Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery (www.nature.com)

A persuasive opinion argues that major scientific prizes should explicitly recognize machines — and the teams that build them — as co‑creators of discovery. The piece notes that many landmark advances over the past 50 years (from gravitational‑wave detection to protein‑structure mapping with AI) depended on purpose‑built apparatus or algorithms rather than lone human insight. Yet awards like the Nobel continue to frame breakthroughs mainly as human achievements, omitting the engineered systems (and the communities behind them) that made those discoveries possible. The author proposes either adapting existing prizes, adding new categories, or creating fresh awards to honor human–machine partnerships. Technically, the article highlights concrete examples to show why this matters: LIGO’s 2015 detection required two 4 km arms and interferometry able to sense length changes to ~1/10,000th the width of a proton; similarly, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider and cryo‑EM were as much engineering milestones as scientific ones. AI systems are now reshaping methodology too — accelerating drug discovery, enabling protein‑folding simulations and producing novel strategies (as with DeepMind’s AlphaGo). Recognizing machines would realign incentives, signal what counts as progress, and reward the scientists who most effectively pair human insight with engineered systems — which increasingly set the pace of discovery.