What is the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize
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Nobel Prize

Original design of Nobel Prize medal. ®© The Nobel Foundation.
Awarded for Outstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine, and economics
Presented by Swedish Academy
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Karolinska Institutet
Norwegian Nobel Committee
Country Flag of Sweden Sweden
First awarded 1901
Official website

The Nobel Prizes (Swedish: Nobelpriserna), as designated in Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, are awarded for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. A prize in economics in memory of Nobel was instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968. The first five prizes were first awarded in 1901, while the first prize in economics was awarded in 1969. All six prizes are widely regarded as the supreme commendations in their subject areas. With the exception of the peace prize, which is handed out in Oslo, Norway, they are all handed out in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

The process of selecting Nobel Laureates is made in a screening process: for the Memorial Prize in Economics, a committee comprising six members; for the Prize in Literature, a committee of five; for the other four Nobel Prizes, a committee comprising five members respectively. 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.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Award ceremonies
* 2 Alfred Nobel's will
* 3 Nomination and selection
o 3.1 Recognition time lag
* 4 Controversies and criticisms
o 4.1 Overlooked achievements
o 4.2 Mathematics prize
* 5 Uniquely distinguished laureates
* 6 See also
* 7 Notes
* 8 External links

[edit] Award ceremonies

The committees and institutions serving as selection boards for the Prizes typically announce the names of the laureates in October. The Prizes are then awarded at formal ceremonies held annually on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. The Nobel Banquet is the banquet that is held every year in Stockholm City Hall in connection with the Nobel Prize.

The Peace Prize ceremony has been held at the Norwegian Nobel Institute (1905-1946); the Aula of the University of Oslo (1947-1990); and most recently at the Oslo City Hall. As of 2005, the other Prize ceremonies have been held at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

Each award can be given to a maximum of three recipients per year. Each consists of a gold medal; a diploma; the extension of Swedish citizenship; and a cash grant. The grant is currently approximately 10 million SEK, slightly more than €1 million (US$1.4 million). The original purpose of the grant was to fund laureates' further work, although nowadays many are retired at the time of award.

If there are two winners in a particular category, the award grant is divided equally amongst 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 is not 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 did not 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 are independent and answer to no legislative authority. Members of the Norwegian government are not permitted to sit on the Committee.

[edit] Alfred Nobel's will
Alfred Nobel.
Alfred Nobel.

The five initial Prizes were instituted by the final will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist, who was the inventor of the high explosive dynamite. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, and signed 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 use 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 Nobel as a "merchant of death."[1] Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million Swedish Kroner, for 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 Scandinavian or not."


– Alfred Nobel[2]

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.[3]

[edit] 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.[4]

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 3rd of February.[5] The submission deadline for nominations for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Economics is January 31.[6] 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 have 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.

[edit] 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" does not 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, 1/2 of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for his work on stellar structure and evolution that was done during the 1930s. As a downside of this approach, not all scientists live long enough for their work to be recognized. Some important scientific discoveries are never considered for a Prize, as all the discoverers are dead by the time their impact is seen.

[edit] Controversies and criticisms

Main article: Nobel Prize controversies

Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awardees and exclusions have generated criticism and engendered much controversy.

[edit] Overlooked achievements

Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times between 1937 and 1948 but never won it. Research indicates that it was likely the Authority would have given him the Prize in 1948, the year in which he was assassinated. The committee apparently considered a posthumous award but ultimately decided against it, instead choosing not to award the Nobel Peace Prize for that year.[7]

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.[8]

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.[9] 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..."[10]

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.[11][12]

[edit] Mathematics prize

There are several possible reasons why Nobel did not create a 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. Because mathematics is not considered as practical a science as the others that are recognized, this would explain the lack of a mathematics prize.[13]

Another possible reason is 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.

Myth has it that Nobel refused to endow a mathematics prize as his wife or his mistress had an affair with the mathematician Mittag-Leffler. However, this story is not supported by any historical evidence: Alfred Nobel never married.[14]

However, some mathematicians have won the Nobel Prize in other fields: Bertrand Russell for literature (1950), Max Born and Walther Bothe for physics (1954). Still others have won the related Nobel Memorial prize in Economics: Kenneth Arrow (1972), Leonid Kantorovich (1975), John Forbes Nash (1994), Clive W. J. Granger (2003), Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling (2005)[15].

Several prizes in Mathematics have 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 under forty years old. A comparison may be made with the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy since 1982. Other comparable prizes are the Abel Prize, awarded by the Norwegian government as of 2001; the Shaw Prize in mathematical sciences given since 2004; and the Gauss Prize, first introduced by the International Mathematical Union and the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians for practical and applied mathematics research.

[edit] Uniquely distinguished laureates

Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize, four people have received two Nobel Prizes:

* Maria Skłodowska-Curie: in Physics 1903, for the discovery of radioactivity; and in Chemistry 1911, for the isolation of pure radium
* Linus Pauling: in Chemistry 1954, for the hybridized orbital theory; and Peace 1962, for nuclear test-ban treaty activism
* John Bardeen: in Physics 1956, for the invention of the transistor; and Physics 1972, for the theory of superconductivity
* Frederick Sanger: in Chemistry 1958, for structure of the insulin molecule; and in Chemistry 1980, for virus nucleotide sequencing

Otto Heinrich Warburg could have been among them, but he was prevented by the Nazi government from accepting his second Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1944.[16]

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.

The Curie family claim the most Nobel Prizes, with five:

* Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911
* Her husband Pierre Curie, Physics 1903
* Their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, Chemistry 1935
* Their son in law Frederic Joliot-Curie, Chemistry 1935

Furthermore, Henry Labouisse, the husband of the Curies' second daughter Ève, was the director of UNICEF when it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965.

William Lawrence Bragg, who was only 25 when he won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics, is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Raymond Davis Jr., who was 87 when he won the 2002 Physics Prize, is the oldest.