>>14063195They've done studies on predicting nobel prize winners.
The biggest factor is whether your PI also won a nobel prize or not.
Luck is a big, big factor. You have to come in at the exact right moment into the exact right position in the field and have the resources to push the science that much more of an inch forward that takes it into breakthrough territory. Sometimes it's totally unpredictable which way it will go.
Quick, you have two labs to choose from to do your PhD in; a new hype new technique to genomically edit DNA in cells or a lab that studies how the bacteria proto-immune system works to protect themselves against phages.
If you chose the first lab, congrats, you work on TALENs which no one cares about anymore because the second lab figured out that bacteria use CRISPR/Cas9 to protect against viruses and just came up with the proof-of-purchase that "maybe we can take these and try genome editing".
during grad school I got to talk to a few nobel prize winners. Eric Wieschaus straight-up told me he wasn't too smart and did not have a remarkable career, he just happened to be in the right place and the right time to publish. He gave us a talk and told us that nobels are awarded based on a certain experiment (or set), not a career usually (neat developmental work though).
Oliver Smithies was great, and honestly a very smart and charismatic guy, but he said again, something to the effect of "right place, right time". It's easy to see because often times nobel-prize winning work is discovered independently within months of each other. This is because everyone has access to the same literature, and everyone comes to the same conclusion about the same time- and race each other to publish the groundbreaking work.
Sometimes the labs will call each other up when they see each others work at conferences and try to co-publish, but sometimes that gets rejected and a war begins. The HIV sequence discovery has a legendary story behind it.
