Individual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of

Individual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of the ribosome, which finally demonstrated that the active site was RNA, not protein). And don't forget that AlphaFold worked because of sequence data (similarly laboriously collected by a large number of people). A big part of the problem is that we award prizes to the small number of people who do something first, or who were in charge- the LIGO NP should have been awarded to the entire consortium, not Kip Thorne and a couple other people under this logic.