The Nobel Prize controversies are contentious disputes regarding the Nobel Prize. Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awards and exclusions have generated considerable criticism and controversy. In particular, the Prizes in Literature and Peace have generated considerable criticism.
Prizes
Upon the 1895 death of Swedish industrialist
Alfred Nobel, his will established the
Nobel Prizes. Currently, Nobel prizes are 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 related to the Nobel Prize. Since the first
Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awardees and exclusions have engendered both criticisms and on-going controversies.
The institution of a Nobel-equivalent Prize in 1969 for economics, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has aroused more disaffection than any other Nobel Prize category. Similarly, the Nobel Prize in Literature, has also generated considerable criticism and controversy. Likewise, the original words of Nobel concerning the Nobel Prize Award in Literature have undergone a series of revised 'interpretations'.
Recipients
Particularly when critics believe another person deserved the prize more, or that a prize has a political message, Nobel awards are often faulted. Many critics assert that the Nobel Prizes are too Eurocentric, the Prize in Literature in particular.
For example, one of the most controversial Peace Prizes was the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama. Even Obama himself stated that he did not feel he deserved the award, and that he did not feel worthy of the company within which the award would place him. Obama's peace prize was largely unanticipated and was called a "stunning surprise" by "The New York Times". However, according to Irwin Abrams the most controversial Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Lê Ðức Thọ, who later declined the prize. Two Norwegian Nobel Committee members even resigned in protest at this award. Kissinger and Thọ received the prize for negotiating a cease-fire between North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973. However, when the award was announced, the hostilities were still continuing. The 2007 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were criticized for having received a largely politically motivated award, and for receiving it over Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who worked to save Jewish children during the Holocaust.
A recent example of a controversial Literary Prize recipient is 2004 winner Elfriede Jelinek. A member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund protested against the award and then resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the reputation of the award. The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Herta Müller also generated some criticism. According to "The Washington Post" many US literary critics and professors had never heard of Müller before. This generated a lot of criticism that the Nobel Prizes are too Eurocentric.
The 2008 economics prize to Paul Krugman, a major critic of George W. Bush, provoked controversy about a "left-wing" bias of the award, prompting the prize committee to deny that "...the committee has ever taken a political stance." that Becquerel had merely rediscovered a phenomenon first noticed and scientifically investigated by the French scientist Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor decades earlier.
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," rather than his often-counter-intuitive concepts and advanced constructs of relativity theory. Until recently, some of these were far in advance of possible experimental verification. Examples include the bending of light in a gravitational field, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing, as well as 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. Even though Einstein was nominated several times, beginning in 1910, for Special Relativity, his other significant contributions in the Annus Mirabilis Papers on Brownian motion and Special Relativity were not explicitly recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee. Often these nominations for Special Relativity were for both Lorentz and Einstein. Henri Poincaré was also nominated at least once for his services to theoretical physics, including his work on Lorentz's relativity theory. However, Kaufmann's experimental results had cast doubt on Special Relativity. These doubts were not resolved until 1915. By this time, Einstein had progressed to the General Theory of Relativity, including his theory of gravitation. Again the empirical support (in this case the predicted spectral shift of sunlight) was in question for many years. The only original evidence was the consistency with the known perihelion precession of the planet Mercury. 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, although the actual results were somewhat ambiguous. Conclusive proof of the gravitational light deflection prediction was not achieved until the 1970s.
Robert Millikan is widely believed to have been denied the 1920 Nobel Prize for Physics owing to Felix Ehrenhaft's claims to have measured charges smaller than Millikan's elementary charge. Ehrenhaft's claims were ultimately dismissed and Millikan was awarded eventually the Physics Prize in 1923. Some controversy, however, still seems to linger over Millikan's oil-drop procedure and experimental interpretation — regarding the validity and ethics of his false claim and data manipulation and selectivity, biased in his favour, in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the electron charge. In particular, that he had reported all his observations when in fact he had omitted a total of 82 drops of experimental data from his final report.
William Bradford Shockley was one of the winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the transistor. There was a controversy hanging over his win — backed up by corroborating accounts from his colleagues Walter Houser Brattain and John Bardeen (the other two Nobelists in the Prize), — which critics characterized as due mainly to Shockley's then-directorship position and self-promotion efforts. The original design Shockley presented to Brattain and Bardeen did not work. His share of the Nobel prize results from his development of the superior junction transistor, which was the basis of the electronics revolution. He excluded Brattain and Bardeen from this process, even though the idea may have been theirs. He regarded his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career. His ideas are largely based on the research of Cyril Burt. He is the only Nobel Laureate who publicly admitted to donating sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded (1980) by Robert Klark Graham in the hopes of passing down humanity's best genes. The repository was shut down in 1999.
Physiology or medicine
Alexander Fleming accidentally stumbled upon the then-unidentified fungal mold that was to bring penicillin to the attention of the world as an antibiotic medicine. He was often credited as the discoverer of
penicillin and won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine together with
Ernst Boris Chain and
Howard Florey. However, some critics pointed out that Fleming did not in fact discover penicillin, that it was technically a rediscovery; decades before Fleming, there had been significant others (notably Sir
John Scott Burdon-Sanderson,
William Roberts (physician),
John Tyndall and
Ernest Duchesne) who had already done studies on its useful properties and medicinal characteristics. Moreover, according to Fleming himself, the first known reference to penicillin he could recall to mind was from Psalm 51: "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean". Meanwhile, he had learnt from the book of the famous American
mycologist Charles Thom (the same who helped Fleming establish the identity of the mysterious fungal mold) that "
Penicillium notatum" was first recognised by Westling, a Swedish chemist, from a specimen of decayed
hyssop. In this award, as it had been pointed out, several deserving contemporaneous research contributors had also been
left out of the Prize altogether.
The Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his development of prefrontal leucotomy. Popular acceptance of the procedure had been fostered by enthusiastic press coverage such as a 1938 "New York Times" report, "Surgery used on the Soul-Sick; Relief of Obsessions is Reported." Soon Dr. Walter Freeman developed a version of the procedure (the transorbital lobotomy) which was much easier to carry out. Due in part to this procedural ease, lobotomy was often prescribed injudiciously and without regard for modern medical ethics. Endorsed by such influential publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, lobotomy became so popular that, in the three years immediately following Moniz's receipt of the Prize, some 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States alone, and many more throughout the world. Even Joseph Kennedy, father of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, had his daughter Rosemary lobotomized when she was in her twenties, and Freeman himself performed at least 4,000 lobotomy operations during his career. Moniz died in 1955 as his brainchild began to fade from use; since then it has fallen into disrepute and is even prohibited in many countries.
Karl von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his explanation of the "dance language" of bees. However, subsequently, there has been controversy over this explanation due to the lack of direct scientific proof of the waggle dance of the bees – as exactly postulated or worded by von Frisch. The controversy was finally put to rest by a team of researchers from Rothamsted Research in 2005, who tracked bees by radar as they flew to a food source. Their experimental results did not exactly match von Frisch's original formulation, but, in fact, match part of his opponent Adrian Wenner's theory that states that bees are basically guided to the food source by odor, i.e., after the general direction and distance specific and relative to the transmitting bees (a still unknown mysterious mechanism) had been communicated via the waggle dance, as originally postulated by von Frisch.
David Baltimore, who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was implicated in the "Baltimore" or "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. 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. Following Imanishi-Kari's vindication, Baltimore's role has been reassessed more favorably; 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."
The 1926 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, for his "discovery" of a microbial parasite which Fibiger claimed was the cause of cancer, thereby suggesting that cancer was somehow a communicable disease. This "finding" was discredited by other scientists within a very few years but it was apparently never suggested that Fibiger's prize be rescinded or returned.
Peace
The choice of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is often controversial. Critics have called the decisions dubious and driven by politics. A recent evaluation by Norwegian lawyer Fredrik S. Heffermehl finds most of such comments irrelevant and misconceived, since they neither understand nor relate to the types of peace work Nobel actually wished to support. The committee has made the elementary mistake of formulating its own prize for “peace”, ignoring the fact that Nobel used the expression “champions of peace” (fredsförfäktare) to describe the recipients, meaning those working to strengthen international law and institutions and dismantle national military forces.
Cordell Hull was awarded the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1945 in recognition of his efforts for peace and understanding in the Western Hemisphere, his trade agreements, and his work to establish the United Nations. Hull was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of State during the SS St. Louis Crisis. The St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1939 carrying over 950 mostly wealthy Jewish refugees, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II. The ship's voyage caused great controversy in the United States. Initially, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt showed modest willingness to take in some of those on board, but vehement opposition was voiced by Hull and Southern Democrats — some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred. On 4 June 1939 Roosevelt issued an order to deny US entry to the ship, which was waiting in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. The passengers began negotiations with the Cuban government, but those broke down at the last minute. Forced to return to Europe, over a quarter of its passengers subsequently died in the Holocaust.
High-ranking North Vietnamese communist leader Le Duc Tho and United States Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for their work on the Paris Peace Accords intended to secure a ceasefire in the Vietnam War. However, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam soon after this (April 1975) and reunified the country under the single-party rule of the communist party. In addition, Kissinger had instituted the secret 1969–1975 campaign of bombing against infiltrating NVA in 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.
Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt during the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel, and Menachem Begin were jointly awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions to the Camp David Accords. Both are believed to have fought against British rule by violence.
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were joint winners of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat's critics have referred to him as an "unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of promoting violence". Kåre Kristiansen, a Norwegian member of the Nobel Committee, resigned in 1994 in protest at the award to Yasser Arafat, calling him a "terrorist". Supporters of Arafat claimed fairness, citing Nelson Mandela's lacking a renouncement of political violence, having 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.
Rigoberta Menchú was given the prize in 1992, as a result of her memoirs, which turned out to be partially falsified.
Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, for the "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 gave President George W. Bush authorization 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.
Wangari Maathai, 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was reported by the Kenyan newspaper Standard and Radio Free Europe to have stated that AIDS was originally developed by Western scientists in order to depopulate Africa. She later denied these claims, although the Standard stands by its reporting. Additionally, in a Time magazine interview, she hinted at its non-natural origin, saying that someone knows where it came from and that it "...did not come from monkeys."
Al Gore and the IPCC, joint 2007 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, have received criticism on the grounds of political motivation. Al Gore's victory over prize candidate Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker known as the "female Oskar Schindler" for her efforts to save Jewish children during the Holocaust,
Barack Obama, 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, drew much criticism that the award 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.
Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Peace Prize, has been viewed negatively in China, with some in the government arguing that Liu did not promote "international friendship, disarmament, and peace meetings", the stated goal of the Nobel Peace Prize. Further, some suggest that Liu Xiabo received funding from NED, which some claim is supported by the CIA , which they claim brings his status, and in fact the Nobel Peace Prize, into question. This criticism may have little to do with the criticisms that Liu Xiabo was exercising free speech and has been denied certain rights.
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics
Unlike the other categories, the Prize in Economics was not included in Alfred Nobel's will; it was created in 1969 by the Bank of Sweden. Although governed by the same rules by the Swedish Academy, the Prize in Economics has been criticized by many, including members of the Nobel Family, as being outside the original intent of Alfred Nobel. As of 2010, faculty of the University of Chicago have garnered nine of these Prizes—more than any other university—interpreted by some as a bias against candidates with alternative or heterodox views.
Milton Friedman was awarded the 1976 prize in part for his work on monetarism. The prize to Friedman caused international protests, mostly by the radical left, stemming primarily from his association with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. During March 1975 Friedman visited Chile and gave lectures on inflation, meeting with many government officials (including with Pinochet for less than an hour).
The 1994 prize to John Forbes Nash caused controversy within the prize's selection committee because of his history of mental illness and alleged anti-Semitism. The controversy resulted in a change to the governing committee: members of the Economics Prize Committee no longer serve without limit but only for three years
The 2005 prize to Robert Aumann was criticized by European press due to his alleged use of his research of game theory to justify his stance against the dismantling of Israeli settlements from occupied territories.
The 2008 prize to Paul Krugman, a major critic of George W. Bush, provoked controversy about a left-wing bias of the award, prompting the prize committee to deny "the committee has ever taken a political stance."
Literature
A member of the Swedish Academy,
Knut Ahnlund, who had not played an active role in the Academy since 1996, protested the choice of the 2004 winner,
Elfriede Jelinek. Ahnlund resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the reputation of the award. Although Pinter was unable to give his controversial Nobel Lecture, "
Art, Truth and Politics", in person, due to his hospitalisation for ill health, he delivered it from a television studio on video projected on three large screens to an audience at the
Swedish Academy, in
Stockholm, and it was simultaneously transmitted on
Channel Four, in the
UK, on the evening of 7 December 2005. The 46-minute television transmission was introduced by friend and fellow playwright
David Hare. Subsequently, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official
Websites. In these formats, Pinter's Nobel Lecture has been widely watched, cited, quoted, and distributed by print and online media and is the source of much commentary and debate. A privately printed limited edition,
Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture, is published by
Faber and Faber (2006). The issue of their "political stance" was also raised in response to the awards of the Nobel Prize in Literature to
Orhan Pamuk and
Doris Lessing in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Exclusions
Physics
The US Patent Office first awarded the patent on radio to Nikola Tesla, but reversed its decision in Marconi's favour in 1904. Thus, Guglielmo Marconi received the 1909 Nobel Prize for his work on radio. In 1942, the patent office again reversed itself in Tesla's favour.But it is to be mentioned that in November 1894, the Indian physicist, Jagadish Chandra Bose, demonstrated publicly the use of radio waves in Calcutta, but he was not interested in patenting his work.[16] In 1894, Bose ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance using electromagnetic waves, showing independently that communication signals can be sent without using wires. In 1896, the Daily Chronicle of England reported on his UHF experiments: "The inventor (J.C. Bose) has transmitted signals to a distance of nearly a mile and herein lies the first and obvious and exceedingly valuable application of this new theoretical marvel."Bose was not interested in the commercial exploitation of the experiment's transmitter. He did not try to file patent protection for sending signals. In 1899, Bose announced the development of an "iron-mercury-iron coherer with telephone detector" in a paper presented at the Royal Society, London.[17] Later he received U.S. Patent 755,840, "Detector for electrical disturbances" (1904), for a specific electromagnetic receiver. It is now confirmed that contribution of Sir J.C. Bose was no less than Marconi or Tesla on radio.
Both Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential Nobel laureates in 1915. Despite their enormous scientific contributions, they were never given the award. It is believed the reason was their animosity toward each other. There is circumstantial evidence that each sought to minimize the other's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it – as was rumored in the press at the time. Tesla had a greater financial need for the award than Edison: in 1916, he filed for bankruptcy.
While a graduate student at Caltech in 1930, Chung-Yao Chao was the first person to experimentally identify positrons through electron-positron annihilation, but did not realize what they were. Carl D. Anderson, who won the 1936 Nobel Physics Prize for his discovery of the positron, used the same radioactive source, 208Tl, as Chao. (Historically, 208Tl was known as thorium C double prime, ThC", see decay chains.) Late in his life, Anderson admitted that Chao had in fact inspired his discovery: Chao's research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without the honor of sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment.
Enrico Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 in part for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". However, in this case, the Prize later appeared to be premature: Fermi had 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 Nobel Prize.
Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 but received no Nobel recognition. In fact, it was not Otto Hahn who first figured out fission, but Meitner. Working with the then-available experimental data , she managed, with Otto Robert Frisch's participation, to incorporate Bohr's liquid drop model (first suggested by George Gamow) into fission's theoretical foundation. She was known also to have predicted, from her research work on atomic theory and radioactivity, the possibility of chain reactions. In an earlier collaboration with Hahn, she had also independently discovered a new chemical element called (protactinium) : Niels Bohr did in fact nominate both for the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, in addition to recommending the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Hahn. There was a third junior contributor Fritz Strassmann who was not considered for the Prize. In his defense, Hahn was under strong pressure from the Nazis to minimize Meitner's role since she was Jewish. But he maintained this position even after the war.
Although the 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), his lab boss, Cecil Powell, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for "his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method". It was actually Lattes himself who 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). The reason for this apparent neglect is that the Nobel Committee policy until 1960 was to award the Nobel Prize to the research group head only. Lattes was also responsible for calculating the pion's mass and, with USA physicist Eugene Gardner, demonstrated the existence of this particle after atomic collisions in a synchrotron. Again, Gardner was denied a Nobel because he died soon thereafter, and posthumous nominations for the Nobel Prize are not permitted.
Because the Nobel committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications, Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain received the 1956 Prize for the invention of the transistor. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented a field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether Lilienfeld or Heil had really 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 duodiodes for German radar equipment during World War II.
Indian mathematician and physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was noted for developing a theory with Albert Einstein regarding the gaslike qualities of electromagnetic radiation and best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. He is honoured as the namesake of the boson. Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates—Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize.
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. Essentially, it is the same theory as that proposed by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann in their "mathematical physics" paper on the structure of the weak interaction. Actually, Gell-Mann had been let in on the former group's results before, via open sharings that were intimated by Sudarshan himself to Gell-Mann earlier on, 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 of Chien-Shiung Wu's, although also helped along by a sprinkling of other evidences to, such as the muon (discovered in 1936, it had a colorful history itself and would lead on again to a new revolution in the 21st Century). However, this real breakthrough was not awarded with a Nobel Prize. The V-A theory would later form the foundation for the electroweak interaction theory. George Sudarshan himself regarded the V-A theory as his finest work to date. It was later successfully subsumed under the electroweak interaction unification theory by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg that would go on to win for the 'official Nobel Threesome' the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. Curiously, the Sudarshan-Marshak (or V-A theory) was assessed, preferably and favourably, as "beautiful" by J. Robert Oppenheimer, only to be disparaged later on as "less complete" and "inelegant" by John Gribbin.
Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel Prize. 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. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.
In 1964, George Zweig, then a PhD student at Caltech, espoused the physical existence of aces possessing several unorthodox attributes (essentially Gell-Mann's quarks, although regarded expressly by the latter as a mere theoretical shorthand construct) at a time which was very 'anti-quark'. Zweig consequently suffered academic ostracism and career path blocks from the scientific community of 'mainstream orthodoxy'. Despite the 1969 Nobel Prize awarded for contributions in the classification of elementary particles and the 1990 Nobel Prize for the development and proof of the quark model, Zweig's true dimension and size of his original contributions to the quark model story have largely gone unrecognized. Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who published the classification of hadrons through their SU(3) flavour symmetry independently of Gell-Mann in 1962, also felt that he had been unjustly deprived of the Nobel Prize for the quark model.
The 1974 Nobel Prize was awarded to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish for pioneering research in radio astrophysics; Hewish was recognized for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars although he did not come up first with the correct explanation of pulsars: having described them as communications from "Little Green Men" (LGM-1) in outer space. An answer was given by David Staelin and Edward Reifenstein, of the National RadioAstronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, who found a pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula: that pulsars are neutron stars, leftovers from a supernova explosion had been proposed in 1933. Soon after the discovery of pulsars in 1968, Fred Hoyle and astronomer Thomas Gold came up with the correct explanation of a pulsar as a rapidly spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field, emitting radio waves, much as a lighthouse does with its lamp. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was later recognised as a pulsar. Pulsars are a group of astronomical objects that provide scientists with the first signs of the possible existence of gravity waves. In addition, rotating binary pulsars are also found to be reliable sources for putting Einstein's relativity theories to the most stringent of tests. While the astronomer Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the Prize, Bell herself has stated that "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." Research students who have received Nobel Prizes include Louis de Broglie, Rudolf Mössbauer, Douglas Osheroff, Gerard 't Hooft, John Forbes Nash, Jr., John Robert Schrieffer and H. David Politzer.
The 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for the chanced "detection of Cosmic microwave background radiation". The joint winners, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, initially did not comprehend the implications of their findings and they had to have their discovery fully elucidated for them. Many scientists felt that another scientist, 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 independently received one. There are many unproven theories as to why Alpher's work was ignored. 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 theory.
Although the winner William Alfred Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis, Fred Hoyle did not receive a share of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. 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".
Other arguably controversial exclusions include Kan-Chang Wang (discoverer of the anti-sigma minus hyperon (1959), first Paper on the Detection-of-Neutrino Experiment), and Robert Oppenheimer (first precursor Paper on the 'quantum tunnelling' phenomenon (1927–28), first prediction of the antimatter positron existence (1930), neutron stars and black hole breakthrough seminal studies, mentor, "father of the atomic bomb", among others).
Chemistry
Dmitri Mendeleyev, who originated the
periodic table of the
elements, never received a Nobel Prize. His first periodic table was completed in 1869. However, a year earlier, another chemist,
Julius Lothar Meyer, had also reported a somewhat similar table. Similarly, another scientist,
John Alexander Reina Newlands, presented a paper in 1866 that established himself as the first to propose a periodic law. In fact, none of these tables was correct — all the 19th century tables arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic weight (or
atomic mass). It was left to
Henry Moseley to correct the periodic table, basing it 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 the prize in 1906, but died the next year. Some had also pointed out that Mendeleyev's failure to land a Nobel Prize was due to behind-the-scenes machinations of one dissenting chemist on the Nobel Committee who happened to disagree with his work.
Some assert that Henry Eyring failed to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because of his religion (he was a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).
Arguably, the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the 1977 "discovery and development of conductive polymers" ignored similar previous work on highly-conducting polymers, which were discovered and had even been applied well before the work of the Nobelists (see conductive polymer article). The Nobel Prize information page acknowledges some historic studies in this field, but primarily emphasizes the importance of the Nobel laureates in launching the field.
Physiology or medicine
In 1923
Frederick Banting and
John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of insulin. While it was obvious that Banting deserved the prize, 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 more logical choice to share the prize. Banting complained that the original idea of how to isolate insulin from pancreatic islets had been his, and that Macleod's initial contribution to the project had only been to let Banting use his lab space at the
University of Toronto to test the idea while Macleod was on vacation for the summer. Macleod also loaned Banting a lab assistant (Best) to help him with the experiments, and ten dogs for experimentation. While Macleod was vacationing in Scotland, Banting and Best achieved limited success with their experiments, which they presented to Macleod when he returned to Toronto in the fall of 1921. Macleod pointed out that there were flaws with the design of some experiments. He then advised Banting and Best to repeat the experiments with better lab equipment, more dogs, and better controls. Macleod then provided better lab space for Banting and Best. He also began paying Banting a salary out of his research grants. Thus, while Banting's association with Macleod had been unofficial when he made his initial discovery, Macleod's providing a salary made their relationship official, and equivalent to the present-day relationship between a
postdoctoral researcher (Banting) and his supervisor (Macleod). Banting and Best repeated the experiments, which were conclusive when better equipment and techniques were used. While Banting's original method of isolating insulin had been successful, it was too labor-intensive for large-scale production of insulin. Best then set about finding a biochemical extraction method for isolating insulin as an alternative to Banting's more labor-intensive method. Meanwhile,
James Bertram Collip, a chemistry professor on sabbatical from the
University of Alberta arrived at the University of Toronto, joined what was now Macleod's insulin research team, and sought a biochemical method for extracting insulin in parallel with Best. Both Best and Collip simultaneously developed biochemical methods for extracting insulin on a large scale. While Macleod's intellectual contribution to the discovery of insulin was less than Banting's, Best's and Collip's, it was ultimately Banting and Macleod who were nominated for the Nobel Prize. The fact that Banting was technically working for Macleod, and was being supported with money from Macleod's research grants was no doubt a factor in the Nobel Committee's decision to list Macleod as a co-winner of the prize with Banting. Although Banting initially refused to share the prize with Macleod, he changed his mind, and instead shared half of his prize money with 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.
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 veritable pioneering platform for further genetic research and advance. According to John M. Barry, in his book The Great Influenza, the committee was preparing to award Avery for prior work, but declined to after the DNA findings were published. They feared that they would be seen to be endorsing findings that had not yet survived significant scrutiny.
The 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded solely to Selman Waksman for his discovery of streptomycin, had omitted recognition due his co-discoverer Albert Schatz. Litigation brought by Schatz against Waksman over the details and credit of streptomycin discovery. The result was such that Schatz was awarded a substantial settlement, and, together with Waksman, Schatz would be officially recognized as a co-discoverer of streptomycin.
Heinrich J. Matthaei broke the genetic code in 1961 with Marshall Warren Nirenberg in their poly-U experiment at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, paving the way for modern genetics. Nirenberg became a much lauded Nobel Laureate in 1968. However, Matthaei, who was responsible for experimentally obtaining the first codon (genetic code) extract, and whose initial accurate results were tampered with by Nirenberg himself (due to the latter's belief in 'less precise', 'more believable' data presentation) did not get any recognition or a Nobel Prize.
The 1962 Prize awarded to James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins — for their work on DNA structure and properties — did not recognize some contributions from others, such as: 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 the ability of Watson and Crick to solve the structure of the DNA molecule. Avery died in 1955, and Franklin in 1958 and posthumous nominations for the Nobel Prize are not permitted.
The first successful synthesis of bovine insulin. a Nobel-like breakthrough which won worldwide recognition, was carried out between 1958 and 1965 by two scientists at Beijing University, Niu Jingyi and Wang Yinglai. Insulin is now manufactured using protein-production biotechnology. Although there were repeated nominations and support from eminent scientists, as it turned out, due to a series of hindering political and other related contretemps, both were not to receive a Nobel Prize.
The 1975 Prize was awarded to David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Howard Martin Temin "for describing how tumor viruses act on the genetic material of the cell". It has been argued that Dulbecco was distantly, if at all, involved in this ground-breaking work. 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 confirming Temin's provirus hypothesis. between 1937 and 1948. Decades later, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. The Nobel Committee may have tacitly acknowledged its error, however, when in 1948 (the year of Gandhi's death), it made no award, stating "there was no suitable living candidate" although they awarded it posthumously to fellow Scandinavian Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, who died after being nominated. The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing this issue.
Literature
The Prize in
Literature has a history of controversial awards and notorious snubs. Notable literati have pointed out that more indisputably major writers have been ignored by the Nobel Committee than have been honored by it, including
Marcel Proust,
Ezra Pound,
James Joyce,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Gertrude Stein,
August Strindberg,
John Updike,
Arthur Miller,
Yannis Ritsos,
Federico García Lorca and others, often for political or extra-literary reasons. Conversely, many writers whom contemporary and subsequent criticism regard as minor, inconsequential or transitional have been the recipient of the award.
From 1901 to 1912, the committee was characterized by 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. Also, many believe Sweden's historic antipathy towards Russia was the reason neither Tolstoy nor Anton Chekhov were awarded the prize. During World War I and its immediate aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality, favoring writers from non-combatant countries. He was thus denied a Nobel Prize.
French novelist and intellectual André Malraux was seriously 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", and Camus won the prize in 1957.
Some attribute W. H. Auden's not being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to errors in his translation of 1961 Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjöld's Vägmärken (Markings) and to statements that Auden made during a Scandinavian lecture tour suggesting that Hammarskjöld was, like Auden, homosexual.
Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 prize winner, did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the U.S.S.R. would prevent his return afterwards (his works there were circulated in samizdat—clandestine form). After the Swedish government refused to honor Solzhenitsyn with 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 did not accept the award, and prize money, until 10 December 1974, after he was deported from the Soviet Union.
In 1974 Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow were considered but rejected in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both Nobel judges themselves, and unknown outside their home country. Bellow would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov was awarded the Prize.
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was nominated for the Prize several times but, as Edwin Williamson, Borges's biographer, states, the Academy did not award it to him, most likely because of his support of certain Argentine and Chilean right-wing military dictators, including Pinochet, which, according to Tóibín's review of Williamson's Borges: A Life, had complex social and personal contexts. Borges' failure to win the Nobel Prize for his support of these right-wing dictators contrasts with the Committee honoring writers who openly supported controversial left-wing dictatorships, including Joseph Stalin, in the case of Jean Paul Sartre and Pablo Neruda.
The award to Italian performance artist Dario Fo in 1997 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. Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller had been strongly favoured to receive the Prize, but the Nobel organisers were later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular."
There was also criticism of the academy's refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie in 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed, and two members of the Academy resigned over its refusal to support Rushdie.
The heavy focus on European authors, and authors from Sweden in particular, has been the subject of mounting criticism, even from major Swedish newspapers. The absolute majority of the laureates have been European, with Sweden itself receiving 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.". 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 nature of the award, saying that, "I think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition." The 2009 award to Herta Müller, previously little-known outside Germany but many times named favorite for the Nobel prize, has re-ignited criticism that the award committee is biased as Eurocentric mostly by the US press.
Recent exclusions (since 1990)
The
1993 Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of
introns in
eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of
gene splicing –
Philip Allen Sharp and
Richard J. Roberts were the only two winners. Several other scientists, such as
Norman Davidson and
James D. Watson, argued that Louise T. Chow, a China-born Taiwanese researcher and accomplished female scientist, who collaborated with Roberts, should also have had part of the prize. In 1976, as Staff Investigator, she carried out the studies of the
genomic origins and structures of
adenovirus transcripts leading directly to the EM discovery of RNA splicing and alternative RNA processing at
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on
Long Island in 1977, the year the discovery was made. Norman Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, Emeritus, at Caltech (a well-known 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 herself developed in the previous two years at the lab.
The 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry credited winner Kary Mullis with the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method, a central technique in molecular biology which allows for the amplification of specified DNA sequences. However, others disputed that he 'invented' the technique: claiming that Norwegian scientist Kjell Kleppe, together with 1968 Nobel Prize laureate H. Gobind Khorana, had an earlier and better claim to it in 1969. His co-workers at that time also refuted the suggestion that Mullis was solely responsible for the idea of using Taq polymerase in the PCR process. In addition, a book on the history of the PCR method which Paul Rabinow (an anthropologist) wrote in 1996 raised the issue of whether or not Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it. However, other scientists have said that "the full potential [of PCR] was not realized" until Mullis' work in 1983.
The 1997 Nobel Prize In Physics stirred up controversy soon as it was announced as Russian scientists disputed the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and techniques to cool and trap atoms with laser light, whose work the Russians had reputedly carried out more than a decade before.
The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded singly to Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of prions, had caused a ceaseless stream of academic polemics ever since: as regard the actual validity extent of his work—which had also been criticized by other researchers as not yet proven.
The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to three pioneering neuroscientists, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric R. Kandel, "for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system" had caused many neuroscientists to protest that Oleh Hornykiewicz, who helped pioneer the dopamine replacement treatment for Parkinson's disease, was left out of the prize, and claimed that Hornykiewicz's research provided a foundation for some of the scientific progress credited to the three scientists.
The 2000 Nobel Prize In Chemistry–"For the Discovery and Development of Conductive polymers" recognized passive high-conductivity in oxidized iodine-doped polyacetylene black and related materials (reported in 1977), as well as determining conduction mechanisms and developing devices, especially batteries. The citation alleges this work led to present-day "active" devices, where a voltage or current controls electron flow.
:However, an active organic polymer electronic device was reported in a major journal (Science) three years before the Nobel prize winner's discovery. Further, the "ON" state of this device showed almost metallic conductivity. This device is now on the "Smithsonian chips" list of key discoveries in semiconductor technology . See figure.
:Moreover, 14 years before the Nobel-prize-winning discovery, Weiss and coworkers in Australia had reported equivalent high electrical conductivity in an almost identical compound—oxidized, iodine-doped polypyrrole black. Eventually, the Australian group achieved resistances as low as .03 ohm/cm. This is roughly equivalent to present-day efforts. Slightly later, DeSurville and coworkers reported high conductivity in a polyaniline. For more on the early history of this field, also see reviews by Inzelt and Hush. Likewise, this award ignored the even earlier (1955) discovery of highly conductive organic Charge transfer complexes. Some of these are even superconductive.
:"Interest in the electronic properties of semiconducting organic molecules dates back many decades to classic studies of ground- and excited-state electronic structure of model molecules, such as anthracene, performed in the early 1960s by Martin Pope and colleagues. Since then, various semiconducting organic molecules and polymers have been steadily developed."
:A basic discovery of Martin Pope and his group was that of a dark ohmic charge injecting electrode and the publication of the work function requirements for dark ohmic charge injecting electrodes in general.
The 2003 Nobel Prize In Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. Two independent controversial exclusions have been alleged:
: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 MRI scan, but used a dead-end methodology. Meanwhile, Damadian's original report prompted Lauterbur to develop NMR into the presently used method of generating MRI images. Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers protesting his exclusion from the award. Some researchers felt that Damadian's work deserved at least equal credit.
:Herman Y. Carr both pioneered the present NMR gradient technique and demonstrated rudimentary MRI imaging in the 1950s, based on it. The Nobel prize winners had almost certainly seen Carr's work, but did not cite it. Consequently, the prize committee very likely did not become cognizant of Carr's discoveries, a situation likely abetted further by the high-profile distractions due to the unprecedented, drawn-out, persistent remonstrances of Damadian in defense of his work regarding MRI.
The 2005 Nobel Prize In Physics controversy involved George Sudarshan's relevant work in quantum optics (1960), which was considered by many to have been slighted in this award. Roy J. Glauber—who initially derided the former theory representations and later produced the same P-representation under a different name, viz., Sudarshan-Glauber representation or Sudarshan diagonal representation—was the winner instead. According to still others, two other seminal contributors, Leonard Mandel and Daniel Frank Walls, may have been passed over for the Prize because no posthumous nominations are accepted.
The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of RNA interference. Many of the discoveries credited by the Nobel committee to Fire and Mello, who studied RNA interference in C. elegans, had been previously studied by plant biologists, and it has been suggested that at least one plant biologist who was a pioneer in this field, such as David Baulcombe, should have also been awarded a share of the prize.
The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by John C. Mather and George F. Smoot (leaders of the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite experiment) "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR).". The Prize was thought by some to have precluded proper recognition due an earlier original discoverer of anistropy of the CMBR. In July 1983 an experiment Relikt, launched aboard the Prognoz-9 satellite, studied cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) via one frequency alone. In January 1992, Andrei A. Brukhanov was known to have presented a seminar at Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, where he first reported on the discovery of anistropy of CMBR. However, the Relikt team claimed only an upper limit, not a detection, in their 1987 results paper.
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on green fluorescent protein or GFP. Douglas Prasher actually first cloned the gene for GFP 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." Dr. Prasher's accomplishments were not recognized and he lost his job. When the Nobel was awarded in 2008, Dr. Prasher was working as a courtesy shuttle bus driver in Huntsville Alabama.
One half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for their 1972 work on quark mixing, which postulated the existence of six quarks (only three were known to exist at the time, and a fourth one was suspected) and used this postulate to provide a possible mechanism for CP violation, which was observed 8 years earlier. Their work represented expansion and reinterpretation of previous research by Nicola Cabibbo, dating back to 1963, before the quark model was even introduced. The resulting quark mixing matrix, which describes probabilities of different quarks to turn into each other under the action of weak force, is known as CKM matrix, after Cabibbo, Kobayashi, and Maskawa. Therefore, it is argued sometimes that Cabibbo should have been included among the recipients. A possible explanation is that Nobel Committee wanted to award a prize for achievements in theoretical particle physics, and wanted to recognize Yoichiro Nambu, the other recipient of the 2008 prize, specifically (Nambu's significance in the field is generally undisputed, and he was already 87 years old at the time the prize was awarded). Since the prize is not awarded to more than three people at once, the committee was forced to recognize only two out of three CKM researchers.
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Willard Boyle and George E. Smith for developing the CCD. Eugene I. Gordon and Michael Francis Tompsett have come forward to say that they should gotten the award since they are the ones that figured out that the technology they were developing could be used for imaging.
Recent rumors and news on the progress to find the Higgs boson has led to a dispute on who should get credit for the discovery and the resulting Nobel Prize in Physics. Six people, across three different teams, are credited with this discovery: Robert Brout and François Englert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles; Peter Higgs of University of Edinburgh; and G. S. Guralnik at Brown University, C. R. Hagen of the University of Rochester, and Tom Kibble at Imperial College London. Three papers written in 1964 explained what is now known as the "Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism" (or Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson for short). The mechanism is the key element of the electroweak theory that forms part of the Standard model of particle physics. The papers that introduce this mechanism were published in Physical Review Letters in 1964 and were each recognized as milestone papers by PRL’s 50th anniversary celebration. All six won The American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for "elucidation of the properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses"
Laureates who declined the prize
Involuntary refusals
In 1936,
Adolf Hitler was offended with the Nobel Foundation when the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to
Carl von Ossietzky, a German writer who publicly opposed Hitler and
Nazism. (At that time, the prize was awarded the following year.) Hitler reacted by issuing a decree on 31 January 1937 that forbade German nationals from accepting any Nobel Prize in the future. Awarding the peace prize to Ossietzky was itself considered controversial. While
fascism had few supporters outside of Italy and Germany, those who did not necessarily sympathize with fascism felt that it was wrong to offend Germany by awarding the prize to someone opposed to the Nazi regime.
Hitler's decree made it forbidden for three subsequent German nationals to accept the Nobel Prize: 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 diplomas and medals, but not the prize money.
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 who would be the 1939 Nobel Laureate in physiology and medicine. The majority of the professors at the Institute were in favor of giving the prize to Domagk and someone leaked the news, which was then passed on to Berlin. The Kulturministerium in Berlin replied with a telegram stating that a Nobel Prize to a German was "completely unwanted" (durchaus unerwünscht). Despite the telegram, a large majority of the Institute voted to give the prize to Domagk on 26 October 1939. Domagk received the news later that day by phone and telegram. Being aware of Hitler's decree but unsure if it only applied to the peace prize or all of the Nobel Prizes, Domagk sent a request to the Ministry of Education in Berlin asking if it would be possible to accept the prize. Since he didn't 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. 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 and taken by the Gestapo to police headquarters. He was released after one week only to be arrested again. On 28 November 1939, he was forced by the Kulturministerium to sign a prepared letter, addressed to the Institute, declining the prize. 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's forced refusal of the prize was the first time the prize was declined. Due to his refusal, the statutes for the Nobel Prizes were 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 be allocated back to the funds.
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. When notified of the decision, the German scientists were forced to refuse the prizes by threats of violence from the German government. 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. (See Otto Heinrich Warburg for details.)
Boris Pasternak at first accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, but was forced by the authorities in the USSR to decline it because the prize was considered a "reward for the dissident political innuendo in his novel, Doctor Zhivago." 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. Mstislav Rostropovitch, a renowned Russian cellist and close friend of Boris Pasternak, played a Bach suite in his memory at the banquet.
Voluntary refusals
There have been two laureates who voluntarily declined the Nobel Prize.
Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964 but refused stating, "A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form." The second person who has refused to accept the prize is
Lê Đức Thọ, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his role in the
Paris Peace Accords. He declined, claiming there was no actual peace in Vietnam. An early theory was that Alfred Nobel was jealous of the mathematician
Gösta Mittag-Leffler and did not want to institute a prize that Mittag-Leffler might receive. This has been refuted by Lars Garding and Lars Hörmander because of timing inaccuracies; they suggest that the reason for the lack of Nobel Prize in mathematics is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a "practical" enough discipline in
Chemistry at that time. Several prizes in mathematics have similarities to the Nobel Prize, with both the
Fields Medal and the
Abel Prize being described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".
Emphasis on discoveries over inventions
Alfred Nobel left a fortune to finance annual prizes to be awarded "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". One part, he stated, should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Nobel did not emphasise discoveries, but they have historically been held in higher respect by the Nobel Prize committee than inventions: 77% of Nobel prizes in physics have been given to discoveries, compared with only 23% to inventions.
Christoph Bartneck and
Matthias Rauterberg in papers published in
Nature and
Technoetic Arts, have argued this emphasis on discoveries has moved the Nobel prize away from its original intention of rewarding the greatest contribution to society in the preceding year.
Alternatives to the Nobel Prizes
Some important primary fields of human intellectual endeavor-such as
mathematics,
philosophy and
social studies-have been excluded from the Nobel Prizes, for the simple reason that 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, sometimes referred to as "The Alternative Nobel Prize."
A new Nobel-equivalent Award was also created especially for mathematics, the Abel Prize, which came into effect in 2003, though the older Fields Medal is often considered as the mathematical Nobel equivalent.
Following the announcement of the award of the 2010 Peace Prize to incarcerated Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Global Times proposed the Confucius Peace Prize. The award ceremony was deliberately organised to take place on 8 December, one day before the rival award ceremony. Organisers of the award said it has no relation to the Chinese government, the Ministry of Culture or Beijing Normal University."
German National Prize for Art and Science
Ig Nobel Prize
Notes
Sources
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. First published in the United Kingdom as
Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told.
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External links
Article on Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
BBC article on Nobel Peace Prize controversies
CNN overview of Nobel prizes
Declined papers that won Nobel prizes
Nobel Foundation official site
Controversies
Category:Discovery and invention controversies
