Earlier this month, a Russian multi-millionaire decided to award three million dollars for the discovery of the Higgs boson(?). The money would be split among the institutions responsible for the discovery: the LHC and the CMS and ATLAS experiments. The news was on World Radio Switzerland that morning and I was listening to it on my way to work. The journalist interviewed Michel Della Negra, a former CMS spokesperson, who explained why finding the Higgs boson was important and why it was difficult to detect it. So far so good.
Then the interviewer asked: "Can you tell us what you are going to do with the money?" and I was waiting to hear how CMS would use this money for the benefit of the collaboration, perhaps buying some new equipment or setting up some sort of scholarship for graduate students. But no. Instead of what I was naively expecting, Michel Della Negra replied that the awarding body had decided that one million would be split in four parts, one for each of the spokespersons CMS has had, and he would keep his own share of $250K for his family "because, you know, I have been, you know, working very hard for almost twenty years and the family had to suffer because it was a really full-time, difficult project". Michel Della Negra laughed halfway through his answer, probably because nobody can bullshit his way through this sort of announcement with a straight face.
Now, in case you do not know enough about modern particle physics experiments to grasp the full magnitude of the shamelessness in that statement, CMS is a collaboration of (currently) more than 3000 people from 38 countries. In the two decades of its existence, many more have passed from its ranks. Most of all these thousands of scientists, students or administrative assistants have contributed a lot of effort to the experiment spending weeks, months or years away from their home countries and families, doing night shifts, working long hours of overtime and suffering every bit as much (some even more, as they are severely underpaid or altogether unpaid) as Michel Della Negra and his family. The reason people have done and are actually still doing this is that they have a genuine curiosity about the physics CMS investigates and a possibly misguided but nevertheless honest expectation that, one day, the discoveries made by this experiment through their sacrifice and effort might actually matter to the world.
It should be clear now that the discovery of the Higgs boson is not the work of the four people who, at times, have been elected by the thousands of CMS members to represent and manage them at the top level, because no matter how smart or knowledgeable they may be, they have only contributed a tiny fraction of the collective thought, effort and time (and none of the money) it took to make the experiment happen. Any prize awarded for the discovery thus rightfully belongs not to them, but to the collaboration and should be used for the common purpose of doing science with the CMS detector. Using all of it for the financial benefit of an individual contributor would mean that this contributor would be making money off of the effort and sacrifice of each of the members of the collaboration who came into this thinking they were doing it only for the benefit of science. It would also mean that every time a future member of the management makes the official or unofficial request of a collaboration member to do unpaid overtime (for which some may volunteer and others may "be volunteered"), they might be making this request hoping to one day make some money off of it. That is, from a moral standpoint entirely unacceptable.
Of course, people are naturally selfish beings and one can to a certain extent expect some of them to succumb to temptation and do that sort of thing. I will not be surprised if some of the other laureates silently pocket the money and pretend to themselves that they deserve it. But Della Negra took moral inadequacy to an entirely different level by having the nerve to get himself on the radio, talk about the discovery of the Higgs and how the prize was awarded for this scientific achievement and then shamelessly announcing that he will keep his quarter of the money, implicitly staking a claim to one quarter of the discovery.
You can listen to most of Della Negra's interview, including the offending part,
here.
PS: A reader pointed out that it was not clear from the original post that the money was given directly to the spokespersons and someone could be misled into thinking that splitting the money to the spokespersons was an idea the CMS management (i.e. the current spokesperson) had. I have since corrected the text to make that point clearer.
