WHAT IT IS The most prestigious accolade in the world
WHY YOU WON’T DO IT They are reserved for humanity’s true elite
First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prizes today celebrate achievements in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace and economic sciences. They are arguably the most prestigious prizes in the world, and winners receive a medal, a diploma and a sizeable financial reward. Perhaps more than that, they guarantee a kind of immortality.
According to one story, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, had the rare chance of reading his own obituary when it was published in error on his brother’s death. Shocked by this foretaste of how the world would remember him, he established the Nobel Prizes to celebrate the great achievers of our world. If you want to stand a chance of claiming one of the honours, you’ll have your work cut out, but here are some guidelines worth bearing in mind.
Firstly, do something important. Really important. Suffer in the cause of human rights. Rid the world of the threat from nuclear weapons or solve the Palestinian question. End hunger, find a cure for Aids or a solution to global warming. You know the sort of thing.
To win, first you must be nominated, and alas, you can’t nominate yourself: in September of each year, the various Nobel committees contact thousands of qualified individuals and invite them to submit candidates. The winners are then chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred names. The process is hardly foolproof, though – Stalin, for instance, was nominated twice, while Mahatma Gandhi never won the Peace Prize despite a dozen nominations.
The Nobel wheels turn slowly, and prizes often acknowledge breakthroughs that are decades old. On average, you’ll have to wait until at least your fifties to win a Prize. The Physics Prize has the lowest average age for winners (54) while Economics has the oldest (67). Age, though, should not be considered a major issue. The youngest winner was 25 (Lawrence Bragg, who won in 1915 in Physics, along with his father) and the oldest, Leonid Hurwicz, was 90 when he won the Economics prize in 2007. Dying, unfortunately, rules you out of the race – posthumous prizes have not been allowed since 1974 and honours can only be awarded to a deceased person if they die between the announcement of the prize and the presentation ceremony. This happened in 1996 with William Vickrey (Economics) and again in 2011 with Ralph Steinman (Medicine).
It pays to be American: of 840 individuals and organizations that received prizes between 1901 and 2010, 328 were from the USA. Your next best bets are to be British (116 awards) or German (102). You stand a much greater statistical chance if you are a man. There have only been 41 awards to females (and two of those were to Marie Curie). And you could also do worse than work with a family member – over the years, prizes have been won by four married couples, one mother-daughter partnership, one father-and-daughter, six fathers-and-sons and one set of brothers.
The awarding committees do not have to award prizes every year if they decide there are no suitable candidates. Certainly, fewer awards were given out during the World Wars, with fewest (perhaps not surprisingly) in the Peace category. It seems that you should time your run for the prize to coincide with a period of relative peace.
Be warned, though: despite a current cash value of 10 million Swedish krona (US$1.5 million) the Nobel accolade may not always make your life comfortable. Four nominees have been forced to turn down their prizes (three by Hitler’s Germany and one by the Soviet Union). Furthermore, three laureates have been under arrest at the time of their awards, including the recent Peace Prizewinners Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo.
And if you can do it once, then why stop there? Four individuals have won twice, including Marie Curie and John Bardeen (inventor of the transistor).
