Anilrgowda

Earlier this week a British researcher came out with findings that Nobel Prize winners live two years longer, on average, than those who were mere finalists for a prize. The killer quote is this one, from University of Warwick economist Andrew Oswald: "Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic."
Oswald says he doesn't know what that magic is, but the report reminded me of the compelling work of UC Berkeley's Len Syme. Syme is the former dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health, and he's worked on some landmark studies over the years. Syme is the rare researcher who's willing to admit when his research doesn't pan out, or that it is based on wrong assumptions - and from those negative results he's gone on to make remarkable insights. Most famously is his notion of "control of destiny," the idea that he defines as "the ability of people to deal with the forces that affect their lives." It seems that the more control we have over our lives, the healthier we are. Even if we're at the relative top of our social/economic food chain, if we don't feel that we have control, we'll be more likely to suffer adverse health effects. Here's Syme describing the effect:

A few years ago Dr. Michael Marmot studied coronary heart disease in 10,000 British civil servants and made an interesting discovery. He found, as you would expect, that workers at the bottom of the civil-service hierarchy — guards and delivery people — had heart disease rates 4 times higher than workers at the very top of the hierarchy. But Marmot also observed a gradient of disease from top-to-bottom of the civil-service hierarchy. Workers at the top had the lowest rates of disease, but those one step below them — professionals and executives, doctors and lawyers — had heart disease rates twice as high as those at the very top. We might be able to explain the high rates among those at the bottom in terms of poverty, poor education, inadequate nutrition, or poor housing, but that would not explain why doctors and lawyers had rates of disease twice as high as those at the very top. Doctors and lawyers are not poor; they do not have bad educations or poor medical care or poor housing, and yet they have disease rates twice as high as those above them. A very similar gradient has now been seen for virtually every disease in every industrialized country in the world.

So it seems to me that this 'control of destiny' phenomenon is in effect even among Nobel Prize finalists - if you win, you're the king of the world, in total control. If you don't, you'll always know that there's always somebody out there better than you, even if it's just one punk physicist at MIT...