Criticisms levelled against the most famous award

There is no doubt that the achievements awarded by the Nobel Prize have had immense positive effects on the world, fully justifying the highest accolade, as the prize is popularly perceived.

But criticisms of the award continue to surface and the Nobel Prize authorities seem oblivious to them. 

The Nobel Prize: The good, the bad and the ugly

Among the most serious flaws in the principles that underpins the awards are the Nobel authorities' refusal to reassess how they select winners in the sciences. And it's not like past instances did not teach them to be more wary of their methods. 

One of the ugliest pockmarks in the Nobel prize's history is the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology, which was awarded to the Portuguese neurologist and brain surgeon António Egas Moniz for devising the surgical procedure of lobotomy, which involved cutting away a portion of the brain, causing permanent brain damage. 

But perhaps, it was a different time, and they do not deserve the harsh anachronistic judgement for it. However, this is far from the only criticism of Nobel Prizes awarded for contributions made in the sciences. 

Refusing to make group awards 

Researchers have pointed out that although it is generally believed that the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry are the most justified and fair, the fact that the Nobel Prize can only be shared by three people is a major drawback, since groundbreaking discoveries today are unthinkable without teamwork.

"The fact that the Nobel Prize 2017 committee refuses to make group awards is causing increasingly frequent problems and giving a misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done," astrophysicist Professor Martin Rees, former Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, told BBC News in 2017, commenting on that year's Nobel prize in physics. 

In fact, one of the three Nobel recipients in Physics in 2017, Emeritus Professor Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that the discovery for which he and two of his co-researchers were awarded the prize, did actually involve not just hundreds, but more than 1,000 scientists, taking "as long as 40 years of people thinking about this …", as Prof Weiss was quoted in The Guardian. 

Not much has changed since 2017, and the Nobel committee still refuses to make group awards in sciences. 

Studies have also shown that the number of epoch making ideas winning nobel prizes have slowed down and since the work most scientists do now is hyper specialised it is hard to judge the impact of their work on the real world. 

The peace prize controversies

The Peace Prize category is even more notorious for its seemingly premature recognitions and sometimes outright political subservience. 

For every laureate like Nelson Mandela there seems to be a controversial winner, be it Malala Yousafzai or Barack Obama.

Critics have dubbed the Nobel Peace Prize as a "political tool" used by the West to advance its agendas. Obama's winning of the prize in 2009, before his first year in office could end, seemed to have embarrassed even the former US president, who in 2016 told TV host Stephen Colbert: "To be honest, I still don't know what my Nobel Peace Prize was for".

And there is no provision for rescinding the peace prize, even when recipients go on to commit atrocities. Obama presided over the biggest drone assassination campaign in the world, killing over 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. 

Closer to Bangladesh, the Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991 for "her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights" back when she was a political prisoner. 

But since she became the head of state of Myanmar and under her watch at least 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed in the country's Rakhine State and 700,000 others have fled Myanmar. 

Yet, Suu Kyi and Obama continue to be Nobel Peace Prize laureates.