Now that another round of Nobel prizes has been awarded, consideration should be given to abolishing these powerful but often misleading accolades to scientific and literary achievement. That’s not going to happen, since the Nobel brand brings international glory and attention to the homeland of the prizes, Sweden.

Nonetheless, the robotic-like reverence evoked by the prizes is strangely out of whack with the realities of the honored achievements. Among the thousands of prizes for intellectual accomplishments awarded annually, the Nobels alone command front-page, prime-time notice. Though they’re here to stay, the attentive world might usefully subject them to realistic understanding. Hard to believe, but take away the pomp of bestowal by the King of Sweden and the accompanying cash awards — now $1.4-million — and the prizes lose a lot of allure.

The odd exception is the Nobel Peace Prize, a politically focused award that confers celebrity status on the recipient. For putting an international spotlight on the winner’s plight or cause, the Nobel for peace is matchless and different from the scientific and literary prizes.

For all the prizes, the winners must be alive at the time of selection, which eliminates many high achievers whose work failed to receive timely recognition. No more than three individuals may share a prize, which frequently leads to injustices in the modern era of team research. And several major fields of research are not eligible for the prizes. There’s no Nobel for mathematics, engineering, environmental studies, or the social sciences, with the exception of economics, which was a late add-on.

As specified in the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the initial prizes were for peace, literature, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and physics. The prize for economics was added in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. Though Nobel’s will stated that the prizes were to be awarded to those “who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” practicality and custom eroded that requirement, so that prizes have sometimes been awarded for decades-old achievements. Peyton Rous, an American physician, discovered tumor viruses in 1911. But the Nobel Prize eluded him until 1966, four years before his death. Given the rapid pace of science, there’s always a backlog of Nobel-worthy recipients for whom the date of demise is the governing variable.

Though careful study goes into choosing the winners, history has not always endorsed the Nobel selections. The 1949 prize for Medicine or Physiology was shared by Egas Moniz, a Portuguese surgeon who developed and promoted prefrontal lobotomy for treatment of psychiatric disorders. The procedure was enthusiastically adopted by a small number of surgeons, but came to be regarded as ineffective. It is now regarded with revulsion, as well-intended medicine gone amok.

The Nobel for Literature often goes to authors whose merit has not attained significant recognition beyond their native lands. Meanwhile, many major authors in major nations work and die without receiving the hallowed call from Stockholm. To the chagrin of many mid-career economists, the late-arriving Economics Prize was initially confronted by the task of honoring a raft of elderly economists before they inevitable collided with the ban on posthumous awards. The geriatric overhang now seems to have been dealt with.

Unique among the Nobels, the Peace Prize reflects the political taste of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which consists of five members of the Norwegian Parliament — a hangover from the time when Norway was an appendage of Sweden. Peace recipients include Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King. Worldwide attention and support given to the Burmese dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi are attributable to her status as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

The case against the scientific Nobels is clear. They’re usually out of touch with the working realities of contemporary science, often arbitrary in their limitation to three awardees, oblivious of important fields of research, and sometimes plain wrong in their assessment of scientific validity.

Benefitting from the public’s bedazzlement with Nobel celebrity, petitions bearing the names of Nobel laureates are frequently thrust into public affairs, though on many issues that they address, they’re no more expert than other citizens. Armored by their prizes, they are generally immune to criticism.

A rare exception dates back to 1963, when Robert Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, fired a blast at Nobel glory: “A scientist has a limited education. He labors on the topic of his dissertation, wins the Nobel Prize by the time he is 35, and suddenly has nothing to do…. He has no alternative but to spend the rest of his life making a nuisance of himself.”