There can be few attributes more influential than one's reputation. It can make (or break) a career by helping (or otherwise) to ease promotion, capture funding, attract coworkers, gain media attention, and increase peer approval. All of these serve to keep up momentum in a career. Although important, reputations are difficult to quantify, and their foundations are often elusive. Scientific Reputations, the final programme in a four part series investigating political aspects of science, seeks to address this.

The programme takes as its premise the assumption that anybody who gains a Nobel prize in science …