GEORGE JOHNSON ESSAY

Prizes and contests have often played a role in scientific advances. Unlike massive government research projects, prizes can lure talented mavericks who would otherwise be rebuffed by bureaucracy.
An often-cited case is the cash prize offered by Britain in 1714 for determining a ship’s longitude at sea. Had there been an 18th-century version of the National Science Foundation, grants would probably have gone to astronomers looking to the sky for a solution. (Latitude was measured that way, so why not longitude-) But the winner, after half a century, was a clockmaker, John Harrison, who took an entirely different approach: devising an extremely accurate chronometer.
Similarly, last month the likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that he wanted to break the United States’ oil dependency by encouraging “heroic efforts in engineering.” He called for the government to offer a prize - $300 million (one dollar per American) to the inventor of a battery so compact, powerful and inexpensive that it would supplement or even supplant the need for fossil fuels.
Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, quickly derided the proposal - involving a sum equivalent to nearly 200 Nobel Prizes - as a gimmick and a distraction. But the debate raises deeper questions, like how best can the government finance and direct basic research without stifling something as mercurial as the spirit of invention.
Even though the latest pictures from Mars are stunning, NASA’s problems have overshadowed its successes like its Mars project. The most exciting thing to happen recently in manned space flight came in 2004 when Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately backed suborbital excursion.
Winning the contest, which was named for its benefactors, the Ansari family, and administered by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, cost more than the award was worth. (Mr. Rutan was backed by a Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen.) But greater spoils may await, with Virgin Galactic licensing the technology for a space tourism industry.
The X Prize Foundation took as its model the 1919 Orteig Prize - $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris offered by a hotelier who figured it would be good for business. The purse was claimed eight years later by Charles Lindbergh, and the publicity helped start American aviation.
Lindbergh’s grandson is a member of the foundation’s board, which is offering other prizes including the Google Lunar X Prize for the winner of an unmanned race to the moon; the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize, endowed by the family of the science fiction writer, “for practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities”; and the Archon X Prize for Genomics for the developer of a faster, cheaper way to sequence DNA.
None of these goals is beyond the reach of the government research establishment. But with formal proposals, peer review and Congressional oversight, it’s hard for administrators to jump quickly on a new idea - and there is always the danger of getting stuck in a rut.
Hence the allure of prizes.
If the trend takes off there may be so many contests that they lose their appeal. But science will be in no danger. No prize will ever match the thrill of discovery - Marie Curie isolating a shimmering gram of radium from tons of uranium ore. And for the less inspired, there will always be the rewards of the marketplace.