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Nobel prize

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Sir Edward Appleton's medal
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Sir Edward Appleton's medal

Nobel Prize Medals.
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Nobel Prize Medals.

The Nobel Prizes are prizes instituted by the will of Alfred Nobel, awarded to people (and also to organizations in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize) 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.

As of November 2005, a total of 776 Nobel Prizes have been awarded (758 to individuals and 18 to organizations).[Nobel Prize Facts] However, a few prize winners have declined the award. There may be years in which one or more prizes are not awarded; however, the prizes must be awarded at least once every five years. The prize cannot be revoked. Nominees must be living at the time of nomination and, since 1974, the award may not be given out posthumously.

Contents

Prize categories

:Also known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, this award was not a part of Nobel's will. It was instituted in 1969 by Sveriges Riksbank, the Bank of Sweden. Although it is awarded with the official Nobel prizes, it is not paid for by his money, and is technically not a Nobel Prize.

The prizes and the ceremony

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 (slightly more than one million Euros or about 1.3 million US dollars). 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 (the Stortinget), 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[First Nobel Prizes - December 10, 1901] The History Channel, This Day in History. 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 in 1901.

The 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:

Similar requirements are in place for the other prizes.

The strictly enforced submission deadline for nominations is January 31.[Nobel Prize nomination and selection process] 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(s).

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 that were nominated when they were still alive. This was the case with UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld (1961, Peace Prize) and Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931, Literature) — 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 (1996, Economics) died before he could receive the prize, but after it was announced.

Criticism of the prize

Main article: Nobel Prize controversies

Inappropriate awards

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 and Shimon Peres.

Failure to recognise similar achievements

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.[Nobel Prize controversy] The Scientist, Volume 3, Issue 1, Page 20021211-03

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 (one of Franklin's collaborators) in 1962.[The Discovery of the Molecular Structure of DNA - The Double Helix]

Other criticism involves the award of the 2003 Nobel chemistry prize in Physiology or Medicine to Paul C. Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for the development of MRI imaging, while neglecting the work of Raymond Damadian. Some have argued that Damadian's exclusion was a politically-motivated decision based upon his creationist views, although others point out that Damadian did not develop (nor suggest) a way of creating images, for which the prize was awarded.

Criticism was levied towards the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics, specifically the recognition of Roy Glauber and not George Sudarshan for the award. Arguably, Sudarshan's work is the most accepted of the two. Though Glauber did publish his work first in 1963, Sudarshan's work later that same year is the work upon which most of quantum optics is based.

Examples from Solid State Physics

For more, see: "An Overview of the First Half-Century of Molecular Electronics" by Noel S. Hush, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1006: 1–20 (2003). Ironically, the science fraud case of Jan Hendrik Schön mainly concerned claims of nano-scale integrated circuit analogs of McGinness' original device.

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.[The Nobel Prize Internet Archive] Mathematics was not considered a practical science from which humanity could benefit (a key purpose for the Nobel Foundation).#redirect

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.[The Prize: Controversy and Landmarks] PBS

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.

Dual Laureates

In the history of the Nobel Prize, there have been only four people to have received two Nobel Prizes. Those are:

:Physics [1903]: Discovery of Radioactivity
:Chemistry [1911]: Isolation of Pure Radium
:Chemistry [1954]: Hybridized Orbital Theory
:Peace [1962]: Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Activism
:Physics [1956]: Invention of Transistor
:Physics [1972]: Theory of Superconductivity
:Chemistry [1958]: Structure of the Insulin Molecule
:Chemistry [1980]: Virus Nucleotide Sequencing
Due to the effects of sharing, Curie effectively obtained 1.25 Nobel Prizes (1.0 for physics, 0.25 for chemistry), Pauling 2.0 (1.0 for chemistry, 1.0 for peace), Bardeen 0.66 (twice 0.33 for physics), and Sanger 1.25 (1.0 for chemistry, then again 0.25 for chemistry). Additionally, Otto Heinrich Warburg, the 1931 Medicine laureate who did not have to share the prize, was selected for a second Nobel Prize in 1944, but was prevented from accepting it due to the policies of the German government. So Linus Pauling was the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, Curie and Sanger the only ones winning more than 1.0 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and Curie also the only one with Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science.

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.

Other prizes include:

Nobel Prize parodies

The humorous Ig Nobel Prize is a parody which annually honours research "that cannot or should not be repeated".

References

See also

External links

 

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