Ben Feringa is the sort of person you’d call ‘smart’.

Despite being relatively famous in his field, you probably haven’t heard of him. I certainly hadn’t up until recently.

One indication of Feringa’s intellectual chops is that he’s a professor of Chemistry at the University of Groningen. The research group he leads is [correction: unofficially] called the “Ben Feringa Research Group”, which should tell you something, but if that’s not convincing enough, you can peruse the very impressive looking list of awards he’s accumulated over his career, on his website1.

I mean, the man was knighted by the Queen of the Netherlands2, for goodness sake. Yet despite his carefully curated list of accolades, (his website claimed to have been last updated March 2018), there’s one, quite obvious omission.

His 2016 Nobel Prize.



Feringa, along with Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir James Stoddart, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on ‘Molecular Machines’, which is the production of mechanisms we’re familiar with on everyday scales, reconstructed on the nanoscale using molecules. He even applied those principles to build the world’s smallest car.

It’s an impressive feat of chemistry for sure, although since I’m not a chemist, I’m deferring to the Nobel Prize committee on that one.

Perhaps, being a researcher in my twenties and far, far removed from any dreams of Nobel-Laureate glory, I have some unrealistic assumptions about the mental process of winning the Nobel. It makes the absence of it on Feringa’s website all the more startling to me.

For starters, if it were me, I’d abandon carefully curating my LinkedIn profile as a sort of corporate fishing lure for recruiters and do away with the whole thing. Instead I’d just opt to hand out the following CV for any job I was interested in:

Physicist and Writer Experience: See https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2038/nathvani-bio.html Accolades and qualifications: 2038 Nobel Prize in Physics Further details: Search my name.

I’m not on the online dating scene but frankly, I imagine my Tinder profile would be pretty similar in that scenario3.

What I’m getting at is, if I in any way wanted to establish my seniority, accomplishment or prowess in my academic field, you’d be damned well sure that the Nobel Prize would be the first thing I bring up, most obviously in the section on my website dedicated to prizes that I had won pertaining to my work.

Putting aside issues related to my ego, the omission highlights a couple of interesting things, especially for those of us well practised in stalking academics and colleagues online4.

I should be up front, I have a particular obsession with academic web pages5 because frankly, I think there’s an art form to them which warrants the kind of obsessive attention I’m giving them in this article.

To start with, for the academic nerd, those web pages provide a deep, historical link to the past. There’s a tapestry of history, woven in the fractured stories told by the titles of research papers, past collaborators, biographies and even photos. I sincerely hope universities are archiving those pages somewhere because I’m sure they’ll provide an extremely useful index to future historians of science.

For example, on one occasion, after checking out the web page of the speaker6 for a talk I was due to attend, I managed to catch him at the post-talk drinks and wean out a few stories from his time collaborating with legendary physicist Richard Feynman in California, based on the knowledge I’d gained from his publication history.

Secondly, since Geocities7 was shut down by Yahoo, academic web pages are one of the few preserves of the hopelessly minimalist, now nostalgic 90s-era design paradigms that have died virtually everywhere else since8. Click anywhere in this sentence for an example. Look at those beauties. You can practically see the lines of HTML.

Of course, their primary purpose, which is to inform any interested party about the nature of their work and themselves as researchers, is crucially important. Not just for fellow, obsessive academics, but because I believe anyone engaging in tax-payer funded scientific research needs to have at least some means of engagement with the public.

A web page is often the bare minimum you can do, and those academics who even go as far as to humanise themselves on their web pages do a great job of portraying scientists in a better light. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think any amount of instagramming can compete with presenting yourself as a fully fleshed out human, right there alongside your academic work, even if the website looks a little simplistic.

The other, parallel goal, which is to present a professional overview of yourself for career purposes, is probably what motivates most researchers to put a page together in the first place, and I doubt Feringa is an exception to this.

We know that prior to the prize, Feringa, or at least one of his research group members, was meticulously keeping that list updated. The last entry was his awarding of the August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann-Denkmünze prize by the German Chemical Society, seven months before his Nobel was announced.

His website biography, which also mentions a few select prizes, also fails to mention the Nobel9, or in fact anything since 2016.

The most obvious explanation is that becoming a Nobel Laureate has cast Feringa’s career in a totally different light. From 2016 onwards, many, like myself, who wish to learn more about him do so because we first heard his name in association with the prize.

I imagine any academic even loosely associated with his field who wishes to know more about Feringa or his work will quickly come across a mention of his Nobel elsewhere, as well as other details of his career. No doubt, rising to that level of professional accomplishment means the number of people he has left to impress, or would care to impress has rapidly diminished.

There’s also a chance that he simply hasn’t had the time to worry about his website, now that his research activity is being boosted, surfing the crest of popularity and interest following the Nobel. It’s only been two years since and his field is still nascent; the wave is unlikely to crash any time soon.

However, I also suspect on some level that the importance of the Nobel, to us mere mortals for whom such an achievement seems damn well impossible, might be over-inflated10 in our minds compared to someone like him.

The specific field of “Molecular Machines”, for which Feringa was awarded his Nobel, is at least somewhat inspired11 by the aforementioned physicist Richard Feynman, who proposed some of the early concepts of engineering on the nanoscale back in the 1960s.

Feynman, also a Nobel Laureate, was actually somewhat ambivalent upon hearing his own winning of the prize12. That tallies with the popular reputation of Feynman as harbouring rejection of institutional authority and the appraisal from those same institutions. How much of Feynman’s cool nonchalance was self-promoted image or genuine iconoclasm is up for historical debate. But we have, based on his work on nuclear forces, Feynman’s own words regarding the experience of doing science:

“I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.”13

Anyone familiar with Feynman’s popular works can grasp how that thrill probably outstripped the joy any committee-awarded prize could bestow. Now compare Feynman’s words to Feringa’s response when interviewed about his own, early career successes:

“I made a molecule that no one had ever created before … and it gave me such a kick, that you could make something like an artist, a piece of music or a painting, that nobody had made before, that nobody in the world had ever made before. And so I became a chemist, making molecules, designing my own molecular world.”

Sound familiar? That might seem like a cherry-picked14 comparison, but the attitude strikes me as terribly similar to most of the high performing individuals I know in science. The awards and the recognition are gratifying, for sure, but that’s not the meat of it. Science is about discovery.



Not just the kind of discovery trotted out for the admiration of your peers, but deep, personal discovery reminiscent of spiritual revelation.

With a Nobel under his belt, I imagine Feringa feels secure in his academic position and less of a need to ‘play the game’ to stay ahead in the field, or worry about silly details like a web page. In another quote, he puts it crystal clear:

“That’s the beauty of Science, it’s not about power… it’s about bringing forward human knowledge, and stimulating young people.”

Ben Feringa didn’t need a Nobel prize to do science and experience a sense of wonder in the early stages of his career. And since I’m sure he won’t struggle to obtain research grants from hereon out, I suppose he no longer feels the need to ‘prove himself’ in the usual hoop-jumping manner academics have to go through.

Or perhaps, I’m just reading into this all a little too much.

[Update] As the appropriately named user richardfeynman on HackerNews pointed out:

Here’s an interview in dutch with Ben years before he received the nobel prize. You can see that he has a love for discovery, but you can also see that he cares about the prize.

Interviewer: So in the future, maybe the nobel prize will go to nanotechnology? Ben: There’s definitely a chance that the nobel prize will go to nanotechnology in the future. Interview: Maybe it’ll go to you! Ben: ::big grin::

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBNrqsJAFWU&feature=youtu.be…

Which suggests perhaps the Nobel is closer to his heart than I’d assumed.

1 There are 40, I counted.

2 Since this isn’t a knighthood from the United Kingdom, (the Dutch knighthood title being ‘Ridder’ as opposed to ‘Sir’), Feringa manages to sidestep the obvious confusion surrounding which title follows first when being addressed: ‘Professor’ or ‘Sir’? For the curious, according to Debrett’s, the supposed authority on etiquette and behaviour, the correct usage is ‘Professor Sir John Doe’, which appears to be common usage.

3 Although not quite the same thing, the Nobel laureate and Physicist Frank Wilczek, who since winning the prize in 2004 has been more active in the science outreach scene, is usually introduced by mention of his prize. I’m sure that dramatically increased sales of his books and attendance of his talks. As for whether it would help his Tinder profile, I don’t believe there’s any data to support my hypothesis either way, but perhaps he could be talked into it for science.

4 By which, I should clarify, I mean strictly their academic profiles as curated on their departmental or organisational websites.

5 This stems from two periods in successive years of my undergraduate, during which I stalked the academic webpages of researchers I was interested in doing a summer project with. The first time I attempted this, it took emailing 30 potential supervisors from my home institution before 2-3 of them actually offered me a placement. The second time around, I emailed 45 professors in my home town, none of whom could offer me a project in the field I wanted to do a PhD in. Anyway, I’m sure that I browsed many more academic profiles than I actually emailed, and somewhere in the process of scanning through a few hundred of them, I became a self-professed connoisseur of them, marvelled by the variety of their design and utility.

6 For those curious, the academic was Graham Ross, who was also involved in the discovery of a fundamental particle, the gluon. Ironically, his departmental webpage is no longer publicly accessible.

7 Which, in the dystopian era of Facebook, now seems like it was the golden age for user-driven, organic social media on the internet. I even look back somewhat fondly on my disastrous ‘piczo’ website, but since I’m not sure I could handle the cringe from reading what teenage me considered good writing, it’s probably for the best that it was never archived anywhere.

8 Except the Space-Jam website, which, for some reason, is still around.

9 I should note, the entire website isn’t bereft of mention of the Nobel. One of the pages refers to work done by the group as ‘Nobel Prize-winning’.

10 There’s also good cause not to place too much emphasis on the Nobel from a cultural standpoint as well.

11 Although according to cultural anthropologist Chris Tourney, Feynman’s talk wasn’t widely cited or known until the field of Nanotechnology was already under way. That said, one of the early pioners of Nanotech, Eric Drexler, was definitely influenced by him.

12 Although, it should be noted that he originally thought it might have been a student prank calling him.

13 Which was apparently untrue, since Murray Gell-Mann and two others had apparently had similar ideas to Feynman regarding the mathematical structure of what is now known as the Electroweak force.

14 I’d highly recommend watching the entire interview for the context of the quote.

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