Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prizes

The Nobel Prizes were the idea of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor who lived from 1833 to 1896. Since 1901 prizes have been awarded every year in different areas of human achievement: Physics, Chemistry, Economic Sciences, Physiology/Medicine, Literature and, perhaps the most famous, the Nobel Peace Prize. Many famous people have received the Peace Prize. The first Nobel Peace Prize laureates were Frédéric Passy and Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross, and others include Albert Schweitzer, who pioneered work against leprosy, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, former US President Jimmy Carter, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Barack Obama and last year, Malala Yousafzai. According to Alfred Nobel’s will, he stated that the Peace Prize should be given to the person (or sometimes organisation) that ‘shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’. It is perhaps ironical that Nobel stipulated that there should be a Peace Prize, because he was a chemical engineer whose inventions included dynamite! Most of us would immediately connect dynamite with violence and war, but Nobel’s aim was to use it for getting minerals from rocks. It often happens that ideas which were originally designed for peaceful uses end up being manipulated for opposite aims. All the Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Swedish Academies, except for the Peace Prize, which is decided by the Nobel Comittee in Norway. Virtually all the most important scientific discoveries and influential economic theories have been recognised by them. One of the most famous laureates for Physics was Albert Einstein, who was awarded the prize in 1921 for ‘services to Theoretical Physics’. Literature prizes have been awarded to, among many others, Samuel Beckett, Eugenio Montale, Grazia Deledda, Winston Churchill, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Alfred Nobel made a huge fortune from his discoveries. He had never married or had children, and 94% of his estate was left to establish the prizes which bear his name. It is sometimes said that he did this because he felt guilty that his invention of dyanamite had created so much destruction. This might perhaps be true, but the important thing is that world-wide recognition can be given to people from many disciplines and that we can read about them and discover things that maybe we did not know before.