(Stockholm) The Nobel Prizes are awarded from Monday until October 10 in Stockholm and Oslo. Here are five things to know about these awards, given to those who have worked for “the benefit of humanity”, according to the wish of their creator, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
Posted at 12:58 a.m.
A prize (almost) for the living
Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that a prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless death occurs after the announcement of the name of the winner. Until the rule of use was written in black and white, only two deceased personalities, Swedes, had been rewarded: the poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (literature in 1931) and the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, probably assassinated (Peace Prize in 1961). It also happened that a prize was not awarded, in the form of a tribute to a deceased winner, as in 1948, after the death of Gandhi. A recent winner will never have had the chance to receive the famous phone call announcing a Nobel: after the 2011 medicine prize to Canadian Ralph Steinman, we learn of his death three days earlier. But he remains on the list.
A fortune for a Nobel medal
The Nobel Prizes are endowed with the tidy sum of ten million crowns per category (about 900,000 euros at the current rate), and an 18-carat gold medal. But Nobel Peace Prize winner and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov has managed to turn gold into fortune, for the benefit of Ukrainian children. In June, the 196-gram medal received by the 2021 co-winner soared to $103.5 million, disbursed by an anonymous philanthropist and donated to a UNICEF program. That is 21 times more than the previous record.
A mistake at the origin of the prices?
On April 12, 1888, Alfred Nobel’s older brother, Ludvig, died in Cannes, France. But Le Figaro misunderstands, and announces in one the death of Alfred, of a brief assassin: “A man that one will be able only with very difficulty to pass for a benefactor of humanity died yesterday in Cannes. It is Mr. Nobel, inventor of dynamite”. What torments could this early obituary cause on Alfred? Many attribute to him the paternity of the creation of the prizes, underlining the echo of the formula chosen by Nobel to reward those who have contributed “to the benefit of humanity”. “But we can only imagine”, because the incident is not mentioned in his correspondence, his biographer Ingrid Carlberg told AFP. As for the visitors who came to offer their condolences to the Parisian mansion of the inventor, they were surprised to be welcomed by a living Alfred, as will be related… Le Figaro, the day after.
A 1903 Nobel pioneer… on global warming
Talented in many fields, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius was awarded the Chemistry Prize in 1903 for his “electrolytic theory of dissociation”. But it was other pioneering work that earned him a pioneering status today: at the end of the 19th century, he was the first to theorize that the combustion of fossil fuels (at the time, especially coal) led via sending CO2 global warming in the atmosphere. According to his calculations, a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide would warm the planet by 5°C. Modern models today give a range of 2.6 to 3.9°C. Far from suspecting the increasingly enormous quantities of fossil fuels that humanity would consume, Arrhenius underestimates the speed at which this level will be reached, and predicts that this warming will occur under the effect of human activity. … in 3000 years.
A new competition… and rich
With more than 120 years of history and a name known around the world, the Nobel Prize winners still have something to look forward to. But some consider them a little outdated, even dusty, to choose often old discoveries. Seeking to be an alternative Nobel, the Right Livelihood Award was created in 1980 by a wealthy German-Swedish after the Nobel Foundation turned down his proposal to create two new prizes for environment and development. But the Nobels have also found a new rival from Silicon Valley, very richly endowed: the Breaktrough Prizes. Already nicknamed the “Oscars of science”, these Californian competitors of the august Swedish committees are endowed with 3 million dollars, or about three times more than a Nobel.