Measuring revolutionary biomedical science 1992-2006 using Nobel prizes, Lasker (clinical medicine) awards and Gairdner awards (NLG metric).

The Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the Lasker award for clinical medicine, and the Gairdner international award are given to individuals for their role in developing theories, technologies and discoveries which have changed the direction of biomedical science. These distinctions have been used to develop an NLG metric to measure research performance and trends in 'revolutionary' biomedical science with the aim of identifying the premier revolutionary science research institutions and nations from 1992-2006. I have previously argued that the number of Nobel laureates in the biomedical field should be expanded to about nine per year and the NLG metric attempts to predict the possible results of such an expansion. One hundred and nineteen NLG prizes and awards were made during the past fifteen years (about eight per year) when overlapping awards had been removed. Eighty-five were won by the USA, revealing a massive domination in revolutionary biomedical science by this nation; the UK was second with sixteen awards; Canada had five, Australia four and Germany three. The USA had twelve elite centres of revolutionary biomedical science, with University of Washington at Seattle and MIT in first position with six awards and prizes each; Rockefeller University and Caltech were jointly second placed with five. Surprisingly, Harvard University--which many people rank as the premier world research centre--failed to reach the threshold of three prizes and awards, and was not included in the elite list. The University of Oxford, UK, was the only institution outside of the USA which featured as a significant centre of revolutionary biomedical science. Long-term success at the highest level of revolutionary biomedical science (and probably other sciences) probably requires a sufficiently large number of individually-successful large institutions in open competition with one another--as in the USA. If this model cannot be replicated within smaller nations, then it implies that such arrangements need to be encouraged and facilitated in multi-national units.