A 2008 report from the consulting group Knowledge Ecology International cataloged dozens of examples.
Napoleon Bonaparte created a 12,000-franc prize for the preservation of food, in part so he could feed his troops as they marched across the more barren, or hostile, corners of Europe. That prize — the salary of a high-ranking public official at the time, according to UCLA historian Lynn Hunt — was awarded in 1809 to Nicolas Francois Appert, who preserved boiled food in champagne bottles, inventing commercial canning.
The emperor’s nephew Napoleon III launched an 1869 competition to produce a butter substitute, giving the world margarine. The famous Longitude Prizes offered by the Spanish, Dutch and British eventually gave explorers a way to navigate the high seas. The 1919 Orteig Prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris went to Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and spawned an aviation boom.
But the landscape changed after World War II, Morgan said, as governments began funding large-scale science and intellectual property laws offered companies incentives to look for new technologies on their own.
“Market power takes over the story,” he said, “and prizes fall off the face of the Earth.”
Many trace the current prize boom to the success of the Ansari X Prize, but there are other reasons for the resurgence.
The sluggish economy is a factor. “When there’s not as much university and NIH funding, more people are willing to work with us than would have been willing to years ago,” said Aimee Gilbreath, executive director of Michelson’s Found Animals Foundation.
Further feeding interest is the Internet, which provides a cheap way for a variety of people to hear about, participate and collaborate in the contests.
David Kirkby, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine, heard about NASA’s Mapping Dark Matter challenge from a blog published by Wired. He and a grad student won a token prize — an all-expenses-paid trip to Caltech, a 45-minute drive from his office — for writing a computer program that could accurately measure the shape of 100,000 simulated galaxies. The contest was administered by the prize contest website Kaggle.
Before the contest, Kirkby had been looking for a way to expand his research beyond particle physics. The contest gave him a way to break into a new field. And he wasn’t the only newcomer to take part: Another high-performing contender was a glaciology student from the University of Cambridge in England.
“If you’re asking a question where the solution is a piece of software, anyone with a laptop and the time can enter,” Kirkby said. “You get people of all kinds of backgrounds and levels of seniority working together. You get collaborations.”
But Kirkby, and others, have worried that letting wealthy enthusiasts so closely guide science could distort priorities. If everything is a goal-based contest, what becomes of basic research? Who’ll look into the causes that don’t have flush supporters?
“As a country, we want the best people working on the most important problems, not the problems being sold at the highest price,” he said.
Michelson’s contest represents a sort of middle ground. He is providing the researchers competing for his prize with grants of up to $250,000 a year, totaling up to $50 million. That should leave plenty of room for the scientists to make strides in fundamental research.
Twenty-two teams of researchers are working on the sterilization problem already, silencing genes and stimulating immune systems to try to shut down the reproductive cycle.
At an April meeting of the grantees in Santa Monica, many seemed invigorated by the competition.
Seated around a rectangle of tables, with Michelson perched at the head, they talked through their research and fielded pointed questions from their competitors. Occasionally a scientist would climb out of his seat to get a better view of a graph or a photo.
During a midmorning coffee break, biochemist Tatiana Samoylova said she was enjoying the back-and-forth.
Usually, she said, she didn’t get that kind of quick feedback from funders and other researchers. And the focus on a solution appealed to her.
“Most of us dream of that,” she said. “You don’t want to be a building block.”