The Chinese public used to keenly await the Nobel Prize every year before the list of prizewinners is revealed in autumn. To them, the prize represents the highest-level achievement in the natural and social sciences sector.

Chen Ning Yang and Lee Tsung-dao, two Chinese Americans sharing the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957, have long been idolized among Chinese academics in the process to reach the prestigious award. The dual winner also spurred the question of why the Chinese education system cannot breed its own winner.

The Prize is worshipped to the degree that it is used by the Chinese public to measure the country's research and educational progress. How long will it be before Chinese academics win a Nobel Prize? The question seems to be haunting every Chinese scientist.

This year after Tu Youyou, a Chinese female medical scientist, was awarded the Lasker Award in Clinical Medicine, new hope sprang up that a local Chinese would receive the top scientific award. That hope was dashed again this year though.

It is the case that scientists from or educated in developed Western countries have captured most Nobel Prizes.

This reflects progress in scientific research accumulated over a century, a period in which the West was also the driving force behind the world's development.

China hasn't had the financial capacity to fund top-level scientific research until recent decades.

Breakthrough research findings are being made, but so far there hasn't been enough time to foster an all-around solid scientific research ability, a foundation for winning the Nobel Prize.

Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize to some extent illustrates the West's dominance in judging achievements in the natural and social scientific worlds. Scientists from the developing world yearn for the Prize for the acknowledgement and recognition it represents.

But the acceptance of that dominance is declining subtly among the Chinese public, partly due to the feeling that China is being denied and ignored by the Prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to people for "contributions" that the majority of Chinese disagree with. Despite its economic growth, Chinese economists have had no luck in the Nobel Prize for economics.

All this is pushing mainstream Chinese people simply to care less about the Nobel Prize. It is still much talked about among Chinese elites, but the fever for it among the general public is dropping. It shouldn't be so.