Season – So ‘Nobel’

October is said to be Nobel season – and rightly so. Come October and it is the time the Nobel Prizes are announced. A much looked-forward to event.

THE PRIZE:

All the prizes are administered by the Nobel Foundation and all except the Peace Prize are presented in Stockholm. The Peace prize is given in Oslo, Norway.

What prompted Nobel to institute these prizes? Alfred Nobel was a manufacture of explosives. However, realizing the disaster that his inventions were causing, he was uneasy. But what ultimately made up his mind was reading his own obituary! Published by mistake, (it was his brother Ludvig who had died) it caused him to sit up because the paper called him a “merchant of death”. This is when he willed 94 percent of his wealth to the institution of the prizes to be given to people who have made outstanding contributions in their field of work.

Although the selection process has been stringent and long there has been criticism about lapses.

One major question is why Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize five times between 1937 and 1948, but never won it. It is said that he may have been awarded the Prize in 1948, but he was assassinated.

That year no Peace Prize was announced. 

THE NOBEL SEASON:

Beginning October 8 prizes were announced for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics. The Nobel Prize in Psychology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work on gene expression and genetic cause of disease. Mario R. Capecchi , Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies won the prize because of the impact these discoveries have had on biomedical research.

On October 9, Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg won the prize in Physics for discovering giant magnetoresistance.

October 10 saw the announcement of the prize for chemistry going to Germany’s Gerhard Ertl for studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The prize for Literature was announced a day later and it was awarded to British writer, Doris Lessing for writing on human relations. She is the oldest Nobel Laureate and the 11th woman to be awarded the prize for Literature.

The Peace prize, often the most looked forward to in the event, went to UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Albert Arnold Gore Jr.

The Nobel Prize for Economics, the only one created in 1968, was awarded to American economists Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory.

AMAZING RECORD:

Of interest is the amazing record chalked up by the Curie family. They have five prizes under their belt! Marie Sklodowska-Curie has two, while her husband Pierre has one in Physics, their daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, one in Chemistry and their son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie, one in Chemistry. And finally, when UNICEF won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965, Henry Labouisse, husband of Curies’ second daughter, Eve, was the director.