Podcast with Sten Grillner on Nobel Prize and scientific collaboration

How does the Nobel Prize actually work , and what does its century-old selection process reveal about collaboration in science? Neuroscientist Sten Grillner, a former member of the Nobel Committee, takes us inside the deliberation process and explains why small-scale discovery still outperforms industrial-scale science. Subscribe for more episodes on how real-world collaboration functions. Sten Grillner, renowned for his pioneering work on neural circuits controlling locomotion at the Karolinska Institute, joins Paul Verschure for a conversation that bridges bench science, institutional governance, and international scientific diplomacy. Having served on the Nobel Committee for 14 years and participated in organizations like IBRO and the OECD Global Science Forum, Grillner offers a rare insider perspective on how collaboration operates at the highest levels of science. The conversation opens with Grillner's research trajectory , decades spent analyzing the neural networks that coordinate movement, using the lamprey as a model organism. His discovery that basal ganglia circuitry has been conserved for 500 million years, from lamprey to humans, demonstrates how working on an unfashionable model system can yield fundamental insights that bandwagon science misses entirely. The Nobel Prize selection process emerges as a fascinating case study in structured collaboration. Grillner describes a system designed over a century ago that still functions: international nominations, written evaluations, historical records that allow committees to revisit past deliberations, and rotating membership that prevents institutional capture. The critical design feature is institutional memory , decisions are not made in isolation but against a documented history of prior assessments. When the system fails, the reasons are instructive. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature crisis, where internal conflicts within the Swedish Academy forced a one-year cancellation, illustrates what happens when collaboration breaks down through interpersonal dysfunction. Grillner notes that science prizes have avoided similar crises partly because committee members rotate, whereas the Academy's lifetime appointments created irresolvable tensions. On the question of large-scale versus small-scale science, Grillner draws a clear distinction. Infrastructure projects like the Human Genome Project serve as enablers , platforms that allow individual researchers to ask questions they could not ask before. But novel discoveries remain the province of individual brains or small teams. The answer is not either-or, but the balance matters: jumping on bandwagons is expensive and rarely produces breakthroughs. His advice for improving scientific collaboration is characteristically direct: stop jumping on the bandwagon each time. Sometimes you have to look away from where everyone else is looking to find what matters. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.