Jan. 18, 2007 — Winning a Nobel prize not only is good for your career and pocketbook: it also imbues recipients with about an extra two years of life.
British researchers curious about how social status affects lifespan compared the longevity of Nobel prize winners to those who had been nominated but not given the awards.
"Walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about two years to a scientist's life span," said Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, and the lead researcher of the study. "How status does this, we just don't know."
Oswald and colleagues collected data on 528 male scientists awarded or nominated for a Nobel between 1901 and 1950. They could not use more recent nominees because the list is kept confidential for 50 years.
Only men were considered for the study to avoid lifespan differences that could be attributed to gender.
And statistics on four men on the list who died in combat or by other non-biological causes were omitted from the study, leaving 524 scientists, of whom 135 won Nobels.
As a group, the men lived an average of 76 years. But laureates averaged 77.2 years, compared to nominees, who lived to be about 75.8 years old. Further paring the group into nationalities increased the difference, adding another eight months to prize-holders' lives.
Researchers also compared the changes in value of the Nobel Prize cash award, which currently is about $1.4 million, to see if wealth was a factor in the laureates' enhanced longevity. But they found no correlation there, suggesting that it was the enhanced status of winning that alone accounts for the extra years of life.
"Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic," Oswald said.
