October, the Month of Alfred Nobel’s Birth, Heralds the Announcement of the Nobel Prize Winners

First published Oct. 1, 2023

It is the practice of the Nobel Foundation to announce Nobel Prize winners in October, the birth month of Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This announcement leads to a frenzy in the world’s press and to elaborate celebrations in the communities and institutions with which the laureates are connected. The actual awards usually go unnoticed. That event occurs on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, when the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish royal family recognize the individuals deemed to have made the greatest achievements “for the benefit of mankind” in chemistry, physics, literature, and physiology or medicine. In a separate ceremony, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognizes “the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reducing of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”, the Nobel Prize for Peace.  The prizes were established as a result of Alfred Nobel’s bequest, the details of which were carefully specified in his will

No other prize for achievement in a discipline holds the same prestige. The laureates will be hailed throughout the world, the science winners will attract the most talented students to their laboratories; the laureates will be honored by political leaders and claimed as products of any institution they attended from grade school to graduate school and beyond, even if the work for which they were recognized occurred decades later.   

Nobel was one of the great entrepreneurs of the 19th century. He was a chemist, scientist and businessman with little formal education. He was tutored, especially in chemistry and physics, in St. Petersburg where his family had moved when he was a child because of his father’s munitions business on behalf of the Russian military. Alfred’s contributions to the invention of explosives, such as dynamite, permitted tunneling through mountains for roadways, excavating for the construction of canals and other such large enterprises. His invention of dynamite, a much more stable and safer explosive than nitroglycerin, allowed him to derive revenue from factories throughout the world that manufactured this product.  His fortune, also, was derived from the family’s and his development of explosives for war: land and sea mines, and munitions.  

The, so-called, Nobel Prize in Economics was not established by Alfred Nobel. It was established in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden and is officially designated as “The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel”. It has become generally accepted as the sixth Nobel Prize.  Nobel specifically required that the nation of citizenship of the laureate not be a factor in selection. Indeed, his nationality was in question. Born in Sweden, he moved to Russia at age 8 when his father established a munitions factory there. He had moved the headquarters of his company to France in 1870. When he felt conditions in France were no longer propitious, he moved to Italy in 1891 where he died five years later. 

After his death and the knowledge that his fortune was to be dedicated to prizes sponsored by institutions in Sweden (and Norway), according to the last version of his will, which was drawn up in Paris and dated 27 November 1895, the French contested his decision and argued that his huge fortune should stay in France. The decision regarding his country of “citizenship” fell to a curious French custom: in which country ones carriage horses were stabled. Shortly before his death, he had moved his magnificent Orloff carriage horses to Sweden. The Orloff trotter, a remarkable Russian breed, was characterized by physical stature and beauty, strength, and stamina. They were bred by Count Alexei Orloff to meet the demands of the Russian climate, primitive roadways, and long distances between Russian towns.  French custom dictated that wherever one’s carriage horses were housed, the estate distribution had to be made and, once this was determined, his will’s stipulations were accepted by the French. 

Some years before (1888), while living in France, Alfred read his obituary in a French newspaper. His brother Ludwig had died in Cannes, but the Parisian press mistakenly thought it was Alfred who had died and the obituary in a French newspaper had the headline “Le marchand de la morte est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead.”) His obituary said that Alfred Nobel “…became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.” Ludwig who was the wealthiest of the three Nobel brothers, had made his fortune developing the oil industry in Azerbaijan, which at one point produced fifty percent of the world’s oil. This initiative was in collaboration with his brother, Robert Nobel. Many felt Alfred’s identification as a merchant of death prompted his decision to leave his fortune for those who made the most important contribution to human betterment, a legacy more in keeping with his sense of himself. 

Nobel required that the peace prize be awarded by a committee established by the Norwegian Storting, its parliament, which so irked the Swedish king that he almost refused the gift. Since 1814, Norway and Sweden had been united under one king, although they each had separate political institutions and geographic boundaries.  At the time of Nobel’s death, Norway and Sweden were in a dispute about separation, which was achieved in 1905 as a result of a Norwegian plebiscite, a very contentious dissolution. In the end the Swedish king acquiesced to this stipulation in Nobel’s will. Nobel’s decision about the inclusion of the peace prize was thought to be the result of a longstanding platonic relationship that he had with Bertha Kinsky, who had worked for him for a time and then left to marry and became the Baroness Von Suttner. They continued a very long correspondence. She was devoted to this cause, was a founder of the Austrian peace movement, and, in 1905, won a Nobel Prize for Peace for her several books on the subject, one published in German and translated into English entitled “Lay down your arms” and her commitment to establishing peace conferences in an effort to subdue the winds of war in Europe. Nobel, also, felt that war was not a reasonable way to settle disputes among nations. He, initially, wrote his will to limit the Peace Prize to 30 years indicating that if harmony among nations was not achieved in that time-frame, the world could not be saved from continued irrational, violent and destructive relationships. That stipulation was removed from the final version of his will.

The Prizes for Chemistry, Physics and Physiology or Medicine are usually not controversial although at least two glaring errors were made in that Prize in the distant past. One was in 1926 when the Prize was given to a Danish professor of pathological anatomy, Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, for his report of a worm he named Spiroptera carcinoma that purportedly caused stomach cancer in the rat. The tissue changes were misinterpreted and were not neoplastic. The idea that one had an animal model of cancer at that early time led to the overly enthusiastic response of the Nobel selection committee. Errors of this sort should not be repeated after a century of scientific progress and our more advanced state of knowledge. The other error was the Nobel Prize in this category shared by the Portuguese neurologist, António Egas Moniz, in 1949 for introducing the procedure of frontal lobotomy. The procedure, originally hailed as a treatment for schizophrenia and severe depression, proved to be not only ineffectual but it worsened the cognition and behavior of its victims, often leaving them in a vegetative state. Here the error was acting too quickly. Many had argued the procedure did harm more frequently than good. A glaring example of the misapplication of frontal lobotomy, was its effect on Rosemary Kennedy, Rose and Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s eldest daughter and sister of future President John F. Kennedy. Her father was so concerned that she might be seduced and become pregnant out of wedlock, he insisted on trying this procedure, which she had at age 21 years. She was an attractive, interactive, although slow-witted and sometimes cantankerous person, the result of an obstetrical misadventure at her birth. Following the lobotomy, she was left hopelessly impaired for 65 years, unable to speak or walk and relegated to institutional care following the procedure. In the 1940’s clinical trials to establish a procedure’s merits and risks had not yet been formally introduced. This rush to judgment can be compared to the Prize for the description of the structure of DNA, among the most impactful discoveries in the history of the biological sciences, published in 1953. The Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962, nearly a decade later. Peyton Rous received his Prize at age 88, 55 years after he established that a filterable particle, a presumptive virus, caused sarcoma in fowl in 1911, subsequently named the Rous sarcoma virus.     

Although the choice in these scientific disciplines may be contentious because there are several deserving candidates, the choice is usually appropriate. A former chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Arne Tiselius, himself a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1948, stated that one cannot in practice apply the principle that the prize should be given to the person who is best; it is impossible to define who is best. Hence, there is only one alternative, which is to try to find a particularly worthy candidate. This approach has been largely successful in the selecting the scientific prize recipients. The Prizes in Literature and Peace are often very controversial. Great authors like Tolstoy have been overlooked, repeatedly, whereas some other choices have been lost to obscurity. Likewise in the selection of the Peace Prize, controversy is often provoked when the accomplishment does not result in the hoped for result with the passage of time, such as the Prize shared by Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 for agreeing to the Oslo Accords as a step toward Middle East Peace and a two state solution between the Palestinians and the Israelis, now 26 years ago with the promise unfulfilled. 

As we approach October, we will again be treated to the revelation of the great accomplishments recognized by this most prestigious of awards. It will be of interest to see how the Award Ceremony will be managed on December 10th in the year of Covid-19.