Nobel Prizes 2022: The most important information

That’s what we expect today

no. This year’s award ceremony will open on Monday at 11:30 am in Stockholm with the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Last year, the award went equally to New Yorker David Julius and Lebanese-born, US-based Ardem Patapoutian. The two were honored for their discoveries on temperature and touch receptors.

The award for the two basic researchers came as a surprise to many. This shows that you shouldn’t put too much stock in the forecasts made in advance. Nevertheless, this year there will again be hearty speculation as to who has the best chance of winning the prize. In view of the wide range of topics in medicine and the many brilliant minds in research, this is an almost impossible undertaking.

The media company Clarivate, which has been evaluating citation databases since 2002 and using them to determine the top candidates, nominated the Japanese Masato Hasegawa and the Chinese-American dual citizen Virginia Man-Yee Lee for this year’s medicine prize. Both are neuroscientists who deal with the molecular causes of diseases such as dementia or Parkinson’s. According to Clarivate, other possible laureates are the American geneticist Mary-Claire King and the American Stuart Holland Orkin. King has discovered the most important breast cancer genes to date, Orkin hereditary factors, which play a role in the development of blood cells.

What is striking about the Clarivate list is that the augurs have no European, let alone Swiss, research personalities on their radar this year. But that doesn’t have to mean anything. There are also researchers in this country who have what it takes to win a Nobel Prize. The biochemist Michael N. Hall from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, to name just one, has long been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Hall discovered a protein called TOR, which controls natural cell growth and is also involved in the development of diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

A list of possible topics for this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine would be incomplete if it didn’t also include the highly effective mRNA vaccines that were used for the first time in the fight against the corona pandemic. The renowned Breakthrough Prize was awarded a year ago for the scientific basis for this. The biochemist Katalin Karikó and the immunologist Drew Weissman received the award, which is worth three million dollars.

The most important information about the Nobel Prize

Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was a Swedish chemist who became one of the wealthiest men of his time thanks to the invention of dynamite and other explosives. A year before his death, the childless industrialist decided to donate his assets of 31 million Swedish crowns (that would correspond to today’s purchasing power of 160 million francs). In his will he decreed that “the annual interest shall be awarded as prizes to those who have brought the greatest benefit to mankind in the past year”.

Nobel determined that interest income should be divided equally between five areas: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was not established until 1968 by the National Bank of Sweden and was awarded for the first time in 1969. To this day there is controversy as to whether this was what Alfred Nobel intended. He allegedly had an aversion to economics and doubted its usefulness to society.

It is not known what prompted Nobel to donate his money. Some suspect that the businessman had a bad conscience and wanted to do something good for humanity. Others credit the influence of Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner, who briefly worked as private secretary for Nobel. But it couldn’t have been that alone. Presumably Nobel also felt the need to give something back to the sciences to which he owed so much as a chemist.

The prize money is currently 10 million Swedish crowns per category. That corresponds to almost 900,000 Swiss francs. In addition, the award winners receive a gold medal with Alfred Nobel’s likeness and a certificate. While the Nobel Prize in Literature is usually awarded to a single person, there are up to three winners in the other categories. They have to share the prize money. So you don’t get rich from the Nobel Prize, especially since the prize money is taxable in most countries.

It is not the Nobel Foundation that decides who receives the Nobel Prize, but various institutions, depending on the prize:

Within these institutions there are the Nobel Committees, i.e. working groups that deal with the selection. Over the course of the year, they obtain expert opinions, meet in meetings and reference groups and gradually shorten the list of candidates. The Nobel Prize committees then propose their candidates, but the final decision is then made by a larger assembly. In the case of the prizes for physics, chemistry and literature, this is made up of members from the entire academy. The Norwegian Nobel Committee responsible for the Peace Prize has a special status because it is both the proposing working group and the body that awards the Nobel Prize. Incidentally, anyone who was nominated and did not receive the prize is only lucky to find out: The Nobel Foundation only releases its documents fifty years after an award ceremony.

In terms of prize money, there are more important prizes than the Nobel Prize today. The most lucrative is the Breakthrough Prize, which is awarded in the categories of fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics. Each awardee will receive $3 million in prize money. The prize was donated in 2012 by the Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner and his wife Julia. The winners are selected by former laureates. In contrast to the Nobel Prize, the selection takes place in a public process.

Although the Breakthrough Prize is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of the 21st century, especially by its founders, it is not comparable to the Nobel Prize in the public perception. This also applies to other top-class awards such as the Lasker, Wolf, Kavli or Körber prizes. It is not for nothing that it is repeatedly mentioned how often one of these laureates later received the Nobel Prize. This is still the only prize that can completely turn a researcher’s career upside down – for better or for worse.

There are many legends surrounding the Nobel Prize and its founder. One is that Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya is the reason there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. Alfred Nobel is said to have made advances to the world’s first female professor of mathematics. However, she had entered into a liaison with the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, whom Nobel did not like.

The veracity of this legend has not been proven. It is more likely that Nobel did not consider mathematics because, in his view, they did not meet the criterion of serving the good of mankind. The mathematicians need not worry. With the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, there are now two awards that are equal to the Nobel Prize.

It’s possible, but rarely happens. In more than a hundred years of history, only four people have won the Nobel Prize twice: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger. While Curie (Physics and Chemistry) and Pauling (Chemistry and Peace) received awards in two different categories, Bardeen received two Nobel Prizes in Physics and Sanger received two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. The International Committee of the Red Cross has even been awarded the Nobel Prize three times for its peace efforts. In contrast to the other Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Peace Prize can be awarded not only to individuals but also to institutions.

Between 1901 and 2021, 609 Nobel Prizes were awarded to 947 laureates and 28 organizations. The youngest winner is Malala Yousafzai. She was 17 when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her work on children’s rights. The oldest honoree is John B. Goodenough. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97, confirming a trend: with the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize winners, the laureates are getting older. Their average age is well over 60 years.

What is the reason for this is unclear. One explanation is that there are fewer and fewer discoveries worthy of a Nobel Prize today, so one has to dig into the past to find prize winners. However, another explanation is more likely. There are many more scientists and writers today than at the beginning of the 20th century, so that there is a backlog when it comes to awarding Nobel prizes.

Age isn’t the only side to the Nobel Prize. So far there have only been 59 award winners. Their number corresponds approximately to the number of male laureates over 80 years of age. If the dictum of the old white men makes sense somewhere, it’s here.

It is in the nature of things that the decisions of the Nobel Prize Committee are regularly criticized. Usually it is not the topic that is criticized, but the selection of the award winners. Since a maximum of three people per area can be awarded, there is always someone who feels left out. In fact, there have been some glaring mistakes in the past. Today, no one understands why Francis Crick and James Watson received an award in 1962 for the elucidation of the structure of DNA, while the biochemist Rosalind Franklin received nothing. She was the first to put her two male colleagues on the right track. She’s not the only woman who has been passed over.

Another accusation is that some discoveries are acknowledged much too late. This contradicts Alfred Nobel’s requirement to honor those who have brought the greatest benefit to mankind in the past year. However, this criticism is double-edged. After all, the benefits of basic research often only become apparent decades later. When the physicists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, no one could have guessed the revolution they would trigger.

Conversely, it is also possible to award Nobel Prizes too early. In the past, for example, the Nobel Peace Prize has repeatedly gone to people whose decision would be reconsidered in retrospect. The harshest criticism in recent years has been directed at the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to the critics, by honoring writers who hardly anyone knows, the prize is rendered insignificant.