Encyclopedia
The
Nobel Prizes are prizes instituted by the will of
Alfred Nobel, awarded to people who have done outstanding research, invented groundbreaking techniques or equipment, or made outstanding contributions to society. The Nobel Prizes, which are generally awarded annually in the categories listed below, are widely regarded as the supreme commendation in the world today. A recipient of the award is known as a Nobel Laureate.
As of November 2005, a total of 776 Nobel Prizes have been awarded . However, a few prize winners have declined the award. There are years in which one or more prizes are not awarded; however, the prizes must be awarded at least once every five years. During World War II for instance no prizes were awarded in any category from 1940 through 1942. The selection of the peace prize in particular was greatly hampered by Nazi Germany's occupation of Norway.
The prize cannot be revoked. Nominees must be
alive at the time of nomination and, since 1974, the award may not be given out posthumously.
Prize categories
| Medal | Category | Characteristics |
|---|
| | Nobel Prize in Physics | Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics". |
| | Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to "the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement". |
| | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine | Awarded by the Karolinska Institutet to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine". |
| | Nobel Prize in Literature | Awarded by the Swedish Academy to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". |
| | Nobel Prize in Peace | Awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". |
Nobel Memorial Prizes
| Medal | Category | Characteristics |
|---|
| | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics | Also known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, it was instituted in 1969 by Sveriges Riksbank . Although it is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at the same time as the Nobel Prizes – leading many people and commentators to label it a "Nobel Prize" – technically it is not a Nobel Prize as it was not willed by Alfred Nobel nor funded by his bequest. |
Awarding ceremonies
The committees and institutions that serve as selection boards for the prizes typically announce the names of the laureates in October. The prizes are awarded at formal ceremonies held annually on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
The peace prize ceremony was held at the
Norwegian Nobel Institute from 1905 until 1946, later at the
Aula of the
University of Oslo, and since 1990 at the
Oslo City Hall. The other prize ceremonies were held at the
Stockholm Concert Hall as of 2005.
Each award can be given to a maximum of three recipients per year. Each prize constitutes a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money. The monetary award is currently about 10 million Swedish
Kronor . This was originally intended to allow laureates to continue working or researching without the pressures of raising money. In actual fact, many prize winners have retired before winning. If there are two winners in one category, the award money is split equally between them. If there are three winners, the awarding committee has the option of splitting the prize money equally among all three, or awarding half of the prize money to one recipient and one-quarter to each of the other two. It is common for the recipients to donate the prize money to benefit scientific, cultural or humanitarian causes.
Since 1902, the
King of Sweden has formally awarded all the prizes, except the
Nobel Peace Prize, in
Stockholm.
King Oscar II initially did not approve of awarding grand national prizes to foreigners, but is said to have changed his mind after realising the publicity value of the prizes for the country.
The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, given by the President of Norwegian Parliament until the Norwegian Nobel Committee was established in 1904. Its five members are appointed by the
Norwegian Parliament , and it is entrusted both with the preparatory work related to prize adjudication and with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Its members are independent and do not answer to lawmakers. Members of the Norwegian government are not allowed to take any part in it.
Nobel's will
The prizes were instituted by the final will of
Alfred Nobel, a
Swedish chemist, industrialist, and the inventor of dynamite. Alfred Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. The last one was written on November 27, 1895—a little over a year before he died. He signed it at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in
Paris on November 27, 1895. Nobel's work had directly involved the creation of explosives, and he became increasingly uneasy with the military usage of his inventions. It is said that this was motivated in part by his reading of a premature obituary of himself, published in error by a French newspaper on the occasion of the death of Nobel's brother Ludvig, and which condemned Alfred as a "merchant of death." So in his will, Alfred left 94% of his worth to the establishment of five prizes:
The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way:
The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical works by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.
Although Nobel's will established the prizes, his plan was incomplete and, due to various other hurdles, it was five years before the Nobel Foundation could be established and the first prizes awarded on December 10, 1901.
Nomination and selection process
As compared with some other prizes, the Nobel prize nomination and selection process is long and rigorous. This is an important reason why the Prizes have grown in importance and prestige over the years to become the most important prizes in their field.
Forms, which amount to a personal and exclusive invitation, are sent to about 3000 selected individuals to invite them to submit nominations. For example the Nobel Foundation states that in the case of the
peace prize the following people may nominate:
- Members of national assemblies and governments of states
- Members of international courts
- University rectors
- Professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology
- Directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
- Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
- Board members of organisations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
- Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
- Former advisers appointed by the Norwegian Nobel Institute
Similar requirements are in place for the other prizes.
The strictly enforced submission deadline for nominations is January 31. Self-nominations are automatically disqualified and only living persons are eligible for the Nobel Prize.
Unlike many other awards, the Nobel Prize nominees are never publicly announced, and they are not supposed to be told that they were ever considered for the prize. These records are sealed for 50 years.
After the nomination deadline, a Committee compiles and screens the nominations to a list of around 200 preliminary candidates. The list is sent to selected experts in the field of each nominee's work and the list is shortened to around 15 final candidates. The Committee then writes a report with recommendations and sends it to the Academy or other corresponding institution, depending on the prize. As an example of institute size, the Assembly for the Prize for Medicine has 50 members. The members of the institution meet and vote to select the winner.
The process varies slightly between the different disciplines. For instance, Literature is rarely awarded to collaborators but the other prizes often involve multiple names.
No posthumous nominations
Posthumous nominations for the Prize are not allowed. This has sometimes sparked criticism that people deserving of a Nobel Prize did not receive the award because they died before being nominated. In two cases the Prize has been awarded posthumously to people who were nominated when they were still alive. This was the case with
UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and
Erik Axel Karlfeldt — both of whom were awarded the prize in the years they died.
Since 1974, awards have not been allowed for a deceased person. William Vickrey died before he could receive the prize, but after it was announced.
Criticism of the prize
The Prize has been criticized over the years, with people suggesting that formal agreements and name recognition are more important than actual achievements in the process of deciding who is awarded the Prize. Perhaps the most infamous case of this was in 1973 when
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared the Peace Prize for bringing peace to
Vietnam, even though the
War in Vietnam was ongoing at the time. Le Duc Tho declined the award, for the stated reason that peace had not been achieved. There has also been widespread criticism of the 1994 Peace Prize award to
Yasser Arafat.
Failure to recognise similar achievements
Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times in between 1937 to 1948 but never won it. Research indicates that the Authority was probably planning to give him the award in 1948; however, he was assassinated in that year. The committee reportedly considered a posthumous award but ultimately decided against it, instead choosing not to award the Nobel Peace Prize to anybody for that particular year.
The strict rules against a Prize being awarded to more than three people at once is also a cause for controversy. Where a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators, inevitably one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, a Prize was awarded to
Koichi Tanaka and
John Fenn for the development of
mass spectrometry in protein chemistry, failing to recognise the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.
Similarly, the rule against posthumous prizes often fails to recognise important achievements by a collaborator who happens to have died before the prize is awarded. For example,
Rosalind Franklin made some of the key developments into the discovery of the structure of
DNA in 1953, but she died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and the Prize was awarded to
Francis Crick,
James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins in 1962.
Criticism was levied towards the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, specifically the recognition of
Roy Glauber and not
George Sudarshan for the award. While citation counts indicate that Glauber's 1963 papers are the more widely referenced, it is clear that both made important contributions to the fields of quantum optics and coherence theory. Here again, the untimely death of Len Mandel and Dan Walls - who also made seminal contributions - removed these scientists, unfortunately, from the running.
Similarly, the 2000 Nobel prize in Chemistry "For the discovery and development of conductive organic polymers" ignored the earlier discovery of equally highly-conductive
Charge transfer complex polymers, Weiss
et als 1963 report of high conductivity in iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole , and the prior report of a working organic electronic device with a high-conductivity "ON" state.
Lack of a mathematics prize
There are several possible reasons why Nobel created no Prize for mathematics. Nobel's will speaks of prizes for those
inventions or discoveries of greatest practical benefit to mankind, possibly having in mind practical rather than theoretical works. Mathematics was not considered a practical science from which humanity could benefit, a key purpose for the Nobel Foundation.
One other possible reason was that there was already a well known Scandinavian prize for mathematicians. The existing mathematical awards at the time were mainly due to the work of Gösta Mittag-Leffler, who founded the
Acta Mathematica, a century later still one of the world's leading mathematical journals. Through his influence in
Stockholm he persuaded
King Oscar II to endow prize competitions and honor distinguished mathematicians all over
Europe, including Hermite, Bertrand,
Weierstrass, and
Poincaré.
It is often repeated that Nobel refused to endow a mathematics prize because his wife had an affair with Mittag-Leffler. This story is patently untrue, as Nobel never married.
In 2001, the government of Norway began awarding the Abel Prize, specifically with the intention of being a substitute for the missing mathematics Nobel. Beginning in 2004, the
Shaw Prize, which resembles the Nobel Prize, included an award in mathematical sciences. The Fields Medal is often described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics", but the comparison is not very apt because the Fields is limited to mathematicians not over forty years old.
Like the science Nobels, the Crafoord Prize in mathematics is awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy. It is generally considered the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize in the sciences.
Trivia
In the history of the Nobel Prize, there have been only four people to have received two Nobel Prizes. Those are:
- Marie Sklodowska-Curie
Physics [1903]: Discovery of Radioactivity
Chemistry [1911]: Isolation of Pure Radium
- Linus Pauling
Chemistry [1954]: Hybridized Orbital Theory
Peace [1962]: Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Activism
- John Bardeen
Physics [1956]: Invention of Transistor
Physics [1972]: Theory of Superconductivity
- Frederick Sanger
Chemistry [1958]: Structure of the Insulin Molecule
Chemistry [1980]: Virus Nucleotide Sequencing
Additionally, the
International Committee of the Red Cross received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917, 1944, and 1963. The first two prizes were specifically in recognition of the group's work during the world wars.
The only siblings to win Nobel Prizes are
Jan Tinbergen and his younger brother
Niko Tinbergen .
Only one person has the distinction of being an
Oscar winner and a Nobel Laureate. The Irishman,
George Bernard Shaw winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1938.
Other prizes
There are several other well known international prizes and awards in various fields of endeavour, including fields without a Nobel prize, most of which are not as well-known. The best known include the Fields Medal, the Turing Award, the Templeton Prize, and the Wolf Prize. The Templeton Prize is the largest financial annual prize award given to a single person for intellectual merit, worth 795,000
pounds sterling or 1.4 million US dollars in 2006.
| Prize | Areas | Characteristics |
|---|
| Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award | Children and youth literature | Instituted in 2002 in honour of the Swedish children's books author Astrid Lindgren. The prize is awarded annually to an amount of five million SEK. |
| Fields Medal | Mathematics | Awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over forty years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union. |
| Goldman Environmental Prize | Environmental protection | The most lucrative environmental award in the world, it is given annually to grassroots environmental activists from six geographic areas: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. |
| Ig Nobel Prize | Physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace | Organized by the scientific humor journal Annals of Improbable Research , it is a parody of the Nobel Prize given annually for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think". |
| MacArthur Fellowship | All fields of human study | Given by the MacArthur Foundation each year to typically 20 to 40 citizens or residents of the United States, of any age and working in any field, who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work". |
| Kyoto Prize | Arts and philosophy, advanced technology, basic sciences | Awarded annually since 1984 by the Inamori Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Japanese businessman Kazuo Inamori. |
| Right Livelihood Award | Environmental protection, human rights, health, education | Established in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull, is presented annually in the building of the Swedish Parliament to honour those "working on practical and exemplary solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the world today". |
| Schock Prize | Logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts, music | Instituted by the will of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock. The prizes were first awarded in Stockholm, Sweden on 1993 and have been awarded every two years since. Each recipient currently receives 400,000 SEK. |
| Wolf Prize | Agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, arts | Awarded annually since 1978 to living scientists and artists for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among peoples... irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views". |
See also
- Nobel Peace Center
- List of prizes, medals, and awards
- List of Nobel laureates
...
References
External links
- — Official site
- of the
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