The world’s most coveted prize

What makes the prize so prestigious?

The Nobel was humanity’s first truly international award. Winners join a unique club of just 705 laureates, chosen over the past century, including such Olympians as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Bertrand Russell, Marie Curie, Ivan Pavlov, and Winston Churchill. The weeklong festivities, in Stockholm, capped by a white-tie ceremony and banquet presided over by the king and queen of Sweden, are like something out of a royal fairy tale. The money isn’t bad either: This year, each prize is worth a record $1.32 million. The attention alone is overwhelming. “For one week,” said 1976 physics laureate Burton Richter, “you’re king of the world.”

Is this what Alfred Nobel envisioned?

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Heavens, no. Nobel (1833–96), the Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, simply wanted to atone for the devastation his invention had brought to the world. In his will, he declared that his $9 million fortune should fund awards to reflect his more enlightened interests: physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, peace, and literature. (A prize in economics was added in 1968.) In the name of global goodwill, Nobel declared that “no consideration whatsoever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates” and that the winners shall “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” At the time, the notion was radical; King Oscar II sniffed that it was insufficiently “patriotic minded.” But since first being awarded in 1901, the prizes have captivated the world.

How are the prizes judged?

Amid great secrecy and strict protocol. The Nobel Foundation controls the money, but three-to-five-member committees do the work. They are drawn from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which bestows the physics, chemistry, and economics prizes; the Karolinska Institute (medicine); the Royal Swedish Academy (literature); and the Norwegian Storting, or parliament (peace). After asking experts for their recommendations, the committees sift through hundreds of nominees, select the finalists, and submit them to their governing bodies. In October, winners learn they’ve won through a ritual phone call, usually just 15 minutes ahead of the rest of the world. “This machinery is so self-effacing,” wrote Nobel historian Burton Feldman, “that the decisions seem almost to issue not from mere Stockholm but from some timeless Realm of Objective Judgment.”

Are the choices always impeccable?

Not quite. Though they strive to be scrupulous and enlightened, Nobel judges sometimes fall prey to the subjectivity that characterizes all contests, and have made many strange choices and grievous omissions. Such masters as Ibsen, Joyce, Tolstoy, and Brecht never won for literature. Gandhi never won the peace prize, and Freud was never honored for medicine. Edwin Hubble, who first postulated the expansion of the universe, was passed over for the physics award. Dmitri Mendeleev devised the periodic table of the elements, but that didn’t garner him the Nobel in chemistry. This year, Raymond V. Damadian, who helped develop magnetic resonance imaging, is raising hell because he didn’t get the medicine prize; he’s even running inverted pictures of the Nobel medal in full-page newspaper ads headlined “The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted.” Some of the winners, on the other hand, have been utterly confounding.

Such as?

A long list of obscure and unreadable literature laureates, including Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Selma Lagerlöf, Henrik Pontoppidan, Pär Lagerkvist, and Salvatore Quasimodo. The least impressive science winner was probably Nils Dalén of Sweden, who won the 1912 physics prize for improving the wattage of lighthouses. Danish researcher Johannes Fibiger snared the 1926 medicine prize after he claimed to have reproduced cancer cells in the laboratory; later, it turned out he was wrong. Egas Moniz’s 1949 medicine Nobel, for perfecting the lobotomy, seemed like a good idea until physicians discarded the practice as ineffective and barbaric. Even some laureates have confessed to harboring some major misgivings about the prizes.

What is their chief complaint?

The prize, they say, is almost too awe-inspiring for its own good. Thanks to the Nobel’s nearly superhuman aura, it tends to foster a godlike cult of omniscience. “Laureates aren’t deities, even if some of them think they are,” said James J. Heckman, who won the 2000 economics prize. “People ask me questions about things I know nothing about.” Some critics suggest that the Nobel has actually ruined many a brilliant career. “No one has ever done anything after he got it,” 1948 literature laureate T.S. Eliot said.

Is that true?

No, although many winners have their best work behind them by the time they’re recognized. By the same token, some truly deserving winners would have been lost to obscurity had it not been for the Nobel. By the time the literature prize went to William Faulkner, in 1949, most of his books were out of print. Critics had written him off as impenetrable, grotesque, and provincial. The Nobel almost single-handedly revived his career. In 1935, despite pressure from Nazi Germany, the peace prize went to Carl von Ossietzky, who had exposed Hitler’s secret rearmament. Von Ossietzky paid for the prize with his life. When the Nazis invaded Norway, they threw him in a concentration camp, where he died.

Giving peace a chance