Recently winners for the 2025 Nobel Prizes were announced. On September 7, 2025 I had blogged about Ten simple rules for improving communication among scientists, and on September 12, 2025 I blogged about Ten simple rules for attending your first scientific conference. I wondered if there was a similar article in that series about the Nobel Prize. There indeed is. That article by Richard J. Roberts in PLoS Computational Biology on April 2, 2015 is titled Ten Simple Rules to Win a Nobel Prize. His rules are to:
1] Never start your career by aiming for a Nobel Prize.
2] Hope that your experiments fail occasionally.
3] Collaborate with other scientists, but never more than two other people.
4] To increase your odds of winning, be sure to pick your family carefully.
5] Work in the laboratory of a previous Nobel Prize winner.
6] Even better than Rule 5, try to work in the laboratory of a future Nobel Prize winner.
7] Always design and execute your best experiments at a time when your luck is running high.
8] Never plan your life around winning a Nobel Prize.
9] Always be nice to Swedish scientists.
10] Study biology.
An image was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.
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