Nobel Prize controversies
Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has engendered controversy and criticism. After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Similarly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes. Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". Awards committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions.
No Nobel Prize was established for mathematics and many other scientific and cultural fields. An early theory that envy or rivalry led Nobel to omit a prize to mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler was refuted because of timing inaccuracies. Another myth that states that Nobel's spouse had an affair with a mathematician has been equally debunked: Nobel was never married. A more likely explanation is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a practical discipline, and too theoretical to benefit humankind, as well as his personal lack of interest in the field and the fact that an award to mathematicians given by Oscar II already existed at the time. Both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics".
The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for Literature, Peace, and Economics. Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics most often discerned political bias and Eurocentrism in the result. The interpretation of Nobel's original words concerning the Literature prize has also undergone repeated revisions.
A major controversies-generating factor for the more recent scientific prizes is the Nobel rule that each award can not be shared by more than two different researches and no more than three different individuals each year. While this rule was adequate in 1901, when most of the science research was performed by individual scientists working with their small group of assistants in relative isolation, in more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups, themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers, spread over the years of effort needed to hypothesize, refine and prove a discovery. This has led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded researchers.
Chemistry
1918
The 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Fritz Haber for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, which allowed for the efficient synthesis of ammonia, leading to the economical mass production of chemical fertilizers. The award was controversial, as Haber had overseen Germany's chemical weapons program during World War I. The Nobel Prize committee considered his war activities but noted his ammonia synthesis process was "the greatest benefit to mankind".1922–1946
From 1922 to 1946, the American scientist Gilbert N. Lewis, who was widely known for his coining of the covalent bond, electron pair, Lewis structure and other seminal contributions that have become near-universal conventions in chemistry, was nominated 41 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry but never won. It has been speculated that while working in Walther Nernst's lab, Lewis developed a lifelong enmity with Nernst. In the following years, Lewis started to criticize and denounce his former teacher on many occasions, calling Nernst's work on his heat theorem "a regrettable episode in the history of chemistry". A friend of Nernst's,, was a member of the Nobel Chemistry committee. There is evidence that he used the Nobel nominating and reporting procedures to block a Nobel Prize for Lewis in thermodynamics by nominating Lewis for the prize three times, and then using his position as a committee member to write negative reports.2003
was awarded the 2003 prize "for the discovery of water channels". Agre published his study about aquaporin in 1988; Gheorghe Benga had shown the existence of a protein water channel in the red blood cell membrane in 1986. The omission of Benga from the 2003 prize has been called a mistake in the awarding of Nobel Prizes. Agre acknowledged the contribution of Benga and others to the field discovery of aquaporins in his Nobel Lecture: "Their existence was suggested by a group of pioneers in the water transport field who preceded us by decades".2007
, who was the sole recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the catalytic effects of metal surfaces, has expressed surprise and disappointment that Gábor Somorjai, a foundational pioneer in modern surface science and catalysis, did not share the prize. Somorjai and Ertl had previously shared the Wolf Prize for Chemistry in 1998. The Nobel Prize committee's decision to exclude Somorjai was criticized in the surface-science community.2008
The 2008 prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on green fluorescent protein. A fourth potential recipient, Douglas Prasher, was the first to clone the GFP gene and suggest its use as a biological tracer; however, he had left academia and was working as a courtesy shuttle bus driver - a fact which received considerable media coverage. Lack of support for Prasher's work, and failure to get tenure at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts where he was employed, caused Prasher to leave this field of research in 1992, but not before he offered samples of the gene to any interested researchers, including Chalfie and Tsien. Tsien noted the prize is usually awarded for "specific discoveries" and that he had put forward Shimomura and Prasher to the Nobel Committee in 2004. 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." Roger Tsien had offered Prasher a job when his academic career stalled. Eventually, Prasher accepted the offer and moved in 2013 to UCSD to join Tsien's lab.2019
When the 2019 prize was awarded, numerous scientific societies reacted to Rachid Yazami's omission for his co-invention of the lithium-ion battery with Stanley Whittingham who was recognized. Whittingham shared the prize with John Goodenough for their cathodes and Akira Yoshino for the first working prototype unlike the importance of the working graphite anode invented by Yazami. Due to the Nobel Prize's limitation of up to three recipients, Yazami believes the committee had to make a difficult decision between Whittingham and himself. He nevertheless congratulated the three recipients of the prize.2020
The Lithuanian and Spanish scientific communities expressed disappointment when the committee did not include Virginijus Šikšnys or Francisco Mojica along with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna in the award as both of them made crucial contributions to the development of CRISPR gene editing technology.Others
- While Henry Eyring was allegedly denied the prize because of his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 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 prize; the academy awarded him the Berzelius Medal in 1977 as partial compensation.
- Dmitri Mendeleyev, the original creator of 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. It was left to the English physicist Henry Moseley to base the periodic table on the atomic number. 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.
Economics
1976
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 because of Friedman's association with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. During March 1975, Friedman visited Chile and gave lectures on inflation, meeting with Pinochet and other government officials.1994
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's mental illness and alleged antisemitism. The controversy resulted in a change to the governing committee: members served three-year instead of unlimited terms and the prize's scope expanded to include political science, psychology, and sociology.Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has a history of controversial omissions. Joseph Epstein noted: "You may not know it, but you and I are members of a club whose fellow members include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. The club is the Non-Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. All these authentically great writers, still alive when the prize, initiated in 1901, was being awarded, didn't win it." This led him to speculate that "Criteria other than high art seem to be involved." Other major authors have been ignored, including Joseph Kessel, André Malraux, W. H. Auden, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf.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 Tolstoy, Ibsen, Twain and Émile Zola 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, favouring writers from non-combatant countries.
The heavy focus on European authors, and Swedes in particular, is the subject of mounting criticism, including from major Swedish newspapers. The majority of the laureates for the Nobel Prize in Literature have been European. Swedes in particular have received more prizes in this category 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 said that American writers did not win often because "the US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." David Remnick replied, "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures." Remnick cited Philip Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo as counterexamples to Engdahl's claim, along with "many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English." Adam Kirsch wrote: "When Saul Bellow learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, he reacted to the news in the only way a great writer can or should: He tried hard not to care. 'I'm glad to get it,' Bellow admitted, but 'I could live without it.' This month, as the Swedish Academy prepares for its annual announcement, Bellow's heirs in the top ranks of American literature—Roth, Updike, Pynchon, DeLillo—already know they're going to live without the Nobel Prize." In 2009, Engdahl's replacement, Peter Englund, rejected his sentiment, 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."