But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then,

But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then, I would guess. Better yet: look at distribution of "age when paper was written", modeling the generating process is scientist X at age Y writes a paper with Z=0 if no award is won, Z=1 if award is won. Is it obvious that this distribution conditioned on Z=1 is different from the unconditional one? Not to me.