Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
First of all, I would like to express my thanks to you all, the Council,
the President and the City of Lindau, for our warm reception here.
And I would particularly like to thank the President, Count Bernadotte, for his very friendly words of welcome.
I think I speak for all of us when I say that being here in Lindau is a very special experience,
as is the opportunity of combining the beauty of the landscape with this gathering of friends and colleagues.
Let me now say a few words about Alfred Nobel, the Foundation and, in a manner of speaking,
the methodology behind the awards ceremony.
The Nobel family has its roots in Schonen in southern Sweden where its earliest known member,
a farmer named Olof, lived in the mid-17th century.
His son, Peter Olofson, the great-grandfather of Alfred Nobel,
was educated in the local school and subsequently left for Uppsala to pursue his studies.
Once registered at the university, he changed his name, as was common practice in those days,
to the Latin Petrus Olai Nobelius after his home town of Nöbbelöv in Schonen.
He later became a judge in Uppsala and married Wendela, the daughter of the famous researcher Olof Rudbeck the Elder.
It is reasonable to assume that the descendants of Petrus Nobelius were genetically favoured by Rudbeck.
(Laughter).
After all, Rudbeck discovered the lymphatic system, which would have probably earned him a Nobel Prize
if he had lived in our times.
Alfred Nobel's grandfather, who was a surgeon, changed his name to Nobel.
His father Immanuel, who lived between 1801 and 1872, left his mark on many fields as a pioneer.
He constructed, among other things, mines and equipped the Russian navy with machinery of all kinds.
He and his wife, Caroline Andrietta Ahlsell, had four sons, three of whom reached adulthood.
All of them were outstanding in one way or another.
The young Alfred Nobel received a meticulous and excellent education from private tutors
and could speak no less than four foreign languages.
He was also interested in literature and wrote novels himself and a drama, which did not, however, win him much acclaim.
In this respect, he had no better luck than Claude Bernard.
The young Alfred Nobel made a precocious, intelligent impression.
His health was not the best right from the start and a tendency towards melancholy manifested itself at an early age.
He had few close friends and was denied a happy family life.
He focused his full attention on his inventions and on the development of his industrial acumen across the globe.
He was in some respects a solitary individual but not consequently unhappy, as has sometimes been alleged.
His expansive productiveness made him increasingly international in his approach,
and he can be described as a true global citizen.
There is manifold evidence that Alfred Nobel had a strong sense of freedom and integrity.
When it was once suggested that a certain newspaper should be distributed among the workers in one of his factories,
he took a strong stand against this, emphasising that, for his part, he would consider it extremely inappropriate
if his workers were to prescribe what newspapers he should read.
The idea of the using the interest accruing on his vast wealth after his death
to fund prizes in various fields gradually grew in his own mind.
In his famous will in 1895 he stipulated, as is known, that five Prizes should be endowed,
of which the Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, as well as for Literature should be conferred in Sweden,
and the Peace Prize in Norway.
After his death on 10 December 1896, the following year,
his property was sold in various countries and converted into a fund to be managed by the Nobel Foundation
which was set up in 1900.
The Board of the Foundation comprises five members with three representatives, all of whom participate in the meetings.
The Foundation is tasked with organising the award ceremony.
It also publishes the "Le Prix Nobel" book every year which includes, among other contributions, the laureate lectures.
Ragnar Sohlmann, Nobel's friend and colleague, was the first Director of the Foundation, and the current director,
former ambassador Nils Ståhle, will be leaving the Foundation this year after almost 25 years at the helm.
As Nobel himself set down, the Prizes for Physics and Chemistry are conferred
by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, the Medicine Prize by the Karolinska Institutet,
the Literature Prize by the Swedish Academy and the Peace Prize by the Norwegian parliament.
These institutions have established special committees serving as in the role of working committees
and are regulated by their statutes in terms of numbers, members and election procedures.
The laureate selection process basically follows the same procedure in all the various Prize committees.
I will be describing selected details based on my own experience of the Committee for Medicine
of which I was formerly a member.
This committee, the Nobel Committee for Medicine, consists of five members
who are elected for a twice-renewable term of three years by the Karolinska Institutet's Faculty of Medicine.
Yearly, an ad-hoc committee of around ten people joins them.
Each committee has a secretary who does not, however, have the right to vote.
A possible point of interest is that Professor Jordan Lillestrand, who died a few years ago,
served as secretary to the Nobel Committee for Medicine no less than forty-two years.
The laureates are selected from the candidates put forward before 1 February of the respective year.
Formal nomination is a prerequisite for the Prize.
Invitations to nominate candidates are sent by the committee to various faculties and institutes;
the members of the faculties of medicine in Nordic countries, including the Karolinska Institutet,
and former Nobel laureates, have a permanent right to submit proposals.
Apart from this,
personal invitations to nominate candidates are issued to members of at least six international medical faculties.
Generally, invitations are also sent to around twenty faculties in total,
including special research institutes which are selected according to a system of rotation.
There is, not infrequently, some uncertainty about whether someone
who has been nominated one year needs to be re-nominated for the following year in order to be considered.
In view of the aforementioned, this is always the case but such nominations can also be made by a committee member
who is eligible to submit candidates.
The invitations are, in principle, confidential as are the submitted recommendations.
Occasionally, however, publicists somehow get wind of a nomination and it gets into the press.
It is obvious that this generally concerns Prizes which are of great interest to the public,
such as the Literature and Peace Prizes.
It virtually goes without saying that this kind of publicity is not exactly favourable for the person recommended.
Although the statutes explicitly stipulate that self-nominations will not be considered, this happens nonetheless.
Receiving good and well-substantiated recommendations is naturally very important,
which is to be ensured by widening the scope of the nominating institutions as far as possible.
It comes as no surprise that former Nobelprizewinners are one of the best sources of good recommendations,
as it is easily understandable that this group would only want new members
who enjoy a high standing in the international scientific community.
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that a certain preponderance in the distribution of prizes
in one or other field of research could well contribute to them being accorded a certain preference.
Nobel's will explicitly states that only the worthiest should receive the Prize, whether of Scandinavian extraction or not,
and that no consideration should be given to nationality, creed or race.
Be that as it may, in certain cases it is impossible to escape the impression of a person being recommended
because they are a fellow compatriot of the individual eligible to nominate them.
It is therefore not entirely infrequent that all members of the faculty submit a kind of petition,
which does not appear to be particularly desirable.
There has been much discussion as to what Nobel meant by "discovery" and "the greatest benefit on mankind".
It should not be forgotten that Nobel himself was an inventor.
And in an earlier will he even uses the words "invention or discovery" as reasons for conferring a Prize.
It should not be the subject of misinterpretation if one assumes that Nobel's idea was
that important discoveries could be made in the selected areas in one fell swoop.
We know all too well that this can only be the exception.
It is the difficult task of the Prize-awarding institutions
to assess the various achievements in the group of medical, physical and chemical research
according to the best of their knowledge, so that the prizes are distributed as unobjectionably as possible.
The difficulties are probably not fewer with regard to the Literature and Peace Prizes.
Particularly problematic is the provision in the will that the discovery should be from the preceding year.
This provision may hint at what Nobel's thoughts were on what constitutes a prize-worthy achievement.
Fortunately, this provision was interpreted in the statutes to allow older work to qualify
when its significance has only recently come to light.
It would be a heavy responsibility indeed, within a time frame of a few years,
to assess not only whether a seemingly major discovery at the time is right,
but also whether it is so significant, in medicine for instance,
that it warrants preference over other well-documented achievements.
One does not have to look far to encounter such problems.
In some cases, it can of course be said that prize-conferring institutions often take a remarkably long time
before they come to a conclusion on a Prize, and we can only wonder what Nobel would have thought
if he knew that a laureate who had done award-winning research almost 40 years earlier had been selected at the age of 87 years.
It could be claimed with hindsight that it was better to award the Prize a little late, than never at all.
Nobel's fundamental idea was, so it seems, to create a one-person prize.
The extremely swift and virtually unforeseeable pace of scientific research
has doubtless lessened the probability of attributing such deeds to individuals.
Members of the scientific community working in different fields have strongly converged in later years,
and it has become increasingly difficult to isolate individual achievements.
The natural consequence is that shared or jointly held Prizes have become more frequent in recent decades,
as illustrated by the following slide.
Slide please. Could someone turn off the lights off please? Thank you.
Yes, here you see the period in decades from 1900 through to 1967 showing
that the incidence of Prizewinners in medicine being selected as a threesome has risen.
In the last two years, this number has increased by another two, bringing it to six here.
With physics, this is not the case.
Here, the numbers indicating one Prizewinner has climbed from four to six.
But for medicine this applies.
And the increase is quite significant from the first three decades compared with later ones.
Thank you.
It becomes particularly complicated if more than three people are considered for a Prize in the same field.
As the maximum number for one Prize may not exceed three, it does happen that work
that is in itself deserving of a Prize is not rewarded.
This may, under certain circumstances, be the reason,
and some critics of the Prize selections are often not in a position to appreciate this suitably.
Of course, the institutions awarding the Prizes cannot avoid criticism.
This criticism is directed, in individual cases, against errors of judgement and more frequently against sins of omission.
It is not my intention here to elaborate on such examples,
but just to mention that such things have, not unexpectedly, happened in the past.
I would, however, like to make one exception in the case of one of the two discoverers of insulin, Charles Best,
who is generally viewed unofficially as a Nobel laureate, particularly as Banting shared the Prize money with him.
If one looks at the list of Nobel laureates, a number of facts are striking.
Let's start with the women of whom there is only a small proportion.
I will not attempt to analyse the reasons for this.
By the way, the contribution of women as assistants or in other support roles should not be overlooked.
To put a few figures on this: During the seventy years which have elapsed since the awards began,
only 14 women compared with 393 men have been selected as laureates, 6 of whom for literature.
If we look at the number of Prizes awarded twice, the ratio is one to one, which reinstates the equilibrium.
As mentioned before, it was certainly one of Nobel's intentions, or perhaps more a hope,
that younger people would be given improved research possibilities through the Prize.
A look at the age distribution of laureates shows that there are huge differences in their ages,
not only in the same awards field, but also between different laureate groups
As the following slide shows, the median age of Nobelprizewinners in medicine is significantly higher than that of the physicists.
Next slide please. Yes, if it is a little darker we can see.
Now it is a little easier to see that the shaded area shows the age of Nobelprizewinners in physics,
here is the age, that's a bit better.
(Laughter, applause).
So, the shaded area indicates the age of Nobelprizewinners in physics, with the age starting at 25 and going through to 85.
The second area here which has been left blank shows the distribution of Prizes in physiology and medicine,
and we can see that the two do not correlate.
Instead, here in physiology and medicine, the average age is higher than for physics.
Naturally, the material is minimal in terms of statistics, but you can see a trend
that perhaps gives us an interesting insight into the various research patterns of the two fields.
Lights please.
Discoveries in physics sometimes, perhaps more suddenly, come to light and are often able to be swiftly confirmed and controlled.
The most productive age in the field of physics appears to be lower than in biological sciences, such as medicine.
Discoveries in the field of biology are sometimes more difficult to assess owing to the complexity of the material,
and it takes more time to achieve clarity about their significance.
We should perhaps, in this context, leave out the national distribution of Prizes.
Nonetheless, an investigation of the distribution by field and country is interesting,
as it reveals certain characteristics.
I will only cite a few examples here.
A look at the following slide shows that the largest number of Prizes for chemistry went to Germany,
whereas in literature, there are more French laureates than from other nationalities.
Next slide please.
Here we have physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine and literature.
The Peace Prize is not included here.
For Germany, we see that the largest number of Prizes have been won for chemistry
and moreover, under Germany, the UK, USA and France, Germany was the country with the highest number of Prizes for chemistry.
In physiology and medicine, the USA boasts the highest count, for physics it is also the USA.
If we turn to literature, it is France that has the highest number. Lights please.
We might ask if chance has had a hand.
Naturally, this is hard to say, but it might be an indication
that intellectual-cultural lines of development perhaps vary a little from country to country.
Finally, a few words on the after-effects ascertained with the respective laureates purportedly
as a consequence of receiving the Prize.
I refer partly to a sociological study carried out by Harriet Zuckerman in the United States.
Her studies which, however, focus only on American laureates, show that the scientific productivity of Nobelprizewinners,
measured by the number of publications, declines more swiftly than in control groups.
This is particularly the case with Prizewinners who were less well known before winning the award.
We should remember that Prizewinners may well be inclined to be more stringent in their selection of works to be published.
Of general interest is perhaps the finding that researchers
who are awarded the Nobel Prize in later life begin their scientific work already at an early age
and are conducive to collaboration particularly at midlife.
It is therefore possible to identify certain behaviour patterns
which are especially characteristic of Nobelprizewinners in the making.
This pattern may well be a reflection of inherent characteristics that are, to some extent,
a precondition for a contribution that could be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
The reaction of a Nobelprizewinner in one case was couched in the following words,
again sourced from Harriet Zuckerman's work: "We have been elevated from the depths to the status of a film star.
We face a true test.
We are not used to public life of this kind, which has made it impossible for us to continue our customary work.
Our life has been turned upside down." This is naturally only one person's take on the situation.
(Laughter).
Some laureates who enjoyed a great deal of fame at an earlier point in time,
have, however, adapted very effectively to the new demands and have not been greatly put out.
One example which I relate here is cited in Zuckerman's work.
Next slide please.
"Dr. Jones thanks you for your letter but regrets
that he is not in a position to accept your invitation regarding mailing an autograph, sending photographs,
healing your ailments, giving an interview, speaking on the radio, appearing on TV, holding banquet speeches,
writing books, honorary doctorate, delivering expert opinions, solving your scientific problems,
reading manuscripts, giving lectures, attending conferences,
participating as chairman, becoming a publisher, and delivering articles."
(Laughter, applause).
So, with the help of this form, you can simply tick what (laughter) you want.
Yes, there is also a mention that the awarding of the Prize can create a certain barrier
between the laureate and his or her colleagues under certain circumstances.
This is said to be particularly the case when several researchers have worked together
and one member of the group is selected for the Prize.
Yes, when consequences of this kind and others evidently come to pass
and must at least be partly known to the Prizewinners,
this begs the question as to whether the Prize has been voluntarily declined on occasion.
This has actually once happened, as in the case of Sartre.
By refusing, Sartre was seeking to safeguard his integrity as a leader and proponent of opinions.
On the other hand, he is, so to speak, registered as a Prizewinner, a fact which he cannot avoid.
(Laughter).
We have given a few examples here of the various effects that may be connected with the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
Some of these consequences are probably unavoidable and stem from the prestige associated with the Nobel Prize.
It has, on the other hand, been proven possible for many laureates to continue their productive research in relative peace.
And, if one were to examine investigate the favourable and unfavourable effects of the Prize on its recipients more closely,
one may reasonably assume that the victims are quite happy with their lot.
(Applause).
(Change of speaker).
Professor von Euler, thank you very much for your introduction to the work of the Nobel Foundation and the Nobel Committee.
We are also delighted that the discussions of this Committee are apparently conducted not only with scientific thoroughness,
but also with a touch of humour, at least represented through its President.
I believe, Mr President, that this is also a good basis that can be often drawn on when discussions become long and hard.
In any case, our warm thanks to you for this human look behind the scenes of the Nobel Foundation's work.