This year’s Nobel Prize winners will be announced starting Monday. In times of science deniers and conflicts, the prizes are a “force for good,” emphasizes Stockholm.
Stockholm – One might think that the Nobel Prizes would slowly fall out of time 123 years after they were first awarded. An award for scientists, writers and peacemakers that goes back to a will from the 19th century, from a time before the world wars, before the Internet and smartphones? Today, scientific findings are sometimes openly questioned by politicians, many people these days prefer to read short social media posts rather than deep literature, and peace, well, things are really not going well around the world at the moment.
“The Nobel Prize plays an increasingly important role in today’s world by addressing many of the issues facing communities, such as science denial, human rights violations and disinformation on many levels,” said acting Nobel Foundation director Anna Sjöström Douagi. As examples, she cites the Nobel Peace Prize for the journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitri Muratow, who were honored in 2021 for their fight for freedom of expression and truth, and the recent Nobel Prize in Medicine for Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, whose work enabled the extremely rapid vaccine development in the Corona virus. pandemic made possible.
A force for good in the world
“The price is therefore a force for good,” says Sjöström Douagi. He repeatedly emphasizes the importance of free science, free expression, free societies and free exchange across borders – all things that the world urgently needs.
Once a year, the Nobel Prizes shine a spotlight on humanity’s greatest achievements, from the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry to literature and peace and economics. Essentially, it celebrates characteristics that define humanity: invention, creativity and the pursuit of good, peaceful coexistence. It starts this Monday with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, before the other prize categories are gradually announced in the following days.
Providing the greatest benefit to humanity
The Nobel Prizes go back to the dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). He stipulated in his will that the awards should go to those who had brought the greatest benefit to humanity during the past year. He named physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace as prize categories. The awards were given out for the first time in 1901 – five years after his death. Since 1969, a prize for economics has also been awarded in Nobel’s memory, founded by the Swedish central bank.
According to the Nobel Foundation, a total of exactly 1,000 Nobel Prize winners have been chosen to date, including 358 individual prize winners and 642 who shared the award in their respective category with two or three people. A few, such as the physicist and chemist Marie Curie or the International Committee of the Red Cross, were even among these 1,000 more than once.
What would Nobel think of today? “Alfred Nobel lived in a world with many challenges, social and political as well as natural, such as epidemics, lack of resources and so on,” says Sjöström Douagi. Nobel, like many of his contemporaries, believed that science and technology could alleviate these challenges and that science and reason went hand in hand with humanism and peaceful development.
Core challenges are very similar
“Although the world has changed in many ways, these core challenges still exist today,” says Sjöström Douagi, who, after foundation director Vidar Helgesen moved to Unesco, will be at the helm of the Nobel Foundation until new director Hanna Stjärne takes over at the beginning of 2025 takes office. “But equally timeless is the hope offered by our ability to change course away from violence, irrationality and suffering through our use of reason, science and humanistic values.”
All Nobel Prizes are traditionally presented on the anniversary of Nobel’s death on December 10th in Stockholm and Oslo. This year they are endowed with eleven million Swedish crowns per prize category – the equivalent of just under 970,000 euros. dpa
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