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Chapter Nobel and His Prizes 1

The annual award of Nobel Prizes is an event of worldwide interest. Apart from their actual value—running into many thousands of dollars—these awards are the highest possible recognition of achievement in science and medicine, in literature, and in the cause of peace. Among the past prizewinners—over 900 in all—are such famous people as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and Malala Yousafzai. Over the years, the prizewinners have come from almost every country in the world; they receive their awards from the King of Sweden at an impressive ceremony in Stockholm. The awards are made each year on the same day, December 10. The date is very significant, for it marks the anniversary of the death of an outstanding Swedish scientist, Alfred Nobel, whose remarkable industrial success made these prizes possible. Yet Nobel is less well known than many people who have received his prizes. There is a certain irony about this, for if the prizes had been founded by others in Nobel’s lifetime, his own brilliance and success would probably have put him among the winners. For this obscurity, Alfred Nobel himself was mainly responsible. Despite the scale of his worldwide industrial operations, he never courted publicity; indeed, he actively shunned it. To him, biography was of no interest. He did not trouble to put on record the sort of material that would help those who later sought to piece together the story of his life.

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