After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist
Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prizes. This specified that
annual prizes are to be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of
physics,
chemistry,
physiology or medicine,
literature, and
peace. Similarly, the
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes. Since the first award in 1901,
the prizes have occasionally engendered criticism[1]
and controversy.[2]
Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall
have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". One prize, he stated,
should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important
'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Awards
committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions: 77%
of Nobel Prizes in physics have been given to discoveries, compared with
only 23% to inventions.[3][4]
In addition, the scientific prizes typically reward contributions over
an entire career rather than a single year.
No Nobel Prize was established for
mathematics and many other scientific and cultural fields.[5]
An early theory that jealousy led Nobel to omit a prize to mathematician
Gösta Mittag-Leffler[6][7]
was refuted because of timing inaccuracies. Another possibility is that
Nobel did not consider mathematics as a "practical" discipline.[8]
Both the
Fields Medal and the
Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".[9][10]
The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for
Literature,[11][12][13][14]
Peace[15]
and Economics.[16][17]
Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics
most often discerned political bias and
Eurocentrism in the result.[18][19][20][21]
The interpretation of Nobel's original words concerning the Literature
prize have been repeatedly revised.
Chemistry
The 2008 prize was awarded to
Osamu Shimomura,
Martin Chalfie and
Roger Y. Tsien for their work on
green fluorescent protein or GFP. However,
Douglas Prasher was the first to clone the GFP gene and suggested
its use as a biological tracer. Martin Chalfie stated, "Douglas
Prasher's work was critical and essential for the work we did in our
lab. They could've easily given the prize to Douglas and the other two
and left me out."[22]
Prasher's accomplishments were not recognized and he lost his job. When
the Nobel was awarded in 2008, Prasher was working as a courtesy shuttle
bus driver in Huntsville Alabama.[23]
The 2000 prize "for the Discovery and Development of
Conductive polymers",[24]
to
Alan J. Heeger,
Alan MacDiarmid, and
Hideki Shirakawa, cited the 1977 discovery of passive
high-conductivity in oxidized iodine-doped
polyacetylene black and related materials.[25]
However, there were several earlier reports of electrical conductivity
in polymeric materials.[26][27]
14 years earlier, Weiss and coworkers in Australia had reported
equivalent high electrical conductivity in a similar compound—oxidized,
iodine-doped
polypyrrole black.[28][29][30]
Eventually, the Australian group achieved resistances as low as 0.03
ohm/cm.[31][32]
Slightly later, DeSurville and coworkers reported high conductivity in a
polyaniline.[27][33]
Moreover, three years before,
John McGinness and coworkers reported an active organic polymer
electronic device in the journal Science.[34][35]
In the "ON" state it showed almost metallic conductivity. This device is
now on the "Smithsonian chips" list of key discoveries in semiconductor
technology.[36]
Thus, Inzelts textbook
[37] states that the Nobel's "...'discovery of conducting
polymers' is an exaggeration..". and it was one in a sequence of such
discoveries. Nevertheless, Inzelt says that Heeger, MacDiarmid and
Shirakawa played a key role in the "development" of such polymers and
actually launched the modern field.
The 1993 prize credited
Kary Mullis with the development of the
polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method, a central technique in
molecular biology which allowed for the amplification of specified
DNA sequences. However, others claimed that Norwegian scientist
Kjell Kleppe, together with 1968 Nobel Prize laureate
H. Gobind Khorana, had an earlier and
better claim to the discovery dating from 1969.[38]
Mullis' co-workers at that time denied that he was solely responsible
for the idea of using
Taq polymerase in the PCR process.[citation
needed] Rabinow raised the issue of whether or not
Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it.[39]
However, Khudyakov and Howard Fields claimed "the full potential [of
PCR] was not realized" until Mullis' work in 1983.[40]
The 1961 prize for carbon assimilation in plants awarded to
Melvin Calvin was controversial because it ignored the contributions
of
Andrew Benson and
James Bassham. While originally named the
Calvin cycle, many biologists and botanists now refer to the
Calvin-Benson, Benson-Calvin, or Calvin-Benson-Bassham (CBB) cycle.
Three decades after winning the Nobel, Calvin published an autobiography
titled "Following the trail of light" about his scientific journey which
didn't mention Benson.
Henry Eyring (1901–1981) allegedly failed to receive the prize
because of his
Mormon faith.[41]
(It is also possible that the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not understand Eyring's theory
until it was too late to award him the Nobel; the academy awarded him
the
Berzelius Medal in 1977 as partial compensation.[42])
Dmitri Mendeleyev, who originated the
periodic table of the
elements, never received a Nobel Prize. He completed his first
periodic table in 1869. However, a year earlier, another chemist,
Julius Lothar Meyer, had reported a somewhat similar table. In 1866
John Alexander Reina Newlands, presented a paper that first proposed
a periodic law. However, none of these tables were correct—the 19th
century tables arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic
weight (or
atomic mass). It was left to
Henry Moseley to base the periodic table on the
atomic number (the number of protons). Mendeleyev died in 1907, six
years after the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. He came within one vote
of winning in 1906, but died the next year. Hargittai claimed that
Mendeleyev's omission was due to behind-the-scenes machinations of one
dissenter on the Nobel Committee who disagreed with his work.[43]
Gilbert N. Lewis, the originator of the
Lewis dot structure and discoverer of the
Covalent bond, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 35 times and never
won once[citation
needed]. Lewis was found dead in his lab on the
same day he had lunch with
Irving Langmuir, 1932 recipient of the Chemistry prize. It is
speculated that this was suicide[citation
needed].
Economics
Economics was not on Nobel's original list of prize disciplines. The
Bank of Sweden created it in 1969. Although governed by the same
rules as the others, this prize was criticized by many, including
members of the Nobel Family, for violating Nobel's intent. As of 2010,
faculty of the
University of Chicago had garnered nine Prizes—far more than any
other university. This led to claims of bias against alternative or
heterodox economics.[who?]
The 2008 prize went to
Paul Krugman "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of
economic activity". Krugman was a fierce critic of
George W. Bush. The award produced charges of a left-wing
bias, with headlines such as "Bush critic wins 2008 Nobel for
economics", prompting the prize committee to deny "the committee has
ever taken a political stance."[44]
The 1994 prize to
John Forbes Nash and others "for their pioneering analysis of
equilibria in the
theory of non-cooperative games" caused controversy within the
selection committee because of Nash'
mental illness and alleged
anti-Semitism.[45]
The controversy resulted in a change to the governing committee: members
served three year instead of unlimited terms[46]
and the prize's scope expanded to include political science, psychology,
and sociology.[46][47]
The 1976 prize was awarded to
Milton Friedman "for his achievements in the fields of consumption
analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the
complexity of stabilisation policy". The award caused international
protests, mostly by the radical left,[48]
ostensibly because of Friedman's brief association with
Chilean
dictator
Augusto Pinochet. During March 1975 Friedman visited Chile and gave
lectures on inflation, meeting with Pinochet and other government
officials.[49]
Literature
The Prize in Literature has a history of controversial awards and
notorious snubs. More indisputably major authors have been ignored by
the Nobel Committee than have been honored by it, including
Marcel Proust,
Ezra Pound,
James Joyce,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Virginia Woolf,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Gertrude Stein,
August Strindberg,
John Updike,
Arthur Miller,
Bertolt Brecht,
Yannis Ritsos, often for political or extra-literary reasons.[50]
Conversely, many writers whom subsequent criticism regarded as minor,
inconsequential or transitional won the prize.
From 1901 to 1912, the committee's work reflected an interpretation
of the "ideal direction" stated in Nobel's will as "a lofty and sound
idealism", which caused
Leo Tolstoy,
Henrik Ibsen,
Émile Zola and
Mark Twain to be rejected. Sweden's historic antipathy towards
Russia was cited as the reason neither
Tolstoy nor
Anton Chekhov took the prize. During World War I and its immediate
aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality, favoring
writers from non-combatant countries.[51]
The heavy focus on European authors, and Swedes in particular, is the
subject of mounting criticism, including from major Swedish newspapers.[52]
The majority of the laureates have been European. Swedes received more
prizes than all of Asia. In 2008,
Horace Engdahl, then the permanent secretary of the Academy,
declared that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and
that "the US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough
and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."[53]
In 2009, Engdahl's replacement,
Peter Englund, rejected this sentiment ("In most language areas ...
there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and
that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well,") and
acknowledged the Eurocentric bias of the selections, saying that, "I
think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature
written in Europe and in the European tradition."[54]
The 2009 prize awarded to
Herta Müller was attacked because many US literary critics and
professors had never heard of Müller before.[55]
This reignited criticism that the committee was too Eurocentric.[56][57]
The 2005 prize went to
Harold Pinter "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under
everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".. The
award was delayed for some days, apparently due to
Knut Ahnlund's resignation. In turn, this renewed speculation about
a "political element" existing in the Swedish Academy's awarding of the
Prize.[58]
Although poor health prevented him from giving his controversial Nobel
Lecture, "Art,
Truth and Politics", in person, he appeared on video, which was
simultaneously transmitted on Britain's
Channel Four.[59]
The issue of "political stance" was also raised in response to
Orhan Pamuk and
Doris Lessing, prizewinners in 2006 and 2007, respectively.[60]
The 2004 prize was awarded to
Elfriede Jelinek. Inactive since 1996 Academy member Knut Ahnlund
resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable
damage" to the prize's reputation.[61][62]
The 1997 prize went to Italian performance artist
Dario
Fo and was initially considered "rather lightweight" by some
critics, as he was seen primarily as a performer and had previously been
censured by the Roman Catholic Church.[63]
Salman Rushdie and
Arthur Miller had been favored to receive the Prize, but a committee
member was later quoted as saying that they would have been "too
predictable, too popular."[64]
The 1974 prize was denied to
Graham Greene,
Vladimir Nabokov, and
Saul Bellow in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors
Eyvind Johnson and
Harry Martinson—both Nobel judges—and unknown outside their home
country. Bellow won in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov took home the
prize.[65]
The 1970 prize was awarded to
Soviet dissident
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm
for fear that the
Soviet Union would prevent his return. His works there were
available only in
samizdat-published, clandestine form. After the Swedish government
refused to hold a public award ceremony and lecture at its Moscow
embassy, Solzhenitsyn refused the award altogether, commenting that the
conditions set by the Swedes (who preferred a private ceremony) were "an
insult to the Nobel Prize itself." Solzhenitsyn later accepted the award
on 10 December 1974, after the Soviet Union banished him.[66]
Czech writer
Karel Čapek's "War With the Newts" was considered too offensive to
the German government, and he declined to suggest a non-controversial
publication that could be cited in its stead ("Thank you for the good
will, but I have already written my doctoral dissertation").[67]
He never received a prize.
French novelist and intellectual
André Malraux was considered for the Literature prize in the 1950s,
according to
Swedish Academy archives studied by newspaper
Le
Monde on their opening in 2008. Malraux was competing with
Albert Camus, but was rejected several times, especially in 1954 and
1955, "so long as he does not come back to novel", while Camus won the
prize in 1957.[68]
W. H. Auden's missing prize was attributed to errors in his
translation of 1961
Peace Prize winner
Dag Hammarskjöld's Vägmärken (Markings)[69]
and to statements that Auden made during a Scandinavian lecture tour
suggesting that Hammarskjöld was, like Auden, homosexual.[70]
Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges was nominated several times but never won. Edwin
Williamson, Borges's biographer, stated that the author's support of
Argentine and Chilean right-wing military dictators may have been a
factor.[71]
Borges' failure to win the Nobel Prize contrasts with awards to writers
who openly supported left-wing dictatorships, including
Joseph Stalin, in the case of
Jean Paul Sartre and
Pablo Neruda.[72][73]
The academy's refusal to express support for
Salman Rushdie in 1989, after
Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini issued a
fatwā on
his life led two Academy members to resign.[74][75]
Peace
Nobel Peace Prize controversies often reach beyond the academic
community that surrounds them. Awards have been called politically
motivated, premature, or guided by a faulty definition of what
constitutes work for peace.[76]
The
2010 prize went to
Liu
Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human
rights in China". Liu was imprisoned at the time of the award and
neither he nor his family were allowed to attend the ceremony. The
Chinese government alleged that Liu did not promote "international
friendship, disarmament, and peace meetings", the prize's stated goal.[77]
They further alleged that Liu Xiaobo had participated in organizations
that received funding from the
National Endowment for Democracy, which they claimed brought his
status and the prize itself into question.[citation
needed] Some Chinese groups[who?]
criticized Liu's selection due to his low profile and obscurity within
China and among Chinese youth. Critics such as
Tariq
Ali, Barry Sautman, and Yan Hairong also criticized Liu's selection
for his long support of American invasions of other nations,
particularly Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq.[78][79]
A Chinese group responded by creating a rival award—the
Confucius Peace Prize.
The
2009 prize went to
Barack Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". The award,
given in the first year of Obama's presidency, received criticism that
it was undeserved, premature and politically motivated. Obama himself
said that he felt "surprised" by the win and did not consider himself
worthy of the award, but nonetheless accepted it.[80][81][82][83][84]
Obama's peace prize was called a "stunning surprise" by
The New York Times.[85]
Much of the surprise arose from the fact that nominations for the award
had been due by 1 February 2009, only 12 days after Obama took office.[86]
In an October 2011 interview.
Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
defended the award on narrow grounds:[87]
- [President Obama] "paved the way for new negotiations with the
Russian Federation about nuclear arms. If you look at the will of
Alfred Nobel that goes directly to what he said that the prize
should go to the person that has worked for—he called it reduction
of
standing armies but in today's terms it means arm control and
disarmament."
The 2007 prize went to
Al Gore
and the
IPCC, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater
knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for
the measures that are needed to counteract such change". The award
received criticism on the grounds of political motivation and because
the winners' work was not directly related to ending conflict.[88]
Separately, an individual working for the IPCC at the time,
Michael E. Mann has generated controversy by claiming to be a prize
winner in a 2012 court filing for a defamation suit. The Nobel Committee
has made clear that this is a recurring problem among the many
organizations who win prizes.
The 2004 prize went to
Wangari Maathai "for her contribution to sustainable development,
democracy and peace". Controversially, she was reported by the
Kenyan
newspaper
Standard and
Radio Free Europe to have stated that
HIV/AIDS was originally developed by Western scientists in order to
depopulate Africa. She later denied these claims, although the Standard
stood by its reporting.[89]
Additionally, in a
Time magazine interview, she hinted at HIV's non-natural origin,
saying that someone knows where it came from and that it "...did not
come from monkeys."[90]
The 2002 prize was awarded to
Jimmy Carter for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful
solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human
rights, and to promote economic and social development." The
announcement of the award came shortly after the US House and Senate
authorized President
George W. Bush to use military force against
Iraq in
order to enforce
UN Security Council resolutions requiring that
Baghdad
give up
weapons of mass destruction. Asked if the selection of the former
president was a criticism of Bush,
Gunnar Berge, head of the Nobel Prize committee, said: "With the
position Carter has taken on this, it can and must also be seen as
criticism of the line the current US administration has taken on Iraq."
Carter declined to comment on the remark in interviews, saying that he
preferred to focus on the work of the
Carter Center.[91]
The 1994 prize went to
Yasser Arafat,
Shimon Peres, and
Yitzhak Rabin "to honour a political act which called for great
courage on both sides, and which has opened up opportunities for a new
development towards fraternity in the Middle East." Arafat's critics
have referred to him as an "unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of
promoting violence".[92]
Kåre Kristiansen, a Norwegian member of the Nobel Committee,
resigned in protest at Arafat's award, calling him a "terrorist".
Supporters of Arafat claimed fairness, citing
Nelson Mandela, who had never renounced political violence, and had
been a founder member of
Umkhonto we Sizwe. On the other hand,
Edward Said was critical of Peres and Rabin and the entire
Oslo Accords.[93]
The 1992 prize was awarded to
Rigoberta Menchú for "her work for social justice and ethno-cultural
reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples".
The prize-winner's memoirs, which had brought her to fame, turned out to
be partly fictitious.[94]
The 1989 prize was awarded to the
14th Dalai Lama. The committee's selection was not well-accepted by
the Chinese government, who regards his violent (receiving CIA funding
for staging an unsuccessful violent coup d'état in Tibet)[95]
and nonviolent actions for
Tibetan self-determination as a threat to national security.
Additionally, the Nobel Prize Committee cited their intention to put
pressure on China.[citation
needed]
The 1978 prize went to
Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt during the 1973
Yom Kippur War against Israel, and
Menachem Begin "for the
Camp David Agreement, which brought about a negotiated peace between
Egypt and Israel". Both had fought against British rule of their
respective countries, and Begin was involved in a failed plot to
assassinate German chancellor
Konrad Adenauer.[96]
The 1973 prize went to North Vietnamese leader
Le
Duc Tho and
United States Secretary of State
Henry A. Kissinger "for the 1973
Paris Peace Accords intended to bring about a cease-fire in the
Vietnam War and a withdrawal of the American forces". Tho later
declined the prize. North Vietnam invaded
South Vietnam in April 1975 and reunified the country. Kissinger's
history included the secret 1969–1975 bombing campaign against North
Vietnamese Army troops infiltrating the South via
Cambodia, the alleged U.S. involvement in
Operation Condor—a mid-1970s campaign of kidnapping and murder
coordinated among the intelligence and security services of Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile (see
details), Paraguay, and Uruguay—as well as the death of French
nationals under the Chilean junta. He also supported the
Turkish Intervention in Cyprus resulting in the de facto partition
of the island.[citation
needed] According to
Irwin Abrams, this prize was the most controversial to date. Two
Norwegian Nobel Committee members resigned in protest.[97][98]
When the award was announced, hostilities were continuing.[97][98][99]
The 1945 prize was awarded to
Cordell Hull as "Former Secretary of State; Prominent participant in
the originating of the UN". Hull was
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
Secretary of State during the
SS St. Louis Crisis. The St. Louis sailed from
Hamburg
in the summer of 1939 carrying over 950
Jewish refugees, seeking asylum from
Nazi persecution. Initially, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
showed some willingness to take in some of those on board, but Hull and
Southern Democrats voiced vehement opposition, and some of them
threatened to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
On 4 June 1939 Roosevelt denied entry to the ship, which was waiting in
the Florida strait between Florida and Cuba. The passengers began
negotiations with the Cuban government, but those broke down. Forced to
return to Europe, over a quarter of its passengers subsequently died in
the Holocaust.[100][101][102]
M K Gandhi – "a role model for the generations to come"
(Albert Einstein on Gandhi)
Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, although he was
nominated five times[103]
between 1937 and 1948. A decades-later Nobel Committee publicly declared
its regret for the omission. Geir Lundestad, Secretary of Norwegian
Nobel Committee in 2006 said, "The greatest omission in our 106 year
history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel
Peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace prize, whether
Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question".[104]
The Nobel Committee of the time may have tacitly acknowledged its error,
however, when in 1948 (the year of his death), it made no award, stating
"there was no suitable living candidate". A later committee awarded the
prize posthumously to the Swedish diplomat
Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, who died after being nominated.[105]
One of the most controversial prizes was the prize awarded to
Carl von Ossietzky in 1936, which led two committee members to
resign. In an unprecedented move, King
Haakon VII of Norway was absent from the award ceremony, and the
Norwegian conservative press, including leading daily
Aftenposten, condemned the award. The award led to
Adolf Hitler forbidding any German to receive any of the Nobel
Prizes in the future, and his prize was not allowed to be mentioned in
the German press.[106]
Physics
The 2009 prize was awarded to
Willard Boyle and
George E. Smith for developing the
CCD. However,
Eugene I. Gordon and
Michael Francis Tompsett claimed that it should have been theirs for
figuring out that the technology could be used for imaging.[107]
Half of the 2008 prize was awarded to
Makoto Kobayashi and
Toshihide Maskawa for their 1972 work on
quark
mixing. This postulated the existence of three additional quarks beyond
the three then known to exist and used this postulate to provide a
possible mechanism for
CP violation, which had been observed 8 years earlier.[108]
Their work expanded and reinterpreted research by the Italian physicit
Nicola Cabibbo, dating to 1963, before the quark model was even
introduced. The resulting quark mixing matrix, which described
probabilities of different quarks to turn into each other under the
action of the
weak force, is known as
CKM matrix, after Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa. Cabibbo arguably
merited a share of the award.[109]
The recipient of the other half of the 2008 prize was
Yoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism of
spontaneous broken symmetry in
subatomic physics.[103]
The foundamental step in this field is the
Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model (NJL model), developed together with the
Italian theoretical physicist
Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, who was left out of the prize like Cabibbo.
In recognition to his colleague's work, Nambu asked Jona-Lasinio to hold
the Nobel Lecture at the Stockholm University in his place.[110]
As the prize is awarded each year to at most three people for no nore
than two different research works, the committee was forced to skip one
member each from both the CKM and the NJL workgroups (incidentally, both
of them Italians), a sort of apparently unfair omissions that will
probably become more and more frequent given the larger number of people
involved with key roles in modern scientific research projects.
The 2006 prize was won by
John C. Mather and
George F. Smoot (leaders of the
Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite experiment) for "the
blackbody form and
anisotropy of the
cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR)." However, in July 1983
an experiment[111]
launched aboard the
Prognoz-9[112]
satellite, studied CMBR via a single frequency. In January 1992, Andrei
A. Brukhanov presented a seminar at
Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, where he first reported
on the discovery. However, the Relikt team claimed only an upper limit,
not a detection, in their 1987 paper.[113]
Half of the 2005 prize was awarded to
Roy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of
optical coherence". This research involved
George Sudarshan's relevant 1960 work in
quantum optics, which was allegedly slighted in this award.[citation
needed] Glauber—who initially derided the former
representations, later produced the same
P-representation under a different name, viz., Sudarshan-Glauber
representation or Sudarshan diagonal representation—was the winner
instead. According to others, the deserving
Leonard Mandel and
Daniel Frank Walls were passed over because posthumous nominations
were not accepted.[114]
The 1997 prize was awarded to
Steven Chu,
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and
William Daniel Phillips "for development of methods to cool and trap
atoms with laser light." The award was disputed by Russian scientists[115]
who questioned the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and
techniques, which the Russians claimed to have carried out more than a
decade before.[116]
The 1983 prize went to
William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies
of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical
elements in the universe". Fowler acknowledged
Fred Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of
stellar nucleosynthesis but that was not enough for Hoyle to receive
a share. Hoyle's obituary in
Physics Today notes that "Many of us felt that Hoyle should have
shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with
Edwin Salpeter, its 1997
Crafoord Prize".[117]
The 1979 prize was awarded to
Sheldon Glashow,
Abdus Salam and
Steven Weinberg for the
electroweak interaction unification theory. However,
George Sudarshan and
Robert Marshak were the first proponents of the successful V-A
(vector minus axial vector, or left-handed) theory for weak interactions
in 1957. It was essentially the same theory as that proposed by
Richard Feynman and
Murray Gell-Mann in their "mathematical physics" paper on lthe
structure of the
weak interaction. Actually, Gell-Mann had been let in on the
Sudarshan/Marshak work on Sudarshan's initiative,[118]
but no acknowledgment appeared in the later paper—except for an informal
allusion. The reason given was that the originators' work had not been
published in a formal or 'reputable enough' science journal at the time.
The theory is popularly known in the west as the Feynman-Gell-Mann
theory.[119]
The V-A theory for weak interactions was, in effect, a new Law of
Nature. It was conceived in the face of a series of apparently
contradictory experimental results, including several from
Chien-Shiung Wu, helped along by a sprinkling of other evidence,
such as the
muon. Discovered in 1936, the muon had a colorful history[120]
itself and would lead to a new revolution[121]
in the 21st century.[122]
This breakthrough was not awarded a Nobel Prize. The V-A theory would
later form the foundation for the
electroweak interaction theory. Sudarshan regarded the V-A theory as
his finest work. The Sudarshan-Marshak (or V-A theory) was assessed,
preferably and favorably, as "beautiful" by
J. Robert Oppenheimer,[118]
only to be disparaged later on as "less complete" and "inelegant" by
John Gribbin.[123]
The 1978 prize was awarded for the chanced "detection of
Cosmic microwave background radiation". The joint winners,
Arno Allan Penzias and
Robert Woodrow Wilson, had their discovery elucidated by others.
Many scientists felt that
Ralph Alpher, who predicted the cosmic microwave background
radiation and in 1948 worked out the underpinnings of the
Big Bang theory, should have shared in the prize or received one
independently. In 2005, Alpher received the
National Medal of Science for his pioneering contributions to
understanding of
nucleosynthesis, the prediction of the relic radiation from the Big
Bang, as well as for a model for the Big Bang.
The 1974 prize was awarded to
Martin Ryle and
Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics:
Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the
aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in
the discovery of
pulsars".
Hewish was not the first to correctly explain pulsars, initially
describing them as communications from "Little Green Men" (LGM-1)
in outer space. David Staelin and Edward Reifenstein, of the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, found a pulsar
at the center of the
Crab Nebula. The notion that pulsars were
neutron stars, leftovers from a
supernova explosion, had been proposed in 1933. Soon after their
1968 discovery,
Fred Hoyle and astronomer
Thomas Gold correctly explained it as a rapidly spinning neutron
star with a strong magnetic field, emitting radio waves.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized,
although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was
later recognized as a pulsar.[124]
While Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize,
Bell said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded
to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not
believe this is one of them."[125]
Prize-winning research students include
Louis de Broglie,
Rudolf Mössbauer,
Douglas Osheroff,
Gerard 't Hooft,
John Forbes Nash, Jr.,
John Robert Schrieffer and
H. David Politzer.
The 1969 prize was won by
Murray Gell-Mann "for his contributions and discoveries concerning
the classification of elementary particles and their interactions"
(essentially, discovering
quarks).
George Zweig, then a PhD student at
Caltech, independently espoused the physical existence of aces,
essentially the same thing. The physics community ostracized Zweig and
blocked his career.[126][unreliable
source?][127]
Israeli physicist
Yuval Ne'eman published the classification of
hadrons
through their
SU(3)
flavor symmetry independently of Gell-Mann in 1962,[128]
and also felt that he had been unjustly deprived of the prize for the
quark model.[129]
The 1956 prize went to
John Bardeen,
Walter Houser Brattain and
William Bradford Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors
and their discovery of the transistor effect". However, the committee
did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as
1928,
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern
transistor types.[130]
In 1934,
Oskar Heil patented a
field-effect transistor.[131]
It is unclear whether Lilienfeld or Heil had built such devices, but
they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further,
Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Walker, at
Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 of an
amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré
had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of
germanium diodes for German radar equipment during World War II.
Shockley was part of other controversies[132]—including
his position as a corporate director and his self-promotion efforts.[133]
Further, the original design Shockley presented to Brattain and Bardeen
did not work. His share of the prize resulted from his development of
the superior
junction transistor, which became the basis of the electronics
revolution.[133][134]
He excluded Brattain and Bardeen from the proceeds of this process, even
though the idea may have been theirs.[133]
Another controversy associated with Shockley was his support of
eugenics.[135]
He regarded his published works on this topic as the most important work
of his career.[136]
The 1950 prize went to
Cecil Powell for "his development of the photographic method of
studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding
mesons
made with this method". However,
Brazilian
physicist
César Lattes was the main researcher and the first author of the
historical
Nature journal article describing the
subatomic particle
meson pi
(pion).
Lattes was solely responsible for the improvement of the nuclear
emulsion used by Powell (by asking
Kodak Co. to add more
boron to
it—and in 1947, he made with them his great experimental discovery).
This result was explained by the Nobel Committee policy (ended in 1960)
to award the prize to the research group head only. Lattes calculated
the pion's mass and, with USA physicist Eugene Gardner, demonstrated the
existence of this particle after atomic collisions in a
synchrotron. Gardner was denied a prize because he died soon
thereafter.
The 1938 prize went to
Enrico Fermi in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new
radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". However, in this
case, the award later appeared to be premature: Fermi thought he had
created
transuranic elements (specifically,
hesperium), but had in fact unwittingly demonstrated
nuclear fission (and had actually created only
fission products—isotopes of much lighter elements than uranium).
The fact that Fermi's interpretation was incorrect was discovered
shortly after he had received his prize.
The 1936 prize went to
Carl D. Anderson for the discovery of the positron. While a graduate
student at Caltech in 1930,
Chung-Yao Chao was the first to experimentally identify
positrons through
electron-positron annihilation, but did not realize what they were.
Anderson used the same
radioactive source,
208Tl,
as Chao. (Historically,
208Tl was known as "thorium C double prime" or "ThC",
see
decay chains.) Late in life, Anderson admitted that Chao had
inspired his discovery: Chao's research formed the foundation from which
much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without
sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment.[137]
The 1923 prize went to
Robert Millikan "for his work on the elementary charge of
electricity and on the
photoelectric effect". Millikan might have won in 1920 but for
Felix Ehrenhaft's incorrect claim to have measured a smaller charge.
Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan's
oil-drop procedure and experimental interpretation, over whether
Millikan manipulated his data in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the
electron charge. Allegedly, he did not report all his observations.[138]
The 1903 prize was awarded to
Henri Becquerel (along with
Pierre and
Marie Curie) "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has
rendered by his discovery of spontaneous
radioactivity". However, critics alleged that Becquerel merely
rediscovered a phenomenon first noticed and investigated decades earlier
by the French scientist
Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor.[139]
Other major unrecognized discoveries
None of the contributors to the discovery of
nuclear fission won the prize for Physics. Instead, the prize for
Chemistry was awarded to
Otto
Hahn for his discovery of fission in Berlin in 1938.
Lise Meitner also contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission,[140]
through her collaboration with Hahn. From the beginning, she had worked
with Hahn on the neutron bombardment of Uranium, but left Germany for
Sweden before fission was discovered. Working there with the
experimental data supplied to her by Hahn, she managed, with
Otto Robert Frisch's participation, to incorporate
Niels Bohr's
liquid drop model (first suggested by
George Gamow)[141]
into fission's theoretical foundation. She also predicted the
possibility of
chain reactions.[citation
needed] In an earlier collaboration with Hahn, she
had independently discovered a new chemical element (called
protactinium). Bohr nominated both for this work, in addition to
recommending the Chemistry prize for Hahn. Hahn's assistant,
Fritz Strassmann, was not considered for the Physics prize.[142]
Chien-Shiung Wu disproved the law of the
conservation of parity (1956) and was the first
Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving a
Nobel.[143]
Wu assisted
Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—with
Chen Ning Yang—by providing him in 1956 with a possible test method
for beta decay that worked successfully.[citation
needed]Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a
sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.
Einstein's annus mirabilis
Albert Einstein, awarded a single 1921 Prize out of numerous
nominations.
Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize Award mainly recognized his 1905
discovery of the mechanism of the
photoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics".
The Nobel committee passed on several nominations for his many other
seminal contributions, although these led to prizes for others who later
applied more advanced technology to experimentally verify his work. Many
predictions of Einstein's theories have been verified as technology
advances. Recent examples include the bending of light in a
gravitational field,
gravitational waves,
gravitational lensing and
black holes. It wasn't until 1993 that the first evidence for the
existence of gravitational radiation came via the Nobel Prize-winning
measurements of the
Hulse-Taylor binary system.[144]
The committee also failed to recognize the other contributions of his
Annus Mirabilis Papers on
Brownian motion and
Special Relativity. Often these nominations for Special Relativity
were for both
Hendrik Lorentz and Einstein.
Henri Poincaré was also nominated at least once for his work,
including on Lorentz's relativity theory. However, Kaufmann's
then-experimental results (incorrectly) cast doubt on Special
Relativity. These doubts were not resolved until 1915. By this time,
Einstein had progressed to his
General Theory of Relativity, including his theory of gravitation.
Empirical support—in this case the predicted spectral shift of
sunlight—was in question for many decades. The only piece of original
evidence was the consistency with the known
perihelion precession of the planet Mercury.[citation
needed] Some additional support was gained at the
end of 1919, when the predicted deflection of starlight near the sun was
confirmed by
Arthur Stanley Eddington's Solar Eclipse Expedition, though here
again the actual results were somewhat ambiguous. (A TV movie was made
in 2008 about this.[145])
Conclusive proof of the gravitational light deflection prediction was
not achieved until the 1970s.[citation
needed]
Physiology or
medicine
The 2011 prize was awarded in part to
Ralph Steinman, who died of cancer days before the award, a fact
unknown to the Nobel committee at the time of the award. Committee rules
prohibit posthumous awards, and Steinman's death created a dilemma
unprecedented in the history of the award. The committee ruled that
Steinman remained eligible for the award despite his death, under the
rule that allows awardees to receive the award who die between being
named and the awards ceremony.[146]
The 2008 prize was awarded in part to
Harald zur Hausen "for his discovery of
human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing
cervical cancer". The Swedish police anticorruption unit
investigated charges of improper influence by
AstraZeneca, which had a stake in two lucrative HPV
vaccines.
The company had agreed to sponsor Nobel Media and Nobel Web and had
strong links with two senior figures in the process that chose zur
Hausen.[147]
The other half of the 2008 prize was split between
Luc Montagnier and
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi "for their discovery of human
immunodeficiency virus". The omission of
Robert Gallo was controversial: 106 scientists signed a letter to
the journal Science stating that 'While these awardees fully deserve the
award, it is equally important to recognize the contributions of Robert
C. Gallo', which 'warrant equal recognition'.[148]
Montagnier said that he was 'surprised' that the award had not been
shared with Gallo.[149]
The 2006 prize went to
Andrew Fire and
Craig C. Mello "for their discovery of
RNA interference—gene silencing by double-stranded
RNA". Many of
the discoveries credited by the committee to Fire and Mello, who studied
RNA interference in
Caenorhabditis elegans, had been previously studied by plant
biologists, and was suggested that at least one plant biologist, such as
David Baulcombe, should have been awarded a share of the prize.[150]
The 2003 prize was awarded to
Paul Lauterbur and Sir
Peter Mansfield "for their discoveries concerning
magnetic resonance imaging" (MRI). Two independent alternatives have
been alleged.[151]
Raymond Damadian first reported that
NMR could distinguish in vitro between cancerous and
non-cancerous tissues on the basis of different proton relaxation times.
He later translated this into the first human scan. Damadian's original
report prompted Lauterbur to develop NMR into the present method.
Damadian took out large advertisements in an international newspapers
protesting his exclusion.[152]
Some researchers felt that Damadian's work deserved at least equal
credit.[citation
needed]Separately,
Herman Y. Carr both pioneered the NMR gradient technique and
demonstrated rudimentary MRI imaging in the 1950s. The Nobel prize
winners had almost certainly seen Carr's work, but did not cite it.
Consequently, the prize committee very likely was unaware of Carr's
discoveries,[citation
needed] a situation likely abetted by Damadian's
campaign.[153][154][155]
The 2000 prize went to
Arvid Carlsson,
Paul Greengard, and
Eric R. Kandel, "for their discoveries concerning signal
transduction in the nervous system". The award caused many
neuroscientists to protest that
Oleh Hornykiewicz, who helped pioneer the dopamine replacement
treatment for Parkinson's disease, was left out, and that Hornykiewicz's
research provided a foundation for the honorees' success.
The 1997 prize was awarded to Dr.
Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of
prions. This award caused a long stream of polemics. Critics
attacked the validity of the work, which had been criticized by other
researchers as not yet proven.[156]
The 1993 prize went to
Philip Allen Sharp and
Richard J. Roberts "for their discoveries of
split genes" the discovery of
introns in
eukaryotic
DNA and the mechanism of
gene splicing. Several other scientists, such as Norman Davidson and
James D. Watson, argued that Louise T. Chow, a China-born Taiwanese
researcher[157]
who collaborated with Roberts, should have had part of the prize.[158]
In 1976, as Staff Investigator, Chow carried out the studies of the
genomic origins and structures of
adenovirus transcripts that led directly to the discovery of RNA
splicing and alternative RNA processing at
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on
Long Island in 1977. Norman Davidson, (a Caltech expert in electron
microscopy, under whom Chow apprenticed as a graduate student), affirmed
that Chow operated the
electron microscope through which the splicing process was observed,
and was the crucial experiment's sole designer, using techniques she had
developed.[159]
The 1975 prize was awarded to
David Baltimore,
Renato Dulbecco and
Howard Martin Temin "for their discoveries concerning the
interaction between
tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell". It has been
argued that Dulbecco was distantly, if at all, involved in this
ground-breaking work.[160]
Further, the award failed to recognize the contributions of Satoshi
Mizutani, Temin's Japanese postdoctoral fellow.[161]
Mizutani and Temin jointly discovered that the
Rous sarcoma virus particle contained the
enzyme
reverse transcriptase. However, Mizutani was solely responsible for
the original conception and design of the novel experiment that
confirmed Temin's
provirus hypothesis.[160]
A second controversy implicated Baltimore in the "Imanishi-Kari" affair,
involving charges that
Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a researcher in his laboratory, had
fabricated data. Imanishi-Kari was initially found to have committed
scientific fraud by the
Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), following highly publicized
and politicized hearings. However, in 1996, she was vindicated by an
appeals panel of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which overturned the
OSI's findings and criticized their investigation.[162]
Baltimore's staunch defense of Imanishi-Kari initially drew substantial
criticism and controversy; the case itself was often referred to as "The
Baltimore Affair", and contributed to his resignation as president of
Rockefeller University.[163]
Following Imanishi-Kari's vindication, Baltimore's role was reassessed;
the
New York Times opined that "... the most notorious fraud case in
recent scientific history has collapsed in embarrassment for the Federal
Government and belated vindication for the accused scientist."[163]
The 1973 prize went to
Konrad Lorenz,
Nikolaas Tinbergen and
Karl von Frisch "for their discoveries concerning organization and
elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns". Von Frisch's
contribution was the "dance language" of bees. However, controversy
emerged over the lack of direct proof of the
waggle dance—as exactly worded by von Frisch. A team of researchers
from
Rothamsted Research in 2005 settled the controversy by using radar
to track bees as they flew to a food source.[164]
It turns out that bees, do indeed, use the information contained in the
waggle dance to find food sources.
The 1968 prize went to
Robert W. Holley,
Har Gobind Khorana and
Marshall W. Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code
and its function in protein synthesis". However,
Heinrich J. Matthaei broke the
genetic code in 1961 with Nirenberg in their poly-U experiment at
National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, paving
the way for modern
genetics. Matthaei was responsible for experimentally obtaining the
first
codon (nucleotide
triple that usually specifies an
amino acid) extract, while Nirenberg tampered with his initial,
accurate results (due to his belief in 'less precise', 'more believable'
data presentation).[160]
The 1962 prize was awarded to
James D. Watson,
Francis Crick and
Maurice Wilkins "for their discoveries concerning the molecular
structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer
in living material". It did not recognize critical contributions from
Alec Stokes,
Herbert Wilson, and
Erwin Chargaff. In addition,
Erwin Chargaff,
Oswald Avery and
Rosalind Franklin (whose key
DNA
X-ray crystallography work was the most detailed yet least
acknowledged among the three) contributed directly to Watson and Crick's
insight to solve the DNA molecule's structure. Avery's death in 1955,
and Franklin's in 1958, eliminated them from eligibility.
The 1952 prize was awarded solely to
Selman Waksman "for his discovery of
streptomycin, the first
antibiotic effective against
tuberculosis" and omitted recognition[165]
due his co-discoverer
Albert Schatz.[166]
Schatz sued Waksman over the details and credit of the discovery. Schatz
was awarded a substantial settlement, and, together with Waksman, Schatz
was legally recognized as a co-discoverer.
The 1949 prize was awarded to Portuguese neurologist
Antonio Egas Moniz "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of
leucotomy (lobotomy)
in certain psychoses". Soon after, Dr.
Walter Freeman developed the
transorbital lobotomy, which was easier to carry out. Criticism was
raised because the procedure was often prescribed injudiciously and
without regard for
medical ethics. Popular acceptance of the procedure had been
fostered by enthusiastic press coverage such as a 1938 "New
York Times" report. Endorsed by such influential publications as
The New England Journal of Medicine, in the three years following
the Prize, some 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States
alone, and many more throughout the world.[167][168]
Joseph Kennedy, father of U.S. President
John F. Kennedy, had his daughter
Rosemary lobotomized when she was in her twenties. The procedure
later fell into disrepute and was prohibited in many countries.[169]
The 1945 prize was awarded to
Ernst Boris Chain,
Howard Florey and
Alexander Fleming "for the discovery of
penicillin and its curative effect in various
infectious diseases". Fleming accidentally stumbled upon the
then-unidentified
fungal
mold.
However, some critics pointed out that Fleming did not in fact discover
penicillin, that it was technically a rediscovery; decades before
Fleming, Sir
John Scott Burdon-Sanderson,
William Roberts (physician),
John Tyndall and
Ernest Duchesne) had already done studies[118]
and research[170]
on its useful properties and medicinal characteristics.[171]
Moreover, according to Fleming himself, the first known reference to
penicillin was from
Psalm
51: "Purge me with
hyssop and I shall be clean". Meanwhile, he had learned from
mycologist Charles Thom (the same who helped Fleming establish the
identity of the mysterious fungal mold)[172]
that "Penicillium
notatum" was first recognized by Per Richard Westling, a Swedish
pharmacist, from a specimen of decayed
hyssop. In this award, as it had been pointed out, several deserving
contemporaneous contributors had been
left out of the Prize altogether.[citation
needed]
The 1926 prize went to
Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, "for his discovery of the
Spiroptera carcinoma", a microbial parasite which Fibiger claimed
was the cause of cancer. This "finding" was discredited by other
scientists shortly thereafter.[citation
needed]
The 1923 prize was awarded to
Frederick Banting and
John Macleod "for the discovery of
insulin".
Banting clearly deserved the prize, however, the choice of Macleod as
co-winner was controversial. Banting initially refused to accept the
prize with Macleod, claiming that he did not deserve it, and that
Charles Best was the proper corecipient. Banting complained that
Macleod's initial contribution to the project had only been to let
Banting use his lab space at the
University of Toronto while Macleod was on vacation. Macleod also
loaned Banting a lab assistant (Best) to help with the experiments, and
ten dogs for experimentation. Banting and Best achieved limited success
with their experiments, which they presented to Macleod in the fall of
1921. Macleod pointed out design flaws in some experiments. He then
advised Banting and Best to repeat the experiments with better lab
equipment, more dogs, and better controls and provided better lab space.
He also began paying Banting. The salary made their relationship
official, and equivalent to the present-day relationship between a
postdoctoral researcher and supervisor. Banting and Best repeated
the experiments, which were conclusive. While Banting's original method
of isolating insulin worked, it was too labor-intensive for large-scale
production. Best then set about finding a biochemical extraction method.
Meanwhile,
James Bertram Collip, a chemistry professor on sabbatical from the
University of Alberta joined what was now Macleod's team, and sought
a biochemical method for extracting insulin in parallel with Best. Best
and Collip simultaneously succeeded. The fact that Banting was being
supported with money from Macleod's research grants was no doubt a
factor in the Nobel Committee's decision. When Banting agreed to share
the prize, he gave half his prize money to Best. Macleod, in turn, split
his half of the prize money with Collip. Later, it became known that
Nicolae Paulescu, a Romanian professor, had been working on diabetes
since 1916, and may have isolated insulin (which he called pancreatine)
about a year before the Canadians.[173][174]
Oswald Theodore Avery, best known for his
1944 demonstration that
DNA is the
cause of
bacterial transformation and potentially the material of which
genes are composed, never received a Nobel Prize, although two Nobel
Laureates,
Joshua Lederberg and
Arne Tiselius, praised him and his work as a pioneering platform for
further genetic research. According to
John M. Barry, in his book The Great Influenza, the committee
was preparing to award Avery, but declined to do so after the DNA
findings were published, fearing that they would be endorsing findings
that had not yet survived significant scrutiny.[citation
needed]
Laureates who declined the prize
Involuntary
refusals
In 1936, the Nobel Foundation offended
Adolf Hitler when it awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize to
Carl von Ossietzky, a German writer who publicly opposed Hitler and
Nazism.[175]
(At that time, the prize was awarded the following year.) Hitler reacted
by issuing a decree on 31 January 1937 that forbade German nationals to
accept any Nobel Prize. Awarding the peace prize to Ossietzky was itself
considered controversial. While Fascism had few supporters outside Italy
and Germany, those who did not necessarily sympathize felt that it was
wrong to (deliberately) offend Germany.[176][177]
Hitler's decree prevented three Germans from accepting their prizes:
Gerhard Domagk (1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine),
Richard Kuhn (1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and
Adolf Butenandt (1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). The three later
received their certificates and medals, but not the prize money.[178]
On 19 October 1939, about a month and a half after
World War II had started, the Nobel Committee of the
Karolinska Institutet met to discuss the 1939 prize in physiology or
medicine.[179]
The majority favored Domagk and someone leaked the news, which traveled
to Berlin. The Kulturministerium in Berlin replied with a telegram
stating that a Nobel Prize to a German was "completely unwanted" (durchaus
unerwünscht).[180]
Despite the telegram, a large majority voted for Domagk on
26 October 1939.[181]
Once he learned of the decision, hopeful that it only applied to the
peace prize, Domagk sent a request to the Ministry of Education in
Berlin asking permission to accept the prize.[182]
Since he did not receive a reply after more than a week had passed, he
felt it would be impolite to wait any longer without responding, and on
3 November 1939 he wrote a letter to the Institute thanking them for the
distinction, but added that he had to wait for the government's approval
before he could accept the prize.[183]
He was subsequently ordered to send a copy of his letter to the Ministry
for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, and on 17 November 1939, was arrested by
the
Gestapo.[184][185]
He was released after one week, then arrested again. On
28 November 1939, he was forced by the Kulturministerium to sign a
prepared letter, addressed to the Institute, declining the prize.[183][186]
Since the Institute had already prepared his medal and diploma before
the second letter arrived, they were able to award them to him later,
during the 1947 Nobel festival. Domagk was the first to decline a prize.
Due to his refusal, the procedures changed so that if a laureate
declined the prize or failed to collect the prize award before 1 October
of the following year, the money would not be awarded.[187]
On 9 November 1939, the
Royal Academy of Sciences awarded the 1938 Prize for Chemistry to
Kuhn and half of the 1939 prize to Butenandt.[181][188]
When notified of the decision, the German scientists were forced to
decline by threats of violence.[188][189]
Their refusal letters arrived in Stockholm after Domagk's refusal
letter, helping to confirm suspicions that the German government had
forced them to refuse the prize.[184][188][189]
In 1948, they wrote to the Academy expressing their gratitude for the
prizes and their regret for being forced to refuse them in 1939. They
were awarded their medals and diplomas at a ceremony in July 1949.
Otto Heinrich Warburg, a German national who won the 1931 Nobel
Prize in Physiology and Medicine, was rumored to have been selected for
the 1944 prize, but was forbidden to accept it. According to the Nobel
Foundation, this story is not true.[190]
Boris Pasternak at first accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in
Literature, but was forced by Soviet authorities to decline, because the
prize was considered a "reward for the dissident political innuendo in
his novel,
Doctor Zhivago."[178][191]
Pasternak died without ever receiving the prize. He was eventually
honored by the Nobel Foundation at a banquet in Stockholm on
9 December 1989, when they presented his medal to his son.
The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo while he was
serving a prison sentence for "subversion of the state," with the
Chinese government not allowing him or his family members to attend the
ceremony.
Voluntary refusals
Two laureates voluntarily declined the Nobel Prize.
Jean Paul Sartre declined the 1964 prize for Literature, stating, "A
writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an
institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form."[192][193]
The second person who refused the prize is
Lê
Đức Thọ, who was awarded the 1973 Peace Prize for his role in the
Paris Peace Accords. He declined, claiming there was no actual peace
in Vietnam.[192]
Nobel rumors
1915 saw a newspaper rumor[194]
(starting with a November 6
Reuters
news agency report from London) along the lines that
Nobel Prize in Physics was to be awarded to both
Thomas Edison and
Nikola Tesla. The story had gone to press in many publications
before a November 15 Reuters story from Stockholm with the announcement
that the prize that year was being awarded to Sir
William Henry Bragg and
William Lawrence Bragg "for their services in the analysis of
crystal structure by means of X-rays".[195][196][197]
There were unsubstantiated rumors at the time that Tesla and Edison had
won the prize and that the Nobel committee had changed recipients when
Tesla and/or Edison refused the award (a claim also made many years
later attributed Tesla).[198]
The Nobel Foundation declined to comment on the rumors other than
saying, "Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize
because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is
ridiculous", further stating a recipient could only decline a Nobel
Prize after he is announced a winner.[199]
Other prizes
Prizes in
non-Nobel domains
Multiple primary fields of human intellectual endeavor-such as
mathematics, philosophy and
social studies-were not included among the Nobel Prizes, because
they were not part of Alfred Nobel's will. When
Jakob von Uexkull approached the Nobel Foundation with a proposal to
establish two new awards for the environment and for the lives of the
poor, he was turned down. He then established the
Right Livelihood Award.
In 2003 purportedly a new Nobel-equivalent Award was also created
especially for mathematics, the
Abel Prize, though the older
Fields Medal is often considered as the mathematical Nobel
equivalent.[200]
However, the Nobel Committee did allow the creation of the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economics. Many people have opposed this expansion,
including the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a
great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel.[201]
In his speech at the 1974 Nobel banquet, awardee
Friedrich Hayek stated that had he been consulted whether to
establish an economics prize, he would "have decidedly advised against
it"[47][202]
primarily because "the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority
which in economics no man ought to possess... This does not matter in
the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is
chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him
down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the
economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians,
journalists, civil servants and the public generally."[202]
The
Kluge Prize, a $1 million dollar prize given by the
John W. Kluge Center at the
Library of Congress, is awarded for lifetime achievement in fields
of humanistic and social science studies that are not included in the
Nobel Prizes, most notably history, philosophy, politics, psychology,
anthropology, sociology, religious studies, linguistics, and criticism
in the arts and humanities.
Alternatives to the Nobel Prizes
Following the announcement of the award of the
2010 Peace Prize to incarcerated Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the
Chinese tabloid
Global Times created the
Confucius Peace Prize. The award ceremony was deliberately organized
to take place on 8 December, one day before the Nobel ceremony.
Organizers said that the prize had no relation to the Chinese
government, the Ministry of Culture or Beijing Normal University.[203]
The
German National Prize for Art and Science was Hitler's alternative
to the Nobel Prize.[citation
needed]
The
Ig Nobel Prize is an American parody of the Nobel Prize.