It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.

We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.

But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.

Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?