Civilisation/Nobel Prizes

Introduction

The Nobel Prizes are prizes awarded annually to people (and, in the case of the Peace Prize, to organizations) who have completed outstanding research, invented ground-breaking techniques or equipment, or made an outstanding contribution to society in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, medicine or physiology and economics.

The Prizes were instituted by the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel through his will. They were first awarded in 1901, five years after Nobel's death. The prize in economics, instituted by the Bank of Sweden, has been awarded since 1969.

Prizes cannot be revoked. Since 1974, no award may be made posthumously.

The Prizes are then awarded at formal ceremonies held annually on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.

A prize may not be shared among more than three people.

The Peace Prize ceremony has been held at the Norwegian Nobel Institute (1905–1946); the Aula of the University of Oslo (1947–1990); and most recently at the Oslo City Hall. As of 2005, the other Prize ceremonies have been held at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

Since 1902, the King of Sweden has, with the exception of the Peace Prize, presented all the prizes in Stockholm

The Nobel Prize amount is currently set at Swedish kronor (SEK) 10 million per full Nobel Prize

In the history of the Nobel Prize, there have been only four people to have received two Nobel Prizes. These are:

• Marie Curie – Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911)
• Linus Pauling – Chemistry (1954) and Peace (1962)
• John Bardeen – Physics (1956 and 1972)
• Frederick Sanger – Chemistry (1958 and 1980)
• Barry Sharpless - Chemistry (2001 and 2022)

Frederick Sanger is the only Briton and the only living person to have received two Nobel Prizes

Only two people have the distinction of being an Oscar winner and a Nobel Laureate –

• George Bernard Shaw, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1938
• Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, won an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2000

Marie Curie shared her Nobel Prize in Physics (1903) with her husband Pierre Curie (and with Henri Becquerel). Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, would similarly share a Nobel Prize. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and is the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences

Oldest winner – John Goodenough, for Chemistry in 2019. Aged 97

Youngest winner – Malala Yousafzai. Aged 17

Niels Bohr (Physics, 1922) and his son, Aage (Physics, 1975) won Nobel Prizes

Jan and Niko Tinbergen are the only brothers to win Nobel Prizes

William Bragg and his son, Lawrence Bragg, won the prize for Physics in 1915 for their work on X-ray crystallography’

Husband and wife team, May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014

Ronald Ross was the first Briton to win a Nobel Prize (Physiology or Medicine, 1902) for his work on malaria

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the first woman after Marie Curie to be awarded alone a Nobel Prize in sciences

Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese to win a Nobel Prize, in 1949

Andre Geim is the only winner of a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel prize (for magnetically levitating a frog)

Alfred Michelson was the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in sciences

First Nobel Prize awarded for astronomical research – Ryle and Hewish (Physics) in 1974

Ernest Walton was the first Irishman to win a Nobel Prize in science

Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated for the Nobel Prize 84 times, more than any other physicist (including Otto Stern, who got nominated 82 times), but he never received the award

People who have declined a Nobel Prize –

• John Paul Sartre (Literature, 1964)
• Le Duc Tho (Peace, 1973)

People who were forced to decline a Nobel Prize –

• Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and Gerhard Domagk – by Hitler
• Boris Pasternak (Literature, 1958) – by the Soviet Union

Nobel Peace Prize

Notable Winners

1901	Henry Dunant and Frederic Passy	Dunant founded the International Red Cross Movement
1903	Randal Cremer	First British winner
1904	Institute of International Law
1905	Bertha von Suttner	First female winner. Austrian
1906	Theodore Roosevelt	for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth. First American winner
1917	International Committee of the Red Cross	Also won in 1944 and 1963
1919	Woodrow Wilson	for promoting the League of Nations
1922	Fridtjof Nansen	for his work as a League of Nations High Commissioner
1925	Austen Chamberlain	for the Locarno Treaties
1929	Frank Kellogg	For the Kellogg-Briand Pact
1934	Arthur Henderson	for his work for the League of Nations in disarmament
1935	Carl von Ossietzky	for his struggle against Germany's rearmament
1937	Robert Cecil	for his work with the League of Nations
1945	Cordell Hull	for his role in establishing the United Nations
1950	Ralph Bunche	First African American to win
1952	Albert Schweitzer	for founding a hospital in Gabon
1953	George Marshall	for the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan
1954	United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)	Also won in 1981
1957	Lester B Pearson	for helping to resolve the Suez Crisis
1960	Albert Luthuli	President of the ANC. First African to win
1961	Dag Hammarskjöld	Awarded posthumously
1962	Linus Pauling	for his campaign against nuclear weapons testing
1964	Martin Luther King
1965	United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
1969	International Labour Organization
1970	Norman Borlaug	for developing strains of high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat for developing countries
1971	Willy Brandt
1973	Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho	Le Duc Tho declined the award
1975	Andrei Sakharov
1976	Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan	Founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement
1977	Amnesty International
1978	Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin	Sadat was the first Muslim Nobel laureate
1979	Mother Teresa	Founder of Missionaries of Charity
1983	Lech Walesa	Founder of Solidarity
1984	Desmond Tutu
1986	Elie Wiesel	Born in Romania. Holocaust survivor
1987	Oscar Arias	President of Costa Rica
1988	United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces
1989	Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
1990	Mikhail Gorbachev
1991	Aung San Suu Kyi
1992	Rigoberta Menchu	Guatemala
1993	Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk
1994	Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres
1995	Joseph Rotblat and Pugwash Conferences	Pugwash is a village in Nova Scotia
1996	Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta	East Timor
1997	International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and Jody Williams
1998	John Hume and David Trimble
1999	Medicins Sans Frontieres
2000	Kim Dae Jung	for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea
2001	United Nations and Kofi Annan
2002	Jimmy Carter
2003	Shirin Ebadi	Iran. First Muslim female winner
2004	Wangari Maathai	Kenya
2005	International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei	for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes
2006	Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank	for microcredit work in Bangladesh
2007	Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore
2008	Martti Ahtisaari	Former President of Finland
2009	Barack Obama
2010	Liu Xiaobo	for his struggle for fundamental human rights in China
2011	Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) and Tawakkul Karman (Yemen)	for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights
2012	European Union
2013	Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
2014	Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi
2015	Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet
2016	Juan Manuel Santos	President of Colombia
2017	International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
2018	Dennis Mugwege (Congo) and Nadia Murad (Iraq)	for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict
2019	Abiy Ahmed Ai	Prime Minister of Ethiopia
2020	World Food Programme
2021	Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov

Nobel Prize in Literature

Award of 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature postponed until the following year following a crisis over sexual assault allegations aimed at French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault at the organisation which decides the winner

France has won the most awards (18)

Rudyard Kipling is the youngest person to win the award

Notable Winners

1901	Sully Prudhomme	French poet and essayist
1902	Theodore Mommsen	principally for The History of Rome
1907	Rudyard Kipling	First British winner
1909	Selma Lagerlof	First female winner. Swedish
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Belgium
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	India. First non-European winner
1921	Anatole France
1923	WB Yeats	First Irish winner
1925	George Bernard Shaw
1927	Henri Bergson
1929	Thomas Mann	principally for Buddenbrooks
1930	Sinclair Lewis	First American winner
1932	John Galsworthy	principally for The Forsyte Saga. Second British winner
1933	Ivan Bunin	First Russian winner
1934	Luigi Pirandello
1936	Eugene O’Neill
1938	Pearl Buck	First female American winner
1945	Gabriela Mistral	Chile. First Latin American winner
1946	Hermann Hesse
1948	TS Eliot
1949	William Faulkner
1950	Bertrand Russell
1953	Winston Churchill
1954	Ernest Hemingway	principally for The Old Man and the Sea
1957	Albert Camus	First African-born winner
1958	Boris Pasternak	Declined
1962	John Steinbeck
1963	Georgos Seferis	Greek Ambassador to UK
1964	John-Paul Sartre	Declined
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov
1967	Miguel Asturias	Guatemala
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	First Japanese winner
1969	Samuel Beckett
1970	Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1971	Pablo Neruda	Chile
1973	Patrick White	First Australian winner
1976	Saul Bellow
1978	Isaac Singer	Works in Yiddish
1982	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1983	William Golding
1986	Wole Soyinka	First African winner. Born in Nigeria
1988	Jose Saramago	Portugal
1990	Octavio Paz
1991	Nadime Gordimer	First South African winner
1992	Derek Walcott	Saint Lucia
1993	Toni Morrison	First Afro-American winner
1995	Seamus Heaney
1997	Dario Fo
1999	Gunter Grass	Born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland
2001	VS Naipaul	Born in Trinidad
2002	Imre Kertesz	Hungary
2003	J.M. Coetzee	South Africa
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	Austria
2005	Harold Pinter
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Turkey
2007	Doris Lessing	Born in Persia
2008	J.M.G. Le Clezio	France
2009	Herta Muller	Germany. Born in Romania
2010	Mario Vargas Llosa	Peru
2011	Tomas Transtromer	Sweden
2012	Mo Yan	China
2013	Alice Munro	Canada
2014	Patrick Modiano	France
2015	Svetlana Alexievich	Belarus. Born in Ukraine
2016	Bob Dylan
2017	Kazuo Ishiguro
2018	Olga Tokarczuk	Poland
2019	Peter Handke	Austria
2020	Louise Gluck	USA
2021	Abdulrazak Gurnah	Britain. Born in Tanzania

Nobel Prize in Physics

Niels Bohr (1922) and his son, Aage (1975) both won the Nobel Prize in Physics

William Bragg and his son, Lawrence Bragg, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 for their work on X-ray crystallography’. Lawrence was 25 at the time

Swedish physicists Manne Siegbahn and his son Kai both received the Nobel Prize in Physics

JJ Thomson and his son George Paget Thomson both won the Nobel Prize in Physics

First Nobel Prize awarded for astronomical research was won by Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish in 1974

Only three women have won the Nobel Prize in physics – Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018

C.V. Raman was the first Asian person to receive a Nobel Prize in any branch of science

Notable winners

1901	Wilhelm Rontgen	for the discovery of X-rays
1903	Antoine Becquerel, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie	for their work on radioactivity
1904	Lord Rayleigh	for the discovery of argon
1906	JJ Thomson	for the discovery of the electron
1907	Alfred Michelson	for The Michelson–Morley experiment which proved that the ether does not exist
1909	Marconi and Braun	for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy
1910	Johannes Diderik van der Waals	for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids
1912	Gustaf Dalen	for the invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys
1913	Heike Onnes	for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led to the production of liquid helium
1914	Max von Laue	for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals
1918	Max Planck	for his discovery of energy quanta
1921	Albert Einstein	for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect
1922	Niels Bohr	for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them
1923	Robert Millikan	for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect
1925	Franck and Hertz	for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom
1927	Charles Wilson Arthur Compton	for work on the cloud chamber for discovery of the Compton effect, which demonstrated the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation
1929	Louis de Broglie	for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons
1930	C.V. Raman	for his work on the scattering of light
1932	Werner Heisenberg	for the creation of quantum mechanics
1933	Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrodinger	for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory
1935	James Chadwick	for the discovery of the neutron
1936	Carl Anderson Victor Franz Hess	for the discovery of the positron for the discovery of cosmic rays
1938	Enrico Fermi	for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons
1939	Ernest Lawrence	for the invention of the cyclotron
1945	Wolfgang Pauli	for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle
1947	Edward Appleton	for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the Appleton layer
1949	Hideki Yukawa	for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces
1951	Cockcroft and Walton	for splitting the atom
1954	Max Born	for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics
1955	Willis Lamb	for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum
1956	Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley	for inventing the transistor
1958	Pavel Cherenkov	for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation
1959	Chamberlain and Segre	for their discovery of the antiproton
1960	Donald Glaser	for the invention of the bubble chamber
1962	Lev Landau	for work on superfluidity
1963	Eugene Wigner Johannes Jensen and Maria Goeppert Mayer	for laying the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus
1965	Richard Feynman	for his work on quantum electrodynamics
1966	Lee, Osheroff and Richardson	for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3
1967	Hans Bethe	for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars
1968	Luis Walter Alvarez	for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics
1969	Murray Gell-Mann	for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions
1971	Dennis Gabor	for his invention and development of the holographic method
1972	Bardeen, Cooper and Schriffer	for the theory of superconductivity
1973	Brian Josephson	for his pioneering theoretical work on superconductivity
1974	Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish	for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics
1978	Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson	for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation
1979	Glashow, Salem and Weinberg	for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles
1983	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar	for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars
1986	Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer and Ernst Ruska	for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope (Binnig and Rohrer) and the electron microscope (Ruska)
1995	Martin Perl and Frederick Reines	for the discovery of the tau lepton (Perl) and the neutrino (Reines)
2000	Jack Kilby	for the invention of the integrated circuit
2006	John Mather and George Smoot	for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation
2010	Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov	for groundbreaking experiments regarding graphene
2011	Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess	for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae
2014	Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura	for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Notable Winners

1901	Jacobus H. van ’t Hoff	for his work on osmotic pressure
1902	Hermann Fischer	for his work on sugar and purine synthesis
1903	Svante Arrhenius	For his electrolytic theory of dissociation
1904	William Ramsay	for his discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air
1905	Adolf von Baeyer	for his work on organic dyes
1906	Henri Moissan	for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds
1908	Ernest Rutherford	for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances
1909	Wilhelm Ostwald	for his work on catalysis
1911	Marie Curie	for the discovery of radium and polonium
1912	Victor Grignard	for the discovery of the Grignard reagent
1918	Fritz Haber	for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements
1921	Frederick Soddy	for his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes
1935	Frederic Joliet and Irene Joliet-Curie	for their synthesis of new radioactive elements
1944	Otto Hahn	for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei
1951	Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan	for discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements
1958	Frederick Sanger	for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin
1960	Willard Libby	for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination
1961	Melvin Calvin	for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants
1964	Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin	for the discovery of the structure of vitamin B12
1965	Robert Burns Woodward	for the synthesis natural products including vitamin B12
1980	Frederick Sanger	for the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids
1993	Kary Mullis	for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method
1995	Crutzen, Molina and Rowland	for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone
2020	Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna	for the development of a method for genome editing

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute

Husband and wife team Carl and Gerti Cori from Czechoslovakia won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947. Gerti Cori was first female winner of the prize

Husband and wife team, May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014

Elizabeth Blackburn became the first Australian woman Nobel laureate in 2009 for her discovery of telomerase

Tu Youyou was the first Chinese woman Nobel laureate

In 2011, Ralph Steinman was awarded the prize; however, unknown to the committee, he had died three days before the announcement

Notable Winners

1901	Emil von Behring	for discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin
1902	Ronald Ross	For his work on the transmission of malaria
1904	Ivan Pavlov	for research pertaining to the digestive system
1905	Robert Koch	for his tuberculosis findings
1906	Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal	in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system
1908	Paul Ehrlich	for work on immunity
1923	Banting and Macleod	for the discovery of insulin. Banting shared the award with Best
1929	Frederick Hopkins	for the discovery of vitamins
1930	Karl Landsteiner	for his discovery of human blood groups
1932	Sherrington and Adrian	for their discoveries regarding the functions of neurons
1933	Thomas Hunt Morgan	for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity
1936	Otto Loewi and Henry Dale	for their discoveries relating to chemical transmission of nerve impulses
1943	Henrik Dam and Edward Doisy	for the discovery of Vitamin K
1945	Fleming, Chain and Florey	for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases
1948	Paul Muller	for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison
1949	Antonio Moniz	for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy (lobotomy) in certain psychoses
1952	Selman Waksman	for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis
1953	Hans Krebs	for his discovery of the citric acid cycle
1958	George Beadle and Edward Tatum	for their discovery of the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells
1960	Peter Medawar and Frank Burnet	for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance
1962	Crick, Watson, and Wilkins	for discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material
1965	Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob	their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis
1973	Niko Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz	for their discoveries concerning social behaviour patterns in animals
1983	Barbara McClintock	for the discovery of jumping genes
1988	James W Black	for the development of beta-blockers
1993	Richard Roberts and Philip Sharp	for the discovery of split genes
2001	Hunt, Nurse and Brenner	for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle
2003	Peter Mansfield and Paul Lauterbur	for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging
2008	Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier	for the discovery of HIV
2010	Robert Edwards	for the development of in vitro fertilization
2015	Tu Youyou	for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria

Nobel Prize in Economics

Full name of Nobel Prize in Economics is “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”

Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 awarded to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize

Notable Winners

1969	Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen	for work on econometrics
1970	Paul Samuelson	First American winner
1972	John Hicks	First British winner
1973	Wassily Leontief	Identified the paradox that the U.S. (the most capital-abundant country in the world by any criteria) exported labour-intensive commodities and imported capital-intensive commodities
1974	Friedrich Hayek	for work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations
1976	Milton Friedman
1981	James Tobin
1994	John Nash	Game theory
1998	Amartya Sen	for his contributions to welfare economics
2008	Paul Krugman	for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography
2009	Elinor Ostrom	First woman to win
2017	Richard Thaler	Nudge theory
2019	Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo	Second woman to win
2020	Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson	for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats

Nobel Prize Winners in 2022

Peace	Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties
Literature	Annie Ernaux (France)
Physics	Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science"
Chemistry	Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and Barry Sharpless "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry"
Physiology or Medicine	Svante Paabo (Sweden) "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution"
Economics	Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig "for research on banks and financial crises"