Nobel Prize controversies

From Freepedia

The Nobel Prizes are a series of awards, posthumously instituted by bequest of Alfred Nobel, to be awarded to individuals who had served humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. There is also the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel which is itself controversial. The prizes are generally considered to be supreme decoration in the world today. Over their hundred-year history, there have been several Nobel Prize controversies wherein apparently deserving recipients were excluded from the prize, or alternately where a recipient later appeared to be undeserving of the prize.

Contents

Controversial exclusions

  • Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated for it five times between 1937 and 1948. Decades later however, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. In a sense, however, Gandhi had already received an unofficial posthumous award; in 1948 (the year of Gandhi's death), the Nobel Committee did not make the award, stating "there was no suitable living candidate". Similarly, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing the issue.
  • Jocelyn Bell first noticed the stellar radio source which was ultimately recognised as a pulsar, but she was excluded from the 1974 prize. Instead, her supervisor Antony Hewish was the second name on the prize (he developed the observational technique and designed the array which detected the pulsar). The prize was officially awarded for Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish's pioneering research in radioastrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously argued that Jocelyn Bell should also have been included as it was she who first detected the pulsar signal in measurements made by the radio array, although she herself did not believe she should have been included. This incident provided the setup for the joke that the prizes are indeed "No-Bell" (origin unknown).
  • Charles Best first isolated insulin, but was excluded from the Nobel Prize in favour of his associate John Macleod. This snub so incensed Best's colleague, Frederick Banting, that he later voluntarily shared half of his 1923 Nobel Prize award money with Best.
  • Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA, but died before she could receive the prize.
  • Fred Hoyle was denied a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983, although the winner William Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis.
  • Chung-Yao Chao first captured positrons (but did not realise what they were) through electron-positron annihilation. He died in 1998 without receiving the prize.
  • Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel.
  • Lise Meitner
  • Robert Millikan is widely believed to have been denied the 1920 prize for physics owing to Felix Ehrenhaft's claims to have measured charges smaller than Millikan's elementary charge. Ehrenhaft's claims were ultimately dismissed and Millikan was awarded the prize in 1923.
  • Raymond V. Damadian was denied a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, which was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers protesting his exclusion from the award.
  • The fact that Nobel Prizes may never be posthumously awarded means that future deserving recipients may be overlooked if they die before receiving the award.

Controversial recipients

  • The selection of Jimmy Carter in 2002, for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts" was hardly controversial, but it was seen as a "kick in the leg" to George W Bush, who was issuing military threats against Iraq.

Nominations which were later condemned

Nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize may be made by any one of thousands of persons, including all national legislators and history professors. Even from the beginning the committee has received hundreds of nominations annually. Nominations are not revealed by the prize committee until fifty years have passed.

  • Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Peace by E.G.C. Brandt, member of the Swedish parliament. The nomination was withdrawn in a letter of February 1, 1939.
  • Josef Stalin, nominated in 1945 by a Norwegian former foreign minister, nominated in 1948 by a Czech professor.
  • Benito Mussolini, nominations in 1935 by a German college law faculty and a by a French law professor.

Recipients who declined the prize

  • Boris Pasternak at first accepted the Literature prize in 1958, but was later caused by the authorities in the USSR to decline the prize.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Literature prize in 1964, stating that he had always refused official honors. However, Sartre later tried to claim the prize money but the Nobel committee turned him down.
  • Although Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn accepted the Literature prize in 1970, he decided not to go to Stockholm to receive it for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return. He finally did receive it however, in December 1974 after he was exiled from the USSR.
  • Le Duc Tho declined the 1973 Peace prize (jointly awarded to him and Henry Kissinger (see above) on the stated grounds that his country was not yet at peace.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Nobel_Prize_controversies.html"


Views
Personal tools
Similar Links