Academic background of Nobel prize laureates reveals the importance of multidisciplinary education in medicine

Abstract

Education is essential to cultivate the innovations. The Nobel prize of physiology or medicine (medicine in short) has been awarded to the breakthrough achievement in medicine. It is of paramount interest to investigate the educational backgrounds of Nobel prize laureates in medicine for discovering their education characteristics. To this end, we compile an integrative and comprehensive dataset about the educational experiences of all the Nobel awardees focusing on their undergraduate and doctoral majors. Then we implement the summary statistics of numerous majors in current university disciplinary system and calculate the proportion of each major accordingly. The results demonstrate that 49.5% of the laureates of Nobel prize in medicine have multidisciplinary educational background and 69% of their undergraduate majors are not directly in medicine. After removing the laureates who graduated from the countries that do not provide undergraduate medical education, the percentage is still as high as 52%. To further check our findings, we compare the similarity and difference between the laureates in medicine and those in physics and chemistry. The percentages in the other two sciences are significantly different from those in medicine, which illustrates a distinct degree of specificity. The comparison confirms the uniqueness of academic backgrounds in major medical innovations, such as those awarded by Nobel prizes. The data-driven analysis highlights the specific pattern and inspires the urgent necessity of introducing science education in medicine for cultivating the original and cutting-edge medical innovations, especially in the undergraduate program.

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