What if an AI wins the Nobel prize for medicine?

Editor's note: This year What If?, our annual collection of scenarios, considers the future of health. Each of these stories is fiction, but grounded in historical fact, current speculation and real science. IT WAS A scene that the Nobel committee had dearly hoped to avoid. As the recipients of this year's prizes filed into the Stockholm Concert Hall to take their seats, dozens of protesters, including several former laureates, clashed with police in the streets outside. They had gathered to express their opposition to the unprecedented decision to award the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine to an artificial intelligence.