There've been accusations that the medicine prize "snubbed" Robert Gallo of the United States, who you will recall staked a claim in 1984 to be first to have discovered the AIDS virus.

After a prolonged and bitter wrangle, Gallo agreed to a compromise over a rival claim, dating to 1983, made by a French team led by Luc Montagnier. After the settlement, the pair have been commonly credited as the "co-discoverers" of HIV.

Now the crushing verdict of history has come down. The 2008 Nobel for medicine went to Montagnier and his co-researcher Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who shared half of the prize, while the other half went to Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Gallo's exclusion has been criticised by some scientists and rued by Montagnier himself, who also said it was a pity that another member of his team, Jean-Claude Chermann wasn't on the list.

There's also a row over another Nobel loseout, Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo. He helped craft the theory of spontaneous broken symmetry -- a cornerstone concept in particle physics - for which Yoichiro Nambu of the United States and Japan's Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the physics Nobel.

Top scientists like reward and glory like everyone else, but in general they accept the judgement of the Nobel Committee, which has a good record of selecting the right people for the prize. For there to be public criticism is highly unusual.

To the outsider, it may sound like kvetching, but there an important point here. The Nobel Foundation can't award the prize to more than three people. But this rule was crafted more than a century ago, at a time when an individual could clearly be pinned to a scientific breakthrough - Pierre and Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roentgen, Robert Koch, and so on.

These days, waiting for insight - the apple-falling-off-a-tree moment - is not enough, and no-one works by themselves in a lab. The elaboration of a theory or a groundbreaking invention are invariably a collaborative effort. Teamwork, a good scientific culture and lots of money are the keys. Singling out just one individual could be grossly unfair.

A good example of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the massive particle collider near Geneva, that was built to unveil secrets of matter. Who should get the Nobel if the LHC, costing billions of dollars and marshalling a small army of men and women, discovers the coveted Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles achieve mass?

In my book, it's not just the numbers rule that the Nobel sages have to revise. They should also take a look at the categories themselves, which were set up in an era when science could be comfortably be divided into just three disciplines.

Today, though, there are few neat pigeon holes. Wednesday's chemistry prize, for instance, went to scientists whose work enabled a fluorescent protein, found in jellyfish, to become an invaluable marker in research on lab animals. "That's not chemistry, it's biology," an irritated French chemist told my colleague.