The Nobel Prize: The good, the bad and the ugly
Controversial winners:
1. Barack Obama, 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Obama's term in office as the US president was marred by the continuation of wars in the Middle East and Africa. President Obama also presided over a notorious drone attack campaign through which over 3,797 people, including 324 civilians were killed.
2. The European Union, 2012 Nobel Peace Prize
The EU's winning of the peace prize was controversial because of its connection to weapons production. "Alfred Nobel said that the prize should be given to those who worked for disarmament," said Elsa-Britt Enger, a representative of Grandmothers for Peace, in a Reuters report at the time. "The EU doesn't do that. It is one of the biggest weapons producers in the world." Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Northern Ireland's Mairead Maguire and Argentina's Adolfo Perez Esquivel, signed an open letter criticising the decision and said the EU is "Clearly not one of the 'champions of peace' Alfred Nobel had in mind" when he created the prize.
3. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, and president of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat, 1994 Nobel Peace Prize
Human rights abuse by the Israel state has been documented very thoroughly at the time when this award was given. The prize appeared to acknowledge ceremonial improvements that had little real-world impact.
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4. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 1973 Nobel Peace Prize
The 1973 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for brokering a cease-fire. Le Duc Tho, however, declined the award. Kissinger has often been criticised for his ruthless foreign policy, which infamously included his ordering of a bombing raid of Hanoi while negotiating the cease-fire and his support of the genocidal Pakistani government during Bangladesh's liberation war. Two members of the committee, who had voted against Kissinger's selection, resigned in protest.
5. António Egas Moniz, 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Portuguese neurologist and brain surgeon António Egas Moniz was awarded the prize for devising the inhumane, cruel, and damaging surgical procedure of lobotomy, wherein an ice pick is inserted through the eye in order to permanently cut away a portion of the brain's frontal lobe. The medical procedure was designed to allegedly treat mental disorders, but has since come into disrepute and has been all but abandoned because it causes permanent brain damage that permanently leaves victims in a zombified state.
6. Fritz Haber, 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Fritz Haber was awarded his prize for inventing the Haber-Bosch process, which is a way of mass producing ammonia, which is an essential component of many fertilisers. However, Haber also developed chlorine gas as a chemical weapon during World War I and defended the use of gas warfare.
Black and Asian Nobel winners
Since the annual Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901, a total of 17 people of Black ethnicities and 59 Asians have won the award until last year.
The award is given for achievements in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. An associated prize in Economics was introduced in 1969.
Over 70% of Black Nobel winners won in the Peace category
As of November 2021, Nobel Prizes had been awarded to 943 individuals, of whom 17 were Black, which is 1.8% of the 943 individual recipients.
Black recipients got awards in three of six award categories: Twelve in Peace (70.6% of the black recipients), four in Literature (23.5%), and one in Economics (5.9%). The first Black recipient, Ralph Bunche, was awarded the Peace Prize in 1950.
Among the 617 science laureates that were awarded the prize over the last one hundred years, none have been Black.
Most number of Nobel won in a year by Asians
Asians have been the recipients of all six award categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics.
The first Asian recipient, Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the Literature Prize in 1913. In 1930, C V Raman became the first Asian recipient of a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences.
The most Nobel Prizes awarded to Asians in a single year was in 2014, when five Asians became laureates.
To date, there have been 59 Asian winners of the Nobel Prize, including twenty-nine Japanese, twelve Israeli, nine Indian and eight Chinese.
Top Ten Institutions with the Most Nobel Laureates
- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA (28)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA (22)
- Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA (22)
- University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA (21)
- California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA (20)
- University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom (18)
- University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA (18)
- Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA (17)
- Columbia University, New York, NY, USA (17)
- Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA (13)
Thanks, but no thanks: Nobel laureates who declined the prize
- Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, declined the prize because he had consistently declined all official honours.
- Le Duc Tho was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize for negotiating the Vietnam peace accord. Le Duc Tho said that he was not in a position to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, citing the prevailing situation in Vietnam as his reason.
- Adolf Hitler forbade three German Nobel Prize laureates, Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and Gerhard Domagk, from accepting the Nobel Prize. All of them were later able to receive the Nobel Prize diploma and medal, but not the prize amount.
- The Russian poet Boris Pasternak, who was the 1958 Nobel Laureate in literature, initially accepted the award, enraging the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This forced the writer to decline the prize eventually.
Also Read: Criticisms levelled against the most famous award
Gandhi and other glaring omissions by the Nobel committee
In 2006, the former director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, said that the greatest omission in the prize's history was never awarding the peace prize to the Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi, whose campaigns of non-violent direct action significantly contributed to the liberation of India from the violent British colonial rule.
According to Lundestad, Gandhi was shortlisted five times (twice before World War II, then in 1946, 1947 and 1948), but the committee's Euro-centric viewpoint and its failure to support national liberation struggles in colonies prevented Gandhi from receiving the award.
"Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether the Nobel committee can do without Gandhi, is the question," said Lundestad.
Moreover, the Nobel Prize committee has failed to award numerous profound authors and playwrights, despite the quality of their works and their influence on literature and culture.
Writers who have never received the Nobel Prize for Literature include James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Arthur Miller, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Furthermore, as celebrated and groundbreaking filmmaker and auteur Jean-Luc Godard once observed, there are no Nobel Prizes for painting, music, and cinema despite the cultural and philosophical significance of these activities.
Winner by gender
58 women won the Nobel Prize until 2021
Between 1901 and 2021, the Nobel Prize and prize in economic sciences have been awarded 59 times to women. Marie Curie, has been honoured twice, with the Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911. This means that 58 women in total have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2021.
31% of all Nobel awards received by women were for peace (10% for males) and 27% for literature (12% for males).
As for men, 24.2% of all Nobels won by men were in physics, followed by Physiology which is a hair below 24%.
The youngest and oldest recipients of the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize winners are 58 years of age on average. Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever recipient of the award, was 17 at the time of receiving the prize in 2014.
The oldest recipient, John B Goodenough from the United States, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 when he was 97. Goodenough was awarded the prize for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
These are the youngest and oldest winners in each of the category:
