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The Nobel Prizes are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. The original Nobel Prizes covered five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, specified in Nobel's will. A sixth prize, the Prize in Economic Sciences, was established in 1968 by Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden's central bank) in memory of Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards available in their respective fields.Shalev, p. 8.
Except in extraordinary circumstances, such as war, all six prizes are given annually. Each recipient, known as a laureate, receives a Electrum medal plated with 24 karat gold, a diploma, and a monetary award. As of 2023, the Nobel Prize monetary award is , equivalent to approximately . The medal shows Nobel in profile with "NAT. MDCCCXXXIII-OB. MDCCCXCVI" which is his year of birth, 1833 (NAT) and year of death, 1896 (OB). No more than three individuals may share a prize, although the Nobel Peace Prize can be awarded to organisations of more than three people. Nobel Prizes are not Posthumous award, but if a person is awarded a prize and dies before receiving it, the prize is presented.
Between 1901 and 2024, the five Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences (since 1969) were awarded 627 times to 1,012 people and organisations. Five individuals and two organisations have received more than one Nobel Prize. Multiple Nobel Laureates . Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
There is a popular story about how, in 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled "The Merchant of Death Is Dead", in a French newspaper. It was Alfred's brother Ludvig Nobel who had died; the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered. This inspired him to change his will. Historians have been unable to verify this story and some dismiss the story as a myth.
On 10 December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in Villa Nobel in Sanremo, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 63 years old.Sohlman, p. 13.
Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. He composed the last over a year before he died, signing it at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895.Sohlman, p. 7. To widespread astonishment, Nobel's last will specified that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK (c. US$186 million, €150 million in 2008), to establish the five Nobel Prizes.Abrams, p. 7. Owing to skepticism surrounding the will, it was not approved by the Storting in Norway until 26 April 1897.Levinovitz, pp. 13–25. 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.Abrams, pp. 7–8
Nobel's instructions named a Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize, the members of which were appointed shortly after the will was approved in April 1897. Soon thereafter, the other prize-awarding organisations were designated. These were the Karolinska Institute on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June.Crawford, p. 1. The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded; and, in 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly created were promulgated by King Oscar II.
The Nobel Foundation was founded as a private organisation on 29 June 1900. Its function is to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes.Levinovitz, p. 14. In accordance with Nobel's will, the primary task of the foundation is to manage the fortune left to posterity by Nobel. Robert Nobel and Ludvig Nobel were involved in the oil business in Azerbaijan, and according to Swedish historian E. Bargengren, who accessed the Nobel family archive, it was this "decision to allow withdrawal of Alfred's money from Baku that became the decisive factor that enabled the Nobel Prizes to be established". Another important task of the Nobel Foundation is to market the prizes internationally and to oversee informal administration related to the prizes. The foundation is not involved in the process of selecting the Nobel laureates.Levinovitz, p. 15.Feldman, p. 16. In many ways, the Nobel Foundation is similar to an investment company, in that it invests Nobel's money to create a solid funding base for the prizes and the administrative activities. The Nobel Foundation is Tax exemption in Sweden (since 1946) and from investment taxes in the United States (since 1953).Levinovitz, pp. 17–18. Since the 1980s, the foundation's investments have become more profitable and as of 31 December 2007, the assets controlled by the Nobel Foundation amounted to 3.628 billion Swedish kronor (c. US$560 million).Levinovitz, pp. 15–17.
According to the statutes, the foundation consists of a board of five Swedish or Norwegian citizens, with its seat in Stockholm. The chairman of the board is appointed by the Swedish King in Council, with the other four members appointed by the of the prize-awarding institutions. An executive director is chosen from among the board members, a deputy director is appointed by the King in Council, and two deputies are appointed by the trustees. However, since 1995, all the members of the board have been chosen by the trustees, and the executive director and the deputy director appointed by the board itself. As well as the board, the Nobel Foundation is made up of the prize-awarding institutions (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute, the Swedish Academy, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee), the trustees of these institutions, and .
In 2011, the total annual cost was approximately 120 million Swedish krona, with 50 million kronor as the prize money. Further costs to pay institutions and persons engaged in giving the prizes were 27.4 million kronor. The events during the Nobel week in Stockholm and Oslo cost 20.2 million kronor. The administration, Nobel symposium, and similar items had costs of 22.4 million kronor. The cost of the Economic Sciences prize of 16.5 Million kronor is paid by the Sveriges Riksbank.
The Nobel Committee's Physics Prize shortlist cited Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of and Philipp Lenard's work on . The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize.Feldman, p. 134.Leroy, pp. 117–118. In the last decades of the 19th century, many chemists had made significant contributions. Thus, with the Chemistry Prize, the academy "was chiefly faced with merely deciding the order in which these scientists should be awarded the prize".Levinovitz, p. 77. The academy received 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff.Crawford, p. 118. Van 't Hoff was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics.Levinovitz, p. 81.Feldman, p. 205.
The Swedish Academy chose the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature. A group including 42 Swedish writers, artists, and literary critics protested against this decision, having expected Leo Tolstoy to be awarded.Levinovitz, p. 144. Some, including Burton Feldman, have criticised this prize because they consider Prudhomme a mediocre poet. Feldman's explanation is that most of the academy members preferred Victorian literature and thus selected a Victorian poet.Feldman, p. 69. The first Physiology or Medicine Prize went to the German physiologist and microbiologist Emil von Behring. During the 1890s, von Behring developed an antitoxin to treat diphtheria, which until then had been causing thousands of deaths each year.Feldman, pp. 242–244.Leroy, p. 233.
The first Nobel Peace Prize went to the Swiss Henry Dunant for his role in founding the International Red Cross Movement and initiating the Geneva Convention, and jointly given to French pacifist Frédéric Passy, founder of the Peace League and active with Dunant in the Alliance for Order and Civilization.
During the occupation of Norway, three members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee fled into exile. The remaining members escaped persecution from the Germans when the Nobel Foundation stated that the committee building in Oslo was Swedish property. Thus it was a safe haven from the German military, which was not at war with Sweden.Abrams, p. 23. These members kept the work of the committee going, but did not award any prizes. In 1944, the Nobel Foundation, together with the three members in exile, made sure that nominations were submitted for the Peace Prize and that the prize could be awarded once again.
The interval between the award and the accomplishment it recognises varies from discipline to discipline. 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. For example, 2008 laureate Martti Ahtisaari was awarded for his work to resolve international conflicts. However, they can also be awarded for specific recent events. For instance, Kofi Annan was awarded the 2001 Peace Prize just four years after becoming the Secretary-General of the United Nations.Abrams, p. 330. Similarly Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres received the 1994 award, about a year after they successfully concluded the Oslo Accords.Abrams, p. 27. A controversy was caused by awarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama during his first year as US president.
Awards for physics, chemistry, and medicine are typically awarded once the achievement has been widely accepted. Sometimes, this takes decades – for example, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Physics Prize for his 1930s work on stellar structure and evolution. Not all scientists live long enough for their work to be recognised. Some discoveries can never be considered for a prize if their impact is realised after the discoverers have died.
The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm occurs when each Nobel laureate steps forward to receive the prize from the hands of the King of Sweden. In Oslo, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presents the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of the King of Norway and the Norwegian royal family. At first, King Oscar II did not approve of awarding grand prizes to foreigners.
Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.
Each medal features an image of Alfred Nobel in left profile on the obverse. The medals for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature have identical obverses, showing the image of Alfred Nobel and the years of his birth and death. Nobel's portrait also appears on the obverse of 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.Feldman, p. 2. The image on the reverse of a medal varies according to the institution awarding the prize. The reverse sides of the medals for chemistry and physics share the same design. "Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Front and back images of the medal. 1954" , "Source: Photo by Eric Arnold. Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers. Honors and Awards, 1954h2.1", "All Documents and Media: Pictures and Illustrations", Linus Pauling and The Nature of the Chemical Bond: A Documentary History, the Valley Library, Oregon State University. Retrieved 7 December 2007.
All medals made before 1980 were struck in 23 carat gold. Since then, they have been struck in 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold. The weight of each medal varies with the value of gold, but averages about for each medal. The diameter is and the thickness varies between and . Because of the high value of their gold content and tendency to be on public display, Nobel medals are subject to medal theft. During World War II, the medals of German scientists Max von Laue and James Franck were sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark, Hungarian chemist (and Nobel laureate himself) George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia (nitro-hydrochloric acid), to prevent confiscation by Nazi Germany and to prevent legal problems for the holders. After the war, the gold was recovered from solution, and the medals re-cast.Feldman, p. 397.
Two organisations have received the Peace Prize multiple times. The International Committee of the Red Cross received it three times: in 1917 and 1944 for its work during the world wars; and in 1963 during the year of its centenary.Abrams, p. 84.Abrams, p. 149.Abrams, pp. 199–200. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been awarded the Peace Prize twice for assisting refugees: in 1954 and 1981.Feldman, p. 313.
Although no family matches the Curie family's record, there have been multiple with two laureates. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the husband-and-wife team of Gerty Cori and Carl Ferdinand Cori in 1947, and to the husband-and-wife team of May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser in 2014 (along with John O'Keefe). The Physics Prize in 1906 was won by J. J. Thomson for showing that are particles, and in 1937 by his son, George Paget Thomson, for showing that they also have the properties of waves.Gribbin, p. 91 William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence Bragg, shared the Physics Prize in 1915 for inventing X-ray crystallography. Niels Bohr was awarded the Physics Prize in 1922, as was his son, Aage Bohr, in 1975. The Physics Prize was awarded to Manne Siegbahn in 1924, followed by his son, Kai Siegbahn, in 1981. Hans von Euler-Chelpin, who received the Chemistry Prize in 1929, was the father of Ulf von Euler, who was awarded the Physiology or Medicine Prize in 1970. C. V. Raman was awarded the Physics Prize in 1930 and was the uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was awarded the same prize in 1983.Feldman, p. 406 Arthur Kornberg received the Physiology or Medicine Prize in 1959; Kornberg's son Roger later received the Chemistry Prize in 2006. Arthur Schawlow received the 1981 Physics prize, and was married to the sister of 1964 Physics laureate Charles Townes. Two members of the Hodgkin family received Nobels in consecutive years: Alan Hodgkin shared in the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine in 1963, followed by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the wife of his first cousin, who won solo for Chemistry in 1964. Jan Tinbergen, who was awarded the first Economics Prize in 1969, was the brother of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who received the 1973 Physiology or Medicine Prize. Gunnar Myrdal, who was awarded the Economics Prize in 1974, was the husband of Alva Myrdal, Peace Prize laureate in 1982. Economics laureates Paul Samuelson (1970) and Kenneth Arrow (1972; shared) were brothers-in-law. Frits Zernike, who was awarded the 1953 Physics Prize, was the great-uncle of 1999 Physics laureate Gerard 't Hooft. In 2019, married couple Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo were awarded the Economics Prize. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was awarded the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, and her nephew Benjamin List received the Chemistry Prize in 2021. Sune Bergström was awarded the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982, and his son Svante Pääbo was awarded the same prize in 2022. Edwin McMillan, who shared the Prize in Chemistry in 1951, was the uncle of John Clauser, who was awarded the Prize in Physics in 2022.
Among the most criticised Nobel Peace Prizes was the one awarded to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ. This led to the resignation of two Norwegian Nobel Committee members. Kissinger and Thọ were awarded the prize for negotiating a ceasefire between North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973 during the Vietnam War. However, when the award was announced, both sides were still engaging in hostilities.Abrams, p. 219. Critics sympathetic to the North announced that Kissinger was not a peace-maker but the opposite, responsible for widening the war. Those hostile to the North and what they considered its deceptive practices during negotiations were deprived of a chance to criticise Lê Đức Thọ, as he declined the award.Feldman, p. 315Abrams, p. 315. The satirist and musician Tom Lehrer has remarked that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin received the Peace Prize in 1994 for their efforts in making peace between Israel and Palestine.Levinovitz, p. 183. Immediately after the award was announced, one of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members denounced Arafat as a terrorist and resigned.Feldman, pp. 15–16. Additional misgivings about Arafat were widely expressed in various newspapers.Abrams, pp. 302–306.
Another controversial Peace Prize was that awarded to Barack Obama in 2009. Nominations had closed only eleven days after Obama took office as President of the United States, but the actual evaluation occurred over the next eight months. Obama himself stated that he did not feel deserving of the award, or worthy of the company in which it would place him. Past Peace Prize laureates were divided, some saying that Obama deserved the award, and others saying he had not secured the achievements to yet merit such an accolade. Obama's award, along with the previous Peace Prizes for Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, also prompted accusations of a Liberalism bias.
Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Peace Prize in 1991. However, in 2015, when she came into power in Myanmar, she was criticized for being silent on human rights violations under her rule and especially over the Rohingya genocide and calls were made to strip her of her Nobel Peace Prize.
The award of the 2004 Literature Prize to Elfriede Jelinek drew a protest from a member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund. Ahnlund resigned, alleging that the selection of Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art". He alleged that Jelinek's works were "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure". The 2009 Literature Prize to Herta Müller also generated criticism. According to The Washington Post, many US literary critics and professors were ignorant of her work. This made those critics feel the prizes were too Eurocentric. The 2019 Literature Prize to Peter Handke received heavy criticisms from various authors, such as Salman Rushdie and Hari Kunzru, and was condemned by the governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey, due to his history of Bosnian genocide denialism and his support for Slobodan Milošević.
In 1949, the neurologist António Egas Moniz received the Physiology or Medicine Prize for his development of the Lobotomy. The previous year, Walter Freeman had developed a version of the procedure which was faster and easier to carry out. Due in part to the publicity surrounding the original procedure, Freeman's procedure was prescribed without due consideration or regard for modern medical ethics. Endorsed by such influential publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, leucotomy or "lobotomy" became so popular that about 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States in the three years immediately following Moniz's receipt of the Prize.Feldman, pp. 286–289.
Other high-profile individuals with widely recognised contributions to peace have been overlooked. In 2009, an article in Foreign Policy magazine identified seven people who "never won the prize, but should have". The list consisted of Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sari Nusseibeh, Corazon Aquino, and Liu Xiaobo. Liu Xiaobo would go on to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize while imprisoned.
In 1965, UN Secretary General U Thant was informed by the Norwegian Permanent Representative to the UN that he would be awarded that year's prize and asked whether or not he would accept. He consulted staff and later replied that he would. At the same time, Chairman Gunnar Jahn of the Nobel Peace prize committee, lobbied heavily against giving U Thant the prize and the prize was at the last minute awarded to UNICEF. The rest of the committee all wanted the prize to go to U Thant, for his work in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending the war in the Congo, and his ongoing work to mediate an end to the Vietnam War. The disagreement lasted three years and in 1966 and 1967 no prize was given, with Gunnar Jahn effectively vetoing an award to U Thant.
The Literature Prize also has controversial omissions. Adam Kirsch has suggested that many notable writers have missed out on the award for political or extra-literary reasons. The heavy focus on European and Swedish authors has been a subject of criticism. The Eurocentric nature of the award was acknowledged by Peter Englund, the 2009 Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, as a problem with the award and was attributed to the tendency for the academy to relate more to European authors. This tendency towards European authors still leaves many European writers on a list of notable writers that have been overlooked for the Literature Prize, including Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, J. R. R. Tolkien, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, August Strindberg, Simon Vestdijk, Karel Čapek, the New World's Jorge Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Mark Twain, and Africa's Chinua Achebe.Feldman, pp. 56–57.
Candidates can receive multiple nominations the same year. Gaston Ramon received a total of 155 nominations in physiology or medicine from 1930 to 1953, the last year with public nomination data for that award . He died in 1963 without being awarded. Pierre Paul Émile Roux received 115 nominations in physiology or medicine, and Arnold Sommerfeld received 84 in physics. These are the three most nominated scientists without awards in the data published . Otto Stern received 79 nominations in physics 1925–1943 before being awarded in 1943.
The strict rule against awarding a prize to more than three people is also controversial.Levinovitz, p. 61. When a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators, one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, the prize was awarded to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn for the development of mass spectrometry in protein chemistry, an award that did not recognise the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.
According to one of the nominees for the prize in physics, the three person limit deprived him and two other members of his team of the honor in 2013: the team of Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and Tom Kibble published a paper in 1964 that gave answers to how the cosmos began, but did not share the 2013 Physics Prize awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert, who had also published papers in 1964 concerning the subject. All five physicists arrived at the same conclusion, albeit from different angles. Hagen contends that an equitable solution is to either abandon the three limit restriction, or expand the time period of recognition for a given achievement to two years.
Similarly, the prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by an individual or collaborator who dies before the prize is awarded. The Economics Prize was not awarded to Fischer Black, who died in 1995, when his co-author Myron Scholes received the honor in 1997 for their landmark work on option pricing along with Robert C. Merton, another pioneer in the development of valuation of stock options. In the announcement of the award that year, the Nobel committee prominently mentioned Black's key role.
Political subterfuge may also deny proper recognition. Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann, who co-discovered nuclear fission along with Otto Hahn, may have been denied a share of Hahn's 1944 Nobel Chemistry Award due to having fled Germany when the Nazi Party came to power. The Meitner and Strassmann roles in the research was not fully recognised until years later, when they joined Hahn in receiving the 1966 Enrico Fermi Award.
During the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler hindered Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt, and Gerhard Domagk from accepting their prizes. All of them were awarded their diplomas and gold medals after World War II.
In 1958, Boris Pasternak declined his prize for literature due to fear of what the Soviet Union government might do if he travelled to Stockholm to accept his prize. In return, the Swedish Academy refused his refusal, saying "this refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award." The academy announced with regret that the presentation of the Literature Prize could not take place that year, holding it back until 1989 when Pasternak's son accepted the prize on his behalf.
Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, but her children accepted the prize because she had been placed under house arrest in Myanmar; Suu Kyi delivered her speech two decades later, in 2012. Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while he and his wife were under house arrest in China as political prisoners, and he was unable to accept the prize in his lifetime.
The statue and memorial symbol Planet of Alfred Nobel was opened in Alfred Nobel University of Economics and Law in Dnipro, Ukraine in 2008. On the globe, there are 802 Nobel laureates' reliefs made of a composite alloy obtained when disposing of military strategic missiles. Monument of the Planet of Alfred Nobel . Panoramio.com. Retrieved on 28 July 2013.
Despite the symbolism of intellectual achievement, some recipients have embraced unsupported and Pseudoscience concepts, including various health benefits of vitamin C and other dietary supplements, homeopathy, HIV/AIDS denialism, and various claims about race and intelligence. This is sometimes referred to as Nobel disease.
In 2001, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, host of the Nobel Conference, commissioned American composer and alumnus Steve Heitzeg to compose a piece for the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes. The 75-minute Nobel Symphony highlights all the major Nobel Prizes, and includes texts from Nobel laureates such as Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison, Amartya Sen, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rigoberta Menchú, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Nelson Mandela. The Nobel Symphony premiered at Gustavus Adolphus on October 2, 2001, and was restaged by Philip Brunelle and VocalEssence at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on April 18, 2004.
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