideas to be discussed transparently. We think good science is science that can be scrutinized transparently--we're facilitating that. Join us!

References: François Jacob. Of flies, mice, and men. 158 p. (1998).