A Nobel Prize Winner And Chocolate

I interviewed two Nobel Prize winners as part of my Inventor Profiles project. The first one was Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR — something most people hadn’t heard of before COVID and now everybody has heard of because of PCR tests.

The second Nobel Prize winner, the 45th inventor in my series, was George E. Smith, co-inventor of the charge-coupled device, better known as the CCD.

We’ll start with him. Then we’ll get to the chocolate.

A simplified introduction to the CCD

In a digital camera, there’s obviously no film. Instead, where the film would be in an analog camera, there’s a light-sensitive chip that captures the image. For the first decades of digital photography, that light sensitive chip was a CCD sensor. Without going into how it works, that’s pretty much what you need to know. It was a hugely important invention for digital imaging.

Eventually, another technology known as CMOS became the dominant sensor in digital cameras because it is less expensive to make and uses less power than a CCD. Today, some devices still use CCDs because they produce higher image quality, but over the years CMOS sensors have pretty much caught up for most applications.

George Smith and co-inventor Willard Boyle developed the CCD while working at Bell Labs, which was then part of AT&T. But concerns around AT&T being a monopoly meant that Bell Labs was only allowed to make things for telephones, so using those new CCD chips to do things like develop cameras wasn’t really an option. Other companies like RCA starting using them in TV cameras, and eventually they were used in still cameras.

(I previously interviewed Steve Sasson, who invented the digital camera by coming up with a way to store the data captured by a CCD. For more of that history you can read this earlier issue of my newsletter where you can see the very first digital camera. It stored photographs on cassette!)

But Bell did have one telephone-related use for a CCD chip: a Picturephone.

Long before FaceTime, AT&T had been working on a Picturephone using various technologies. But it never caught on. George explained the problem to me:

I think society has gotten over that, pretty much.

Sailing around the world

In 1986, George and his wife Janet decided to both retire and sail around the world. They bought a new boat, named it Apogee, and gave in to their mutual wanderlust. They spent seventeen years seeing the world by boat.

Seventeen years!

In 2003, they settled down in New Jersey but they keep the boat docked behind the house.

What does this have to do with chocolate?

I’m getting there.

In 2009, George received the Nobel Prize jointly with Willard Boyle “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit — the CCD sensor.”

George keeps his Nobel Prize in a display cabinet with dozens of other awards that he has received over the years — tons of plaques, certificates, medallions and trophies. There’s the Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute, the induction plaque from the Inventors Hall of Fame, and so on.

George said that he received all these awards before getting his Nobel and that “once you get the Nobel Prize, you never get any more prizes.”

But see if you can spot the one award on this shelf that’s a little different than the others:

See that medallion laying flat in the middle of the shelf? The one that’s bigger than the rest? Wait, hang on. I have a clearer image. Here’s George holding it up:

That is actually not a medal. It’s a giant chocolate coin featuring Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden. As part of his duties, the King of Sweden is the person who presents the Nobel Prizes to the winners each year. And this giant chocolate coin was given to George’s wife Janet when George won the Nobel Prize.

If we’re ever talking in person about the Nobel Prize, there’s a good chance I will say, “Did you know that Nobel Prize winners’ spouses get their own special chocolate Nobel Prize?” Nobody talks about this!

In fact, at the Nobel Banquet, all the guests are served a chocolate replica of the Nobel Prize featuring Alfred Nobel. But Janet’s oversized chocolate featuring the King seems to be rare. At least, I can find no other information about it online.

If you want one of those chocolate replicas of the Nobel Prize with Alfred Nobel on it, you don’t have to actually attend the Nobel Banquet. It turns out that anyone can get one. The catch is that you have to go the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm to get it. They are not available online.

The connection between the Nobel Prize and chocolate

It turns out the Nobel-Chocolate connection goes much deeper than just the replica medallions. In 2012, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper called Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates [PDF] that found a correlation between eating chocolate and winning a Nobel Prize.

This study was widely repeated by major news outlets from the BBC to Scientific American because it’s such a delicious story.

Some news outlets contacted Nobel Prize winners to inquire about their chocolate consumption, causing some controversy. As the BBC reported:

But before you go buying cases of chocolate in the hopes of winning yourself a Nobel, I should tell you that follow-up studies showed that the spurious conclusion was not verifiable.

The Journal of Nutrition identified some flaws in the study such as this:

And then they take a deeper look. The original paper argued that the correlation may be due to the beneficial effect of flavanols found in cocoa on cognitive function. If that were the case, then there should also be a correlation between other flavanol-rich foods and Nobel Prizes.

Both tea and wine are high in flavanol, so they looked at consumption per capita in the same countries identified in the original study. They found no correlation there, and conclude then that “flavanoid concentration does not fully explain the high chocolate-laureate correlation.”

They did, however, discover a very different and surprising finding:

Welff, ffats it for affuvver foofseffer — sorry, I had a mouth full of chocolate. Let me try again.

Well, that’s it for another newsletter! Thanks as always for reading, sharing, subscribing, upgrading, donating, commenting, and helping spread the word.

I’ll see you next time. Until then, if anyone needs me, I’ll be at IKEA.

David