At the beginning of October – in normal years – it is mostly boring. Apart from the fact that the doctor has to read the card again and notices that the radiators should be vented, not much happens. For a few elite groups of people there is still no time for early autumn lethargy.
Top doctors, writers, natural scientists, economists and a few politicians are waiting – and often also betting – on the Nobel Prizes. It starts again on Monday, 120 years after Nobel Prizes were awarded for the first time. To get in the mood, we start Nobel Week with a review of little or no significant, but also terrifying facts about 120 years of prizes and prize winners prize money. Let’s start with the least important.
Monetary 2021 is a good year for the laureates. There are ten million crowns per prize, one million more than two years ago. That is the equivalent of 980,000 euros. The gold medal is always worth a few thousand euros, depending on the gold price – purely in terms of the material. If one is auctioned, a lot more is usually collected. James Watson’s medal, for example, earned the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA $ 4.1 million. But you don’t actually talk about money here, because it’s about honor . And whoever receives a Nobel Prize usually also has a well-paid job and receives many invitations to dinner. Actually.
When Elfriede Jelinek was asked in a 3sat interview in 2004 what the recently announced literature prize meant for her, she looked at the interviewer a little blankly. Then she said the most important thing, of course, was to gain financial independence. And with so much money, even if – as often happens – you only get half or a third or half of the half, of course you can do something .
Albert Einstein, for example, promised his spouse Mileva Maric the full amount when he split up with her, if he won the price would get – of which he was relatively sure. In 1921 he kept his word to the woman who – although this is still controversial today – possibly had a not insignificant part in his theory development.
What Nobel Prize winners did with the prize money
Other disappointed partners learned from this, such as Rita Lucas . In the divorce agreement with Robert Lucas, she secured half of any possible Nobel Prize money. The price came in 1995 – a few months before the deadline for this agreement to be valid.
Other winners invest the money safely and use it to finance prizes and grants themselves, such as Tübingen Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (Medicine 1995). Günter Blobel , who died in 2018, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1998, donated the entire sum for the reconstruction of his hometown Dresden, the destruction of which he witnessed as a child. You can, however, say Wolfgang Ketterle , 2001 Physics Prize Winner, invest the crowns in buying a house and educating the children.
Me and I
When John Bardeen received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956, he traveled alone . The children should be able to go to school, was his reason. And besides, as his son said later, the week in Stockholm was too much for him, because it kept him from work. The Swedish king himself is said to have politely pointed out to Bardeen that he was not amused by it.
Bardeen vowed to get well soon and promised to bring the family “next time”. In 1972 he actually received a Nobel Prize in Physics for the second time. And kept my word. Other double prize winners are Linus Pauling (chemistry and peace), Marie Curie (physics and chemistry) and Frederic Sanger (twice chemistry).
Young and old
With Malala Yousafzai (Peace 2014) did not go to Pakistan for the first prize. Abdus Salam got it in 1979 in physics. But at the age of 17 she was and still is by far the youngest winner of all time. The youngest scientist at the time of the award in 1915 was the 25-year-old Briton Laurence Bragg. He had laid the foundations for X-ray structure analysis three years earlier.
The youngest man of letters was 41-year-old Rudyard Kipling in 1907, and it was not until 2019 that Ester Duflo, 49 at the time, lowered the threshold for the business award to this side of the 50th. 2019 was also the year of the oldest award winner to date . John Goodenough was 97 when he received his medal in Stockholm as one of the fathers of the lithium ion battery.
White and Male
Let’s keep it short because it is too painful to analyze But it would fill pages: It doesn’t look that bad in literature and the Peace Prize, but in medicine, physics and chemistry just three percent of the winners in 2020 were female ( Lise Meitner is said to have been nominated 13 times and always came away empty-handed). In the past year the ratio improved slightly, with four female and seven male award winners. The percentage of people with dark skin is still zero here. A dark-skinned man received the economic award only once: C. Arthur Lewis from St. Lucia 1975.
One and two
There are nations in which have lots of Nobel medals in showcases or maybe even shoeboxes (safer!). Americans (385), British (133) and Germans (108), for example, got quite a few. A few countries, however, only come up with a single award winner. These include such large nations as Brazil (Peter Medawar, Medicine, 1960) and Venezuela (Baruj Benacerraf, Medicine 1980).
An industrial nation like South Korea also has only one with Kim Dae young. As with him (Frieden, 2000), most of the national loners are peace and literature prizes. The latter is also due to the fact that one of the unwritten laws for this award was for a long time – and perhaps it still is – to at least take into account the literatures of as many nations and cultures as possible and to honor them with awards.
That leads to interesting statistics. For a long time, Iceland was the nation with the highest density of Nobel Prize winners – with Halldör Laxness, which is really worth reading, as the only prize winner. But here, too, things get complicated, because it depends on what you value as a nation. In fact, fewer people live in the Faroe Islands. And a Faroese was Niels Finsen. Already in 1903 he got the medicine prize – which turned out to be unfavorable for the writers of the archipelago.
From – who doesn’t know them – Rasmus Rasmussen to Janus Djurhuus to Helena and Rói Patursson so far. But there are still many nations without any award winners, even those with good candidates such as Kyrgyzstan with the writer Tschingis Aitmatow – and those with more than sufficient resources such as Saudi Arabia.
Eh (r) e and inheritance
It is known that the Curie family has a collection of gold medals from Sweden. There are five in total, with Marie as a double winner, Nobel Laureate wife, Nobel Laureate mother and Nobel Laureate mother-in-law all rolled into one.
Some other families struck at least twice: Married couples were honored for working together like May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser 2014 in medicine, but also independently of each other like Alva and Gunnar Myrdahl (Peace 1982 and Economics 1974). With Jan (1969) and Niko Tinbergen (1973), two brothers – in different subjects – are also there. Six times the combination was called father and son, for example with Niels and Aage Bohr (Physics 1922 and 1975).
In 1901 Emil von Behring was one of the very first prize winners. He was honored for important and life-saving work in infection medicine. This time, many believe that this subject will play a role again 120 years later.
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