US, Nov. 9 -- As a young chemistry student in India, and later as a doctoral researcher in organic chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, I regarded Nobel laureates as near-gods. I studied their work line by line: reaction mechanisms, syntheses and structures that had survived years of scrutiny by skeptical colleagues. A Nobel Prize in chemistry is rarely a bet on the future. It usually arrives years, often decades, after a discovery has been tested and replicated. It rewards what has already proven true.

The Nobel Peace Prize, chosen by a separate committee in Oslo, has increasingly done the opposite. It rewards hopes, positions and statements in the middle of unfinished stories. On October 9, the Norwegian Nobel Co...