Everything about The Nobel Prize totally explained
The
Nobel Prize was established in
Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, and it was first awarded in
Physics,
Chemistry,
Physiology or Medicine,
Literature, and
Peace in 1901. An associated prize,
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was instituted by
Sweden's central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. The Nobel Prizes in the specific disciplines (Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature) and the Prize in Economics, which is commonly "identified with" them, are widely regarded as the most prestigious award one can receive in those fields. The Nobel Peace Prize and its recipients' lectures are presented at the annual Prize Award Ceremony in
Oslo,
Norway, also on
December 10. "Since the Nobel Prize is regarded by far as the most prestigious prize in the world, the Award Ceremonies as well as the Banquets in Stockholm and Oslo on
10 December have been transformed from local Swedish and Norwegian arrangements into major international events that receive worldwide coverage by the print media, radio and television."
Although Nobel's will established the prizes, his plan was incomplete and, due to various other hurdles, it took five years before the
Nobel Foundation could be established and the first prizes awarded on December 10, 1901.
Nomination and selection
Compared with some other prizes, the Prize nomination and selection process is long and rigorous. This is a key reason why the Prizes have grown in importance over the years to become the most important prizes in their field.
The
Nobel Laureates are selected by their respective committees. For the Prizes in Chemistry, Physics and Economics, a committee consists of five members elected by
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; for the Prize in Literature, a committee of four to five members of the Swedish Academy; for the Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the committee consists of five members selected by The Nobel Assembly, which consists of 50 members elected by
Karolinska Institutet; for the Peace Prize, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee consists of five members elected by the Norwegian
Storting (the Norwegian parliament). In its first stage, several thousand people are asked to nominate candidates. These names are scrutinized and discussed by experts in their specific disciplines until only the winners remain. This slow and thorough process, insisted upon by
Alfred Nobel, is arguably what gives the prize its importance. Despite this, there have been questionable awards and questionable omissions over the prize's century-long history.
Forms, which amount to a personal and exclusive invitation, are sent to about three thousand selected individuals to invite them to submit nominations. For the peace prize, inquiries are sent to such people as governments of states, members of
international courts, professors and rectors at university level, former Peace Prize laureates, current or former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, among others. The Norwegian Nobel Committee then bases its assessment on nominations sent in before
3 February. The submission deadline for nominations for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Economics is
January 31. Self-nominations and nominations of deceased people are disqualified.
The names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they've been considered for the Prize. Nomination records are sealed for fifty years. In practice some nominees do become known. It is also common for publicists to make such a claim, founded or not.
After the deadline has passed, the nominations are screened by committee, and a list is produced of approximately two hundred preliminary candidates. This list is forwarded to selected experts in the relevant field. They remove all but approximately fifteen names. The committee submits a report with recommendations to the appropriate institution. The Assembly for the Medicine Prize, for example, has fifty members. The institution members then select prize winners by vote.
The selection process varies slightly between the different disciplines. The Literature Prize is rarely awarded to more than one person per year, whereas other Prizes now often involve collaborators of two or three.
While posthumous nominations are not permitted, awards can occur if the individual died in the months between the nomination and the decision of the prize committee. The scenario has occurred twice: the 1931 Literature Prize of
Erik Axel Karlfeldt, and the 1961 Peace Prize to
UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. As of 1974, laureates must be alive at the time of the October announcement. There has been one laureate—
William Vickrey (1996, Economics)—who died after the prize was announced but before it could be presented.
Recognition time lag
The interval between the accomplishment of the achievement being recognized and the awarding of the Nobel Prize for it varies from discipline to discipline. Prizes in Literature are typically awarded to recognize a cumulative lifetime body of work rather than a single achievement. In this case the notion of "lag" doesn't directly apply. Prizes in Peace, on the other hand, are often awarded within a few years of the events they recognize. For instance,
Kofi Annan was awarded the 2001 Peace Prize just four years after becoming the Secretary-General of the UN.
Awards in the scientific disciplines of physics and chemistry require that the significance of achievements being recognized is "tested by time." In practice it means that the lag between the discovery and the award is typically on the order of 20 years and can be much longer. For example,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983
Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on stellar structure and evolution from the 1930s. Unfortunately, not all scientists live long enough for their work to be recognized. Some important scientific discoveries are never considered for a Prize if the discoverers have died by the time the impact of their work is realized. However, there's one exception in the history:
Wolfgang Ketterle from
MIT won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 on a paper he published in 1995
(External Link
); Ketterle was recognized only six years after his reaching absolute nano-Kevin temperature.
Award ceremonies
The committees and institutions serving as the selection boards for the Nobel Prizes typically announce the names of the laureates in October, with the Prizes awarded at formal ceremonies held annually on
December 10, the anniversary of
Alfred Nobel's death.}} The grant is currently 10 million
SEK, slightly more than
US$1.5 million.
If there are two winners in a particular category, the award grant is divided equally between the recipients. If there are three, the awarding committee has the option of dividing the grant equally, or awarding one-half to one recipient and one-quarter to each of the others. It isn't uncommon for recipients to donate prize money to benefit scientific, cultural or humanitarian causes.
Since 1902, the
King of Sweden has, with the exception of the Peace Prize, presented all the prizes in
Stockholm. At first
King Oscar II didn't approve of awarding grand prizes to foreigners, but is said to have changed his mind once his attention had been drawn to the publicity value of the prizes for Sweden.
Until the
Norwegian Nobel Committee was established in 1904, the President of Norwegian Parliament made the formal presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Committee's five members are entrusted with researching and adjudicating the Prize as well as awarding it. Although appointed by the
Norwegian Parliament (
Stortinget), they're independent and answer to no legislative authority. Members of the Norwegian government are not permitted to sit on the Committee.
The Nobel Prize medals
The Nobel Prize medals, which have been minted by
Myntverket in Sweden and the
Mint of Norway since 1902, are registered trademarks of the
Nobel Foundation. Their engraved designs are internationally-recognized symbols of the prestige of the Nobel Prize. All of these medal designs feature an image of
Alfred Nobel in left profile on their front sides (the "face" of the medal). Four of the five Nobel Prize medals (
Physics,
Chemistry,
Physiology or Medicine, and
Literature) feature the same design on their faces (front sides). The reverse sides of the Nobel Prize medals for Chemistry and Physics share a design. Both sides of the
Nobel Peace Prize Medal and the Medal for
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel are unique designs.
Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awards and exclusions have generated criticism and engendered much controversy.
Overlooked achievements
Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times between 1937 and 1948 but never received the prize, being assassinated on
30 January 1948 two days before the closing date for the 1948 Peace Prize nominations. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had very likely planned to give him the Peace Prize in 1948 as they considered a posthumous award, but ultimately decided against it and instead chose not to award the prize that 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, an award that failed 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 prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by a collaborator who happens to die before the prize is awarded.
Rosalind Franklin, who was key in the discovery of the structure of
DNA in 1953, died of
ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before
Francis Crick,
James D. Watson and
Maurice Wilkins (one of Franklin's collaborators) were awarded the Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1962. Franklin's significant and relevant contribution was only briefly mentioned in Crick and Watson's Nobel Prize-winning paper: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and co-workers...."
In some cases, awards have arguably omitted similar discoveries made earlier. For example, the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery and development of conductive
organic polymers" (1977) ignored the much earlier discovery of highly-conductive
charge transfer complex polymers: the 1963 series of papers by Weiss,
et al. reported even higher conductivity in similarly iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole.
Lack of a Nobel Prize in Mathematics
Although there's no Nobel Prize in
Mathematics, leading to considerable speculation about why
Alfred Nobel omitted it, some mathematicians have won the Nobel Prize in other fields:
Bertrand Russell for literature (1950);
Max Born and
Walther Bothe for physics (1954);
Andrew Fire for physiology or medicine (2006). Other mathematicians have won the
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel:
Kenneth Arrow (1972),
Leonid Kantorovich (1975),
John Forbes Nash (1994),
Clive W. J. Granger (2003),
Robert J. Aumann and
Thomas C. Schelling (2005), and
Roger Myerson (2007).
Several prizes in mathematics have some similarities to the Nobel Prize. The
Fields Medal is often described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics", but it differs in being awarded only once every four years to people younger than forty years old. Other prestigious prizes in mathematics are the
Crafoord Prize, awarded by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1982; the
Abel Prize, awarded by the Norwegian government beginning in 2001; the
Shaw Prize in
mathematical sciences awarded since 2004; and the
Gauss Prize, granted jointly by the
International Mathematical Union and the
German Mathematical Society for "outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside of mathematics," and introduced at the
International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006. The
Clay Mathematics Institute has devised seven "
Millennium Problems," whose solution results in a significant cash award: since it has a clear, predetermined objective for its award and since it can be awarded whenever a problem is solved, this prize also differs from the Nobel Prizes.
Specially distinguished laureates
Multiple laureates
Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize, four people have received two Nobel Prizes:
Although
Otto Heinrich Warburg was nominated for a second Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1944, he wasn't selected that time.
As a group, the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has received the Nobel Peace Prize three times: in 1917, 1944, and 1963. The first two prizes were specifically in recognition of the group's work during the world wars.
The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has won the Peace Prize twice: in 1954 and 1981.
Family laureates
A number of families have included multiple laureates. Kornberg's son
Roger won the 2006 Nobel prize in Chemistry for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.
J. J. Thomson, awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1906, was the father of George Paget Thomson who was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1937.
Jan Tinbergen, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1969, was the brother of Nikolaas Tinbergen who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physioogy or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch.
Age extremes
William Lawrence Bragg, who was only 25 when he shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father William Henry Bragg, is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Leonid Hurwicz, 90, is the oldest Nobel Laureate at the time of the award in the 2007 Prize in Economics.
Further Information
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