Nobel Prize
 |
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).
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.
*
Nobel Prize in Physics (decided by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)
*
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (decided by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)
*
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (decided by
Karolinska Institutet)
*
Nobel Prize in Literature (decided by the
Swedish Academy)
*
Nobel Prize in Peace (decided by the
Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament,
Stortinget)
*
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (decided by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)::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 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.
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,
1895â€"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 in
1901.
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 InstituteSimilar 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(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 who 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.
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
It is said that
Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times in between
1937 to
1948 but indeed 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 (one of Franklin's collaborators) in 1962.
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*
1956 Physics Prize, for the Discovery of the transistor in
1947. To Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain. Starting in 1928
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several transistor designs, including
MOSFETs. Likewise, in
1934.
Oskar Heil also patented a field-effect transistor. Likely, they never built such devices, mainly due to the limitations of pre-WWII materials-processing. But this prior art caused significant later patent problems, including for the Nobel winners. Similarly, in
1948 Mataré and Walker at Westinghouse Paris applied for a patent on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process which they called the "transistron". Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium duodiodes for German radar equipment during
WWII.
*
2000 Chemistry Prize. "For the Discovery and Development of Conductive Organic polymers". to MacDiarmid, Heeger, and Shirakawa. Beginning in
1977, they reported passive high-conductivity in oxidized ("doped") polyacetylenes and related materials , as well as conduction mechanisms, and applications (especially batteries). The Prize ignored the previous discovery of highly-conductive organic
charge transfer complex compounds (see, e.g. "
Organic Semiconductors" Y. Okamoto and W. Brenner, Reinhold,1964). Further,
John McGinness et al had previously reported
(Science, vol 183, 853-855 (1974)) both the general mechanism of conduction and a metallic conductivity state in another oxidized
polyacetylene or
melanin. This was well-known at the time. E.g., a contemporary news article in the journal
Nature (Vol. 248 April 5 1974, p475) noted this material's "strikingly large conductivity", etc., in wording rather similar to the eventual Nobel citation. This was part of a working active electronic device (a voltage-controlled switch), the "Holy Grail" of organic electronics. This device also demonstrated "negative differential resistance", now a hallmark of organic polymer electronics. It is now in the Smithsonian collection of early electronic devices. McGinness also patented batteries, etc. that overlapped many of the winner's patents. Unfortunately, though in major journals, all this work went uncited by the eventual winners.
For more, see: "An Overview of the First Half-Century of Molecular Electronics" by Noel S. Hush, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1006: 1â€"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. 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.
In the history of the Nobel Prize, there have been only four people to have received two Nobel Prizes. Those are:
*
Marie 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
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 0.67 (twice 0.333 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.
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 or 1.4 million US dollars in
2006.
Other prizes include:
*The
Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an international prize for children and youth literature, was instituted in
2002 in honour of Swedish children's book author
Astrid Lindgren.
*The
Dan David Prize, valued at 1 million US dollars each, is awarded every year in three categories (the past, present, and future).
*The
Goldman Environmental Prize is the most lucrative environmental award;
*The
Fields Medal in
mathematics;
*The
Kavli Foundation will begin awarding prizes in Astrophysics, Nanoscience and Neuroscience every two years from 2008;
*The
Kyoto Prizes are awarded in three categories: Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy.
*The
Léonie Sonning Music Prize;
*The
Millennium Technology Prize is an international award for outstanding technological achievements;
*The
Polar Music Prize;
*The
Pritzker Prize in
architecture;
*The
Right Livelihood Awards (also known as "Alternative Nobel Prizes") are awarded to persons who have made important contributions in areas such as environmental protection, peace, human rights, health etc;
*The
Schock Prizes in
logic and
philosophy,
mathematics,
visual arts and
musical arts;
*The
Templeton Prize in
religion;
*The
Turing Award in
computing;
*The
Wollaston Medal in
geology;
*The
Wolf Prize in
Agriculture,
Chemistry,
Mathematics,
Medicine,
Physics, and an
Arts prize that rotates annually between architecture, music, painting and sculpture. Each prize consists of a diploma and USD$100,000;
*The
Ansari X Prize, a one-time prize of 10 million US dollars is for a
non-government organization to launch a reusable manned
spacecraft. In
October 2004, a plan for future
WTN X Prizes - multi-million dollar awards similar to the Ansari X Prize, designed to incentivize certain technological (especially engineering) solutions - was announced by the
X Prize Foundation and the
World Technology Network.
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.
The humorous
Ig Nobel Prize is a parody which annually honours research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think".
*The
Nobel Peace Center*
List of prizes, medals, and awards*
List of Nobel laureates**
Nobel Prize laureates by country**
Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation**
Female Nobel Prize laureates**
List of Jewish Nobel Prize winners**
List of Muslim Nobel Prize winners*
Nobel Prize in Physics*
Nobel Prize in Chemistry*
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine*
Nobel Prize in Literature*
Nobel Peace Prize*
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel*
Lenin Peace Prize*
Nobel Prize controversies*
Nobelprize.org — Official site
*
The Nobel Prize Internet Archive*
Why is there no Nobel in computer science?*
Why is there no Nobel in mathematics?*
The Nobel Committees of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences*
The Nobel Committee of the
Karolinska Institute*
The Swedish Academy*
The Norwegian Nobel Committee*
Britannica Spotlight: Guide to the Nobel Prizes*
CNN: Nobel Centennial*
Nobel Prize in English Literature â€" awards to Indian-English writers
zh-yue:諾è²çˆ¾çŽ
