More recently, big breakthroughs in the hard sciences are generally collaborations involving dozens, sometimes hundreds of researchers working in separate but interlocking fields.

Others lament the failure to recognise American virologist Robert Gallo for his contribution to the discovery of HIV, Rosalind Franklin for her pioneering work on DNA, and Italian physicist Adalberto Giazotto for his role in detecting gravitational waves.

Even the most ardent defenders of Nobel Prize and its arguably archaic rules acknowledge that science has shifted dramatically since the era of Einstein, Monsieur and Madame Curie, and Karl Landsteiner, the Austrian biologist who figured out in the 1920s that we have blood types.

"It is true that in modern science you often have very large groups of people interacting," added Norrby, who helped confer Nobels in Medicine for 25 years, and has cast votes for the prizes in physics and chemistry since the early 1980s.

Norrby conceded that Europe's CERN—which runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory and conducted the experiments to detect the Higgs boson—would probably have shared in that Nobel if the rules had allowed, as they do for the Peace Prize.

"The Breakthrough and Gruber prizes—which honoured the discovery of gravitational waves before the Nobel Committee did—took a fairer approach in highlighting the leaders but explicitly recognising the whole team," including monetarily, he noted.