The Nobel Prize

By: Alicia Follett and Emma Robbins Biol-4250 History of Biology

● Annual awards by Nobel Foundation in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances.

● Five prizes awarded 1901 : Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine.

● Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel established 1968● Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, &

Economics● Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute awards Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine● Swedish Academy awards Nobel Prize in Literature● Norwegian Nobel Committee awards Nobel Prize in Peace.

BACKGROUND on Nobel Prize

BACKGROUND on Nobel Prize● Between 1901 and 2018, awarded 590 times to 950 people & organizations.

24 organizations & 919 individuals.● Annual ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden ;

Peace Prize ceremony, in Oslo, Norway.● Gold medal, diploma, and a sum of money per Nobel Foundation for that year.

In 2020, 9,000,000 SEK (CDN$1,274,772.34).● Not awarded to deceased person.

Still awarded in case of death between award & receipt● Not shared among more than three individuals, per will of Alfred Nobel,● Peace Prize may be awarded to organizations of more than three people.

HISTORY● Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden● He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor.

Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, mostly from his 355 inventions● In 1888, Nobel was shocked to read his own obituary, titled The merchant of death is dead, in a

French newspaper.This was a misprint as it was his brother who died.

● Nobel's last will stated that his fortune should be used to create prizes for those who have the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.

Nobel gave 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK at the time (CDN $4,390,882.49) to establish the Nobel Prizes.

● The executors of the will, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of the fortune and to organise the awarding of prizes.

HISTORY

● Nobel's instructions named a Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize, the members were selected shortly after the will was approved in April 1897.

● Soon after, the other prize-awarding organizations were designated. These were Karolinska Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

● The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded; and, in 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly created statutes were put into effect by King Oscar II

WWII● Even though Sweden was officially neutral during World War II, the prizes were

awarded in a different manar.● In 1939, the Peace Prize was not awarded as there was no real peace at the start of a

world war. ● No prize was awarded in any category from 1940 to 1942● In 1943 the prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and economic

sciences were awarded, still no peace prize● In 1944 all prizes were once again awarded

The NOBEL FOUNDATION● The Nobel Foundation was founded as a private organization with the objective to

manage the finances left by Nobel’s will and the administrations of the prizes.● The foundation creates a solid funding base for the prizes and the administrative

activities.● The foundation is exempted from taxes in Sweden and the USA.● The foundation is non-profit and as of December 31st, 2007 it controlled 3.628 billion

SEK (CDN $513,874,892.54)● The foundation’s board is made up of five Norwegian or Swedish citizens, the head

of the board is chosen by the King in Counsel and the remaining four spots are appointed by the trustees of the institutions that award the prizes.

The executive director is chosen from members of the board.

AWARD PROCESS : NOMINATIONS● Nominations for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and

economic sciences are by invitation only.● The nomination for the prize for literature can submitted by any qualified person.● For the Nobel Peace Prize anyone can be nominated by a qualified person, but you

cannot nominate yourself● Nomination forms are sent to about 3,000 individuals.● The deadline for the return of the nomination forms is 31 January of the year of

the award.● The Nobel Committee nominates about 300 potential laureates from these forms and

additional names.● The nominees are not told that they are being considered for the prize and the

nominations are sealed for 50 years.

AWARD PROCESS: SELECTION

● The institutions choose the laureate or laureates in each field by majority vote.

● Their decision is announced immediately following the vote.

● A maximum of three laureates and two different works can be selected per award.

● Prizes can only be awarded to individuals except the Nobel Peace Prize which can

be awarded to institutions.

AWARD PROCESS: POSTHUMOUS NOMINATION

● Nominations cannot be made after the person has passed away.

● Until 1974 a person could be awarded the prize if they were nominated while alive and

passed away before the decision has been made.

● Since 1974 the nominee must be thought alive at the time of the decision.

● There has been one case where the prize was announced and the winner passed

away before he could receive the prize.

● There has also been one case where the committee announced the winner unaware

that the laureate has died three days earlier

RECOGNITION TIME LAG● For physiology or medicine in the beginning the awards recognised recent

discoveries, but some of those early discoveries were later discredited.To avoid this the awards increasingly recognised scientific discoveries that has been accepted as true for a year.

● There is a different amount of time between when the work is done and when the award is presented. This varies with the different types of awards

● The Literature Prize is typically awarded to recognise a cumulative lifetime body of work rather than a single achievement.

● The Peace Prize can also be awarded for a lifetime body of work.● Awards for physics, and chemistry are typically awarded once the achievement has

been widely accepted.● Some can never be awarded if they are not widely accepted until after the person has

passed away

NOBEL LECTURE

● Each laureate gives a public lecture on a subject related to the topic of their prize

within 6 month of receiving the prize but it can be later if needed.

● For example, US President Theodore Roosevelt received the Peace Prize in 1906

but gave his lecture in 1910, when his term in office was done.

● The lectures are organized by the same association which selected the laureates.

PRIZE MEDALS

● The medals for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature have a

portrait of Alfred Nobel and the years of his birth and death.

● Nobel's portrait is also on the Peace Prize medal and the medal for the Economics

Prize, but with a slightly different design. For instance, the laureate's name is

engraved on the rim of the Economics medal.

● The image on the reverse of a medal varies according to the institution awarding the

prize, but the reverse sides of the medals for chemistry and physics share the same

design.

PRIZE MONEY● The amount of prize money depends upon how much money the Nobel Foundation can award each

year. ● In 1980 the prize money was 880,000 SEK (CDN $124,644.41). The prize money has increased

since then.● If two laureates share the prize in a 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 other two.

● Laureates receive a diploma uniquely designed by the prize-awarding institutions● Diplomas have the laureates name and most have citation as to why they won the prize

PRIZE DIPLOMAS

CONTROVERSIES AND CRITICISMS● The Nobel Committee has been accused of having a political agenda and awarding

people based on political beliefs rather than who was most deserving.

● They have also been accused of being Eurocentric.

● There has only been 7 LGBTQ Nobel Prize winners

PEACE PRIZE CONTROVERSIES● Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin received the Peace Prize in 1994.

Immediately after the award was announced, one of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members denounced Arafat as a terrorist and resigned.

● The Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama in 2009. The nominations closed eleven days after Obama took office. Obama did not feel like he deserved the award nor to be in at the ceremony. Past winners of the award were divided as to weather or not Obama should’ve won the award. Obama's award along with other recent winners prompted the accusation of the committee being bias towards the left-wing.

LITERATURE PRIZE CONTROVERSIES● In 2004 the Literature Prize went to Elfriede Jelinek which drew protest from a

member of the Swedish Academy leading to his resignation● The member of the Academy said "irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has

also confused the general view of literature as an art". Also saying that Jelinek's works were "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure".

● The 2009 Literature Prize to Herta Müller also generated criticism. This added to the criticism that the committee is Eurocentric as Müller was European and as others were perhaps more deserving.

GENDER DIFFERENCES● In in three stem sciences (physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine) there has

been 53 female laureates out of a total of 607 total laureates.

● There is a bias in nominations where fewer women than men get nominated.

● There is a bigger delay in awarding Nobel Prizes for women's achievements making

longevity a more important factor for women

● There is also a tendency to omit women from jointly awarded Nobel Prizes, especially

if there are four people working together

FIRST NOBEL PRIZE VICTORSThe Nobel Committees collected nominations and awarded the first prizes in each category based on who had the most nominations

Physics: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

Literature: Sully Prudhomme

Chemistry: Jacobus van’t Hoff

Physiology/ medicine: Emil von Behring

Peace: Jean Henri Dunant

CHEMISTRY● Chemistry prizes: 111● Chemistry Laureates: 184● Awarded women: 5● Youngest laureate: 35 Frédéric Joliot● Oldest laureate: 97 John B. Goodenough

CHEMISTRY: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 1900s

● 1901: Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff wins the Nobel prize in recognition of his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions

● 1902: Herman Emil Fischer wins the Nobel prize in recognition of his work on sugar and purine synthesis

● 1903: Svante August Arrhenius wins the Nobel Prize in recognition of his services in the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation

CHEMISTRY: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 1950s● 1950: Otto Paul Hermann Diels and Kurt Alder win the Nobel Prize for their discovery

and development of the diene synthesis

● 1952: Archer John Porter Martin and Richard Laurence Millington Synge win the Nobel Prize for their invention of partition chromatography

● 1954: Linus Carl Pauling wins the Nobel Prize for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances

CHEMISTRY: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the last 5 years2015: Thomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar win the Nobel Prize for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair

2016: Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L Feringa win the Nobel Prize for the design and synthesis of molecular machines

2019: John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino win the Nobel Prize for the development of lithium-ion batteries

PHYSIOLOGY & MEDICINE

Medicine prizes: 110

Medicine laureates: 219

Awarded women: 12

Youngest laureate: 32 Frederick Grant Banting

Oldest laureate: 87 Peyton Rous

PHYSIOLOGY & MEDICINE: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 1900s1901: Emil Adolf von Behring wins the Nobel Prize for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diptheria, by which he opened a new road in the domain of medical science

1904: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov wins the Nobel Prize in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion

1909: Emil Theodor Kocher wins the Nobel Prize for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland

PHYSIOLOGY & MEDICINE: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the 1950s1951: Max Theiler wins the Nobel Prize for his discoveries concerning yellow fever and how to combat it

1952: Selman Abraham Waksman wins the Nobel Prize for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis

1953: Fritz Albert Lipmann wins the Nobel Prize for his discovery of co-enzyme A and its important for intermediary metabolism

Hans Adolf Krebs wins the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the citric acid cycle

PHYSIOLOGY & MEDICINE: An example of some of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the last 5 years2015: William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura win the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites

2018: James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo win the Nobel Prize for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation

MAJOR DISCOVERIES THAT WENT UNRECOGNIZEDTim Berners-Lee (1989) first proposed the idea for the World Wide Web and in 1990 created the firstwebsite

Craig Venter and his colleagues showcased that automated DNA sequencing and an assembly technique called whole genome shotgun could be combined to read out the entire code of a free-living organism

Stephen Hawking (1970) - black hole death. Hawking’s black hole research is firmly embedded in theoretical physics

Dmitri Mendeleev (1896) - invented the periodic table of the elements

Thomas Edison (1931)- the lightbulb

Murray Gell-Mann - the quark (elementary particles)

John Ostram (1969) - Paleontologist who discovered Deinonychus

Only four individuals have won the award more than once.Marie Curie won it in physics in 1903 and in chemistry in 1911Linus Pauling in 1954 in Chemistry, 1962 in PeaceJohn Bardeen in physics 1956 & 1972Frederick Sanger in chemistry 1958 & 1980

Two organizations have won the award more than onceThe International Committee of the Red Cross in WWI, WWII, & 1963The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1954 and 1981

MULTIPLE LAUREATES

FAMILY LAUREATES● The Curie family has received the most prizes● Marie Curie received the prizes in Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre Curie and

alone Chemistry in 1911.● Their daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, received the Chemistry Prize in 1935 together

with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie.● In addition, the husband of Marie Curie's second daughter, Henry Labouisse, was the

director of UNICEF when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965 on that organisation's behalf.

2020 NOBEL PRIZE AWARDS...Have not yet been awarded!

The winners will be announced on October 5th-12th. The awards will be presented on December 10th.

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