Nobel Prize controversies

Main article: Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize controversies are contentious disputes regarding the Nobel Prize.

The Prize

The Nobel Prizes are a series of awards which were posthumously instituted by bequest of Alfred Nobel (1895). They are currently awarded to persons and organizations that have served humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Some important primary fields of human intellectual endeavor—such as mathematics, philosophy and social studies—have been excluded from the Nobel Prizes. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is related to the Nobel Prize. A new Nobel-equivalent Award created especially for mathematics, the Abel Prize, came into effect in 2003.

Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awardees and exclusions have generated criticisms and engendered controversies.

The development of a Nobel-equivalent Prize for economics, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, in 1969 has aroused more arguments over the validity, effectiveness, and applicability of the award than any other Nobel Prize category. Another Award, the Nobel Prize in Literature, has also met with its collections of controversial criticisms and delimiting issues over the years, as the original words of Nobel himself in relation to the Nobel Prize Award in Literature have themselves undergone a series of purported revised interpretations.

Controversial exclusions

Physics

Tesla greatly influenced life in the 20th and 21st century.

Edison applied "mass production" to the invention process.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates in 1915, but it is believed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was ever given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions. There is some indication that each sought to minimize the other's achievements and right to win the award; that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first; and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it—as was rumored in the press at the time. Tesla had a greater financial need for the award than Edison: in 1916, he filed for bankruptcy.

Chung-Yao Chao was the first person to capture positrons through electron-positron annihilation while a graduate student at Caltech in 1930, but did not realize what they were. Carl D. Anderson, who won the 1936 Nobel Physics Prize for his discovery of the positron, used the same radioactive source thorium carbide (ThC) as Chao. Late in his life, Anderson admitted that Chao had in fact inspired his discovery: Chao's research formed the foundational base from which much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without the honor of sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment.

Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 but received no Nobel recognition [2]. In fact it was not Otto Hahn but she who first figured out fission, after having the accumulated experimental data analysed and successfully incorporating Bohr's liquid drop model (first suggested by George Gamow) at its theoretical base, with Otto Robert Frisch's participation: Niels Bohr did in fact nominate both for the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, besides his recommendation of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Hahn. The case served up as an interesting contrast to that of Louis, 7th duc de Broglie's Nobel deliberations (1929) (Prince de Broglie was regarded then as somewhat of a dilettante in physics)—in particular, of the ways the Nobel Committee gave weight and judged between male and female contributors and their work. Hahn and Meitner had also, in an earlier collaboration, independently discovered a new chemical element (protactinium). There was a third known junior contributor Fritz Strassmann who was not in the Prize. In his defense, Hahn was under strong pressure from the Nazis to minimize Meitner's role since she was Jewish. But he maintained this position even after the war.

Although the Brazilian physicist César Lattes was the main researcher and the first author of the historical Nature journal article describing the subatomic particle meson pi (pion), his lab boss, Cecil Powell, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for "his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method"; though it was actually Lattes himself who was solely responsible for the improvement on the nuclear emulsion used by Powell (by asking Kodak Co. to add more boron to it—and in 1947, he made with them his great experimental discovery). The reason for this apparent neglect is that the Nobel Committee policy until 1960 was to award the Nobel Prize to the research group head only. Lattes was also responsible for calculating the pion's mass and, with USA physicist Eugene Gardner, demonstrated the existence of this particle after atomic collisions in a synchrotron. Again, Gardner was denied a Nobel because he died soon thereafter, and posthumous nominations for the Nobel Prize are not permitted.

The 1956 Prize was awarded to Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain for the discovery of the transistor, because the Nobel committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented a field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether either had really built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further, Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Walker, at Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium duodiodes for German radar equipment during World War 2.

In 1957, George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak came up with the successful V-A (vector minus axial vector or left-handed) theory for weak interactions. It is the same theory as that somewhat-worked-upon-later 'mathematical physics' paper—without the requisite raw experimental data backing—on the structure of the weak interaction by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann; both briefed on the former group's results before via informal sharings earlier on amongst themselves, without giving in their subsequent joint paper the formal credits due the theory originators, except for a cursory allusion. Now it is popularly known in the west as the Feynman-Gell-Mann theory only. The V-A theory for weak interactions was in actuality a new Law of Nature discovered. It was conceived in the face of a string of apparently contradictory experimental results, including several of Chien-Shiung Wu's, though helped along by a sprinkling of other evidences too, e.g. the muon (discovered in 1936, it had a colorful historyitself—and would lead on again to a new revolution in the 21st Century). It was all the more surprising therefore that this breakthrough achievement was passed up for a Nobel Award. The V-A theory would later prove to lay the fundamental layer for the electroweak interaction theory. George Sudarshan himself regarded the V-A theory as his finest work to date. Later, it was subsumed under the electroweak interaction unification theory by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg that would go on to clinch the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for the three scientists. The Sudarshan-Marshak (or V-A theory) was to meet with another coda of curious fate and dubious honour later on again of being assessed, preferably and favourably—after the strangely tortuous, and, at times, 'funny' pedantic imbroglios, and it goes on and on—as "beautiful" by J. Robert Oppenheimer; and, suffering a complete reversal, like a last apparent 'twist', again, as it were, was given an exactly opposite assessment as "less complete", "inelegant" by John Gribbin. George Sudarshan currently holds the record of the most nominated Nobel Prize candidate alive who has yet to receive any Nobel Prize .

Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel [3]. Wu assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—with Chen Ning Yang—by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. At a time when the milieu of widespread institutional disbelief was quite discouraging—where many would just simply have found it too hard and given up—for all her grit, breakthrough efforts and good influence, she did not share their Nobel Prize; a fact widely blamed on sexism on the part of the selection committee. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.

In 1964, George Zweig, then a PhD student at Caltech, espoused the physical existence of aces possessing several unorthodox attributes (essentially Gell-Mann's quarks, though regarded expressly by the latter as only mere theoretical shorthand construct) at a time which was very 'anti-quark'. Zweig consequently suffered academic ostracism and career path blocks from the scientific community of 'mainstream orthodoxy'. Despite the 1969 Nobel Prize awarded for contributions in the classification of elementary particles and the 1990 Nobel Prize for the development and proof of the quark model, Zweig's true dimension and size of his original contributions to the quark model story have largely gone unrecognized. Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who published the classification of hadrons through their SU(3) flavour symmetry independently of Gell-Mann in 1962, also felt that he had been unjustly deprived of the Nobel prize for the quark model.

The 1974 prize was awarded to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish's pioneering research in radio astrophysics; Hewish was recognized for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars though he did not come up first with the correct explanation of pulsars: having described them as communications from "Little Green Men" (LGM-1) in outer space. An answer was given by David Staelin and Edward Reifenstein, of the National RadioAstronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, who found a pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula: that pulsars are neutron stars, leftovers from a supernova explosion had been proposed in 1933. Soon after the discovery of pulsars in 1968, Fred Hoyle and astronomer Thomas Gold came up with the correct explanation of a pulsar as a rapidly spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field, emitting radio waves much as a lighthouse did with its lamp. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was later recognised as a pulsar. Pulsars are a group of astronomical objects that provide scientists with the first signs of the possible existence of gravity waves. In addition, rotating binary pulsars are also found to be reliable sources for putting Einstein's relativity theories to the most stringent of tests. While the astronomer Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the Prize, Bell herself has stated that "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." Well-known exceptions to this rule include Louis-Victor de Broglie, Rudolf Mössbauer, Douglas Osheroff, Gerard 't Hooft, John Forbes Nash, Jr. and H. David Politzer.

Another interesting case surfaced in 1978. In that year, the Nobel Physics Prize winners Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson of 1978—awarded for the chanced "detection of Cosmic microwave background radiation"—themselves initially did not comprehend the "implications and the working out of the meanings behind" their findings, and, similarly, had to have their discovery fully elucidated to them. Many scientists felt that another scientist, Ralph Alpher, who predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation and had worked out in 1948 the underpinnings of the Big Bang theory, should have shared in the prize, or independently received one. There are many theories, none proven, as to why his work was initially ignored and a Nobel withheld. In 2005, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his pioneering contributions to our understanding of nucleosynthesis, the prediction of the relic radiation from the Big Bang, as well as for a model for the Big Bang theory.

Fred Hoyle did not receive a share of the Nobel Prize In Physics in 1983, although the winner William Alfred Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis (1946). Hoyle's obituary in Physics Today [4] notes that " Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997 Crafoord Prize ".

Other arguably controversial exclusions include Kan-Chang Wang (of anti-sigma minus hyperon (1959), the first Paper for the Detection-of-Neutrino Experiment fame), Arnold Sommerfeld, Satyendra Nath Bose (Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) fame), George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman (seminal (CBR) Cosmic microwave background radiation theorists) and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov, with A. G. Doroshkevich (author of the first Paper for the Possible Detection of CBR), Bruno Pontecorvo (neutrino oscillations hypothesis fame, among others) and Robert Oppenheimer (first precursor Paper on the 'quantum tunnelling' phenomenon (1927-28), first antimatter positron) existence prediction (1930), neutron stars, black hole breakthrough seminal studies, mentor and "father of the atomic bomb" fame, among others).

Chemistry

Dmitri Mendeleyev, who originated the periodic table of the elements, never received a prize. His first periodic table was completed in 1869. Actually, a year earlier, another chemist, Julius Lothar Meyer, had also come up with a somewhat similar table. Another scientist, John Alexander Reina Newlands, had also presented a paper in 1866 that essentially credited him as the first to propose a periodic Law: in fact, none of the tables were correct—all the 19th century tables arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic weight (or atomic mass). It was left to Henry Moseley to correct the periodic table, basing it on the atomic number (the number of protons). Mendeleyev died in 1907, six years after the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. He came within one vote of winning the prize in 1906, but died the next year. [5]

Physiology or medicine

In 1923 Frederick Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting initially refused to accept the prize with Macleod, alleging that Macleod had only been Banting's supervisor while Banting and Charles Best had done all the work, before changing his mind and agreeing to split his half of the prize money with Best. Macleod, in turn, split his half of the prize money with James Bertram Collip, a member of the insulin research team with Banting and Best. Later, it became known that Nicolae Paulescu, a Romanian professor, had been working on diabetes since 1916, and may have isolated insulin (which he called pancreatine) about a year before the Canadians.

Oswald Theodore Avery, best known for his 1944 demonstration that DNA is the cause of bacterial transformation and potentially the material of which genes are composed, never received a Nobel Prize, although two Nobel Laureates, Joshua Lederberg and Arne Tiselius, praised him and his work as a veritable pioneering platform for further genetic research and advance.

The 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded solely to Selman Waksman for his discovery of streptomycin had omitted recognition due his co-discoverer Albert Schatz. There was a litigation brought by Schatz against Waksman over the details and credit of streptomycin discovery. The litigation result was such that Schatz was awarded a substantial settlement, and, together with Waksman, Schatz would be officially recognized as a co-discoverer of streptomycin.

Heinrich J. Matthaei broke the genetic code in 1961 with Marshall Warren Nirenberg in their poly-U experiment at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, paving the way for modern genetics; but though Nirenberg became a much lauded Nobel Laureate in 1968, Matthaei, who was responsible for experimentally obtaining the first codon (genetic code) extract, and whose initial accurate results were tampered with by Nirenberg himself (due to the latter's belief in 'less precise', 'more believable' data presentation) did not get any recognition or any Prize.

The 1962 Prize awarded to James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins—for their work on DNA structure and properties—did not recognize somewhat coordinate contributions from others, such as: Alec Stokes, Herbert Wilson, and Erwin Chargaff. In addition, Erwin Chargaff, Oswald Avery and Rosalind Franklin (whose key DNA x-ray crystallography work was the most detailed yet least acknowledged among the three) contributed directly to the ability of Watson and Crick to solve the structure of the DNA molecule—but Avery died in 1955, and Franklin in 1958 and posthumous nominations for the Nobel Prize are not permitted.

The first successful synthesis of bovine insulin. a Nobel-like breakthrough which won world-wide recognition, was carried out between 1958 and 1965 by two scientists at Beijing University, Niu Jingyi and Wang Yinglai. Insulin is now manufactured using protein-production biotechnology. Though there were repeated nominations and support from eminent scientists, as it turned out, due to a series of hindering political and other related contretemps, both were not to receive any Nobel Prize in the end.

The 1975 Prize was awarded to David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Howard Martin Temin "for describing how tumor viruses act on the genetic material of the cell". It has been argued that Dulbecco was distantly, if at all, involved in this groundbreaking work of discovery. The award failed to recognize the contributions of Satoshi Mizutani, Temin's Japanese postdoctoral fellow. Mizutani and Temin jointly discovered that the Rous sarcoma virus particle contained the enzyme reverse transcriptase. However, Mizutani was solely responsible for the original conception and design of the novel experiment confirming Temin's provirus hypothesis.

Peace

Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated for it five times between 1937 and 1948. Decades later, though, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. The Nobel Committee may have tacitly acknowledged its error, however, when in 1948 (the year of Gandhi's death), it made no award, stating "there was no suitable living candidate" though they awarded it posthumously to fellow Scandinavian Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, who died after being nominated. Similarly, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing the issue.

Recent alleged exclusions (since 1990)

The 1993 Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene splicing – Philip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts were the only two winners. Several other scientists, such as Norman Davidson and James D. Watson, argued that Louise T. Chow, a China-born Taiwanese researcher and accomplished female scientist, who collaborated with Roberts, should also have had part of the prize. In 1976, as Staff Investigator, she carried out the studies of the genomic origins and structures of adenovirus transcripts leading directly to the EM discovery of RNA splicing and alternative RNA processing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1977, the year the discovery was made. Norman Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, Emeritus, at Caltech (a well-known expert in electron microscopy, under whom Chow apprenticed as a graduate student), affirmed that Chow operated the electron microscope through which the splicing process was observed, and was the crucial experiment's sole designer, using techniques she herself developed in the previous two years at the lab.

The 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry credited winner Kary Mullis with the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method, a central technique in molecular biology which allows for the amplification of specified DNA sequences. However, others disputed that he 'invented' the technique: claiming that Norwegian scientist Kjell Kleppe, together with 1968 Nobel Prize laureate H. Gobind Khorana, had an earlier and better claim to it in 1969. His co-workers at that time also refuted the suggestion that Mullis was solely responsible for the idea of using Taq polymerase in the PCR process. In addition, a book on the history of the PCR method which Paul Rabinow (an anthropologist) wrote in 1996 raised the issue of whether or not Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it. However, other scientists have said that "the full potential [of PCR] was not realized" until Mullis' work in 1983.

The 1997 Nobel Prize In Physics stirred up controversy soon as it was announced as Russian scientists disputed the awardees' priority in the acquired approach and techniques to cool and trap atoms with laser light, whose work the Russians had reputedly carried out more than a decade before.

The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded singly to Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of prions, had caused a ceaseless stream of academic polemics ever since: as regard the actual validity extent of his work—which had also been criticized by other researchers as not yet proven.

The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to three pioneering neuroscientists, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric R. Kandel, "for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system" had caused many neuroscientists to protest that Oleh Hornykiewicz, who helped pioneer the dopamine replacement treatment for Parkinson's disease, was left out of the prize, and claimed that Hornykiewicz's research provided a foundation for some of the scientific progress credited to the three scientists.

The 2000 Nobel Prize In Chemistry–"For the Discovery and Development of Conductive polymers" [6] recognized passive high-conductivity in oxidized iodine-doped polyacetylene black and related materials (reported in 1977), as well as determining conduction mechanisms and developing devices, especially batteries. The citation alleges this work led to present-day "active" devices, where a voltage or current controls electron flow.

Subsequently, a letter to New Scientist pointed out that such an organic polymer electronic device was reported in a major journal (Science) [7] three years before the Nobel prize winner's discovery. Further, the "ON" state of this device showed almost metallic conductivity. Moreover, 14 years before the Noble-prize-winning discovery, Weiss and coworkers in Australia had reported [8] equivalent high electrical conductivity in an almost identical compound—oxidized, iodine-doped polypyrrole black. Eventually, the Australian group achieved resistances as low as .03 ohm/cm [9][10]. This is roughly equivalent to present-day efforts. Likewise, this award ignored the even earlier (1955) discovery of highly-conductive organic Charge transfer complexes. Some of these are even superconductive.

The 2003 Nobel Prize In Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. Two independent controversial exclusions have been alleged:

Raymond Damadian first reported that NMR could distinguish in vitro between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues on the basis of different proton relaxation times. He later translated this into the first human MRI scan, but used a dead-end methodology. Meanwhile, Damadian's original report prompted Lauterbur to develop NMR into the presently-used method of generating MRI images. Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers protesting his exclusion from the award. Some researchers felt that Damadian's work deserved at least equal credit.

Herman Y. Carr both pioneered the present NMR gradient technique and demonstrated rudimentary MRI imaging in the 1950s, based on it. The Nobel prize winners had almost certainly seen Carr's work, but did not cite it. Consequently, the prize committee very likely did not become cognizant of Carr's discoveries, a situation likely abetted further by the high-profile distractions due to the unprecedented, drawn-out, persistent remonstrances of Damadian in defense of his work regarding MRI.

The 2005 Nobel Prize In Physics controversy involved George Sudarshan's relevant work in quantum optics (1960), which was considered by many to have been given the slight in this award. Roy J. Glauber—who initially derided the former theory representations and later produced the same P-representation under a different name, viz., Sudarshan-Glauber representation or Sudarshan diagonal representation—was the winner instead. According to still others, two other seminal contributors, Leonard Mandel and Daniel Frank Walls, may have been passed over for the Prize because no posthumous nominations are accepted.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of RNA interference. Many of the discoveries credited by the Nobel committee to Fire and Mello, who studied RNA interference in C. elegans, had been previously studied by plant biologists, and it has been suggested that at least one plant biologist who was a pioneer in this field, such as David Baulcombe, should have also been awarded a share of the prize.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by John C. Mather and George F. Smoot (leaders of the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite experiment) "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR).". The Prize was thought by some to have precluded proper recognition due an earlier original discoverer of anistropy of the CMBR. In July 1983 an experiment Relikt, launched aboard the Prognoz-9 satellite, studied cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) via one frequency alone. In January of 1992, Andrei A. Brukhanov was known to have presented a seminar at Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, where he first reported on the discovery of anistropy of CMBR. However, the Relikt team claimed only an upper limit, not a detection, in their 1987 results paper.

Controversial recipients

Physics

Henri Becquerel was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Pierre and Marie Curie, "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity". However, there existed a credible controversy at the time since some scientists claimed that Becquerel had merely rediscovered a phenomenon first noticed and scientifically investigated by the forgotten French scientist Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor decades earlier.

Physicist Philipp Lenard would later become an adviser to Hitler.

Philipp Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize In Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties. An advisor to Adolf Hitler, Lenard became "Chief of Aryan Physics" under the Nazis. He propounded the idea that there is a race element in science (i.e.,'English Science', 'German Science', 'Jewish Science'), and referred to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as a "Jewish fraud". Johannes Stark, who won the Physics Nobel in 1919, also participated in the racially-motivated rejection of the "Jewish ideas" of Einstein and the non-Jewish Werner Heisenberg.

Albert Einstein, though awarded a 1921 Prize, may have deserved a total of 4 Nobels.

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize award mainly recognized him for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and "for his services to Theoretical Physics" — due to the often counter-intuitive concepts and advanced constructs of his relativity theory, some of which were far in advance of possible experimental verifications until only recently, e.g., bending of light, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing, black holes). It would be 1993 before the first evidence for the existence of gravitational radiation came via the Nobel Prize-winning measurements of the Hulse-Taylor binary system. His other significant contributions in the Annus Mirabilis Papers, on Brownian motion and special relativity, were not explicitly recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee, even though Einstein was nominated several times, beginning in 1910, for special relativity. Often these nominations for special relativity recommended awarding the prize jointly to Lorentz and Einstein. Henri Poincaré was also nominated at least once for his services to theoretical physics, including his work on Lorentz's relativity theory. However, Kaufmann's experimental results cast doubt on the correctness of special relativity, doubts which were not resolved until 1915, by which time Einstein had progressed to the general theory, including his theory of gravitation. Again the empirical support (in this case the predicted spectral shift of sunlight) was in question for many years, so the only original evidence was the consistency with the known perihelion precession of the planet Mercury. Some additional support was gained at the end of 1919 when the predicted deflection of starlight near the sun was apparently confirmed by Arthur Stanley Eddington's Solar Eclipse Expedition, although the actual results were somewhat ambiguous. Conclusive proof of the gravitational light deflection prediction was not achieved until the 1970s.

Robert Millikan is widely believed to have been denied the 1920 prize for physics owing to Felix Ehrenhaft's claims to have measured charges smaller than Millikan's elementary charge. Ehrenhaft's claims were ultimately dismissed and Millikan was awarded the prize in 1923. However, some controversy still seem to linger over Millikan's oil-drop procedure and experimental interpretation — regarding the validity and ethics of his false claim and data manipulation and selectivity, biased in his favour, in the 1913 scientific paper measuring the electron charge: in particular, that he had reported all his observations when in fact he had omitted a total of 82 drops of experimental data from his final report.

William Bradford Shockley was one of the winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics award for the transistor. There was a well-documented controversy hanging over his win — backed up by corroborating accounts from his colleagues (the other two Nobelists in the Prize), and historical facts as well — which critics characterized as due mainly to Shockley's then-directorship position and self-promotion efforts (Shockley's original, self-designed 'transistor' did not work at all). A notable change was seen to have come over Shockley's character soon after the Nobel award. Later, he strongly and seriously espoused eugenics, regarding his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career. His ideas are largely based on the research of Cyril Burt, whose research itself was later generally accepted to be fraudulent. He is the only Nobel Laureate who publicly admitted to donating sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded (1980) by eugenicist Robert Klark Graham in the hopes of passing down humanity's best genes. The Repository was shut down in 1999.

Physiology or medicine

Alexander Fleming, though he accidentally stumbled upon the then-unidentified fungi mold that was to bring penicillin to the attention of the world as medicine, was often credited as the discoverer of penicillin and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Florey. However, some critics pointed out that Fleming did not 'discover' penicillin, that in fact it was technically a 'rediscovery', and that decades before Fleming, there had been significant others (notably Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, William Roberts (physician), John Tyndall and Ernest Duchesne) who had already done studies and research on its useful properties and medicinal characteristics. Moreover, according to Fleming himself, the first known reference to penicillin he could recall to mind was from Psalm 51: "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean": he had learnt meanwhile from the famous American mycologist Charles Thom's book (the same who helped Fleming establish the identity of the mysterious fungi mold) that penicillium notatum was first recognised by Westling, a Swedish chemist, from a specimen of decayed hyssop. It was pointed out too, that, in this award, several deserving contemporaneous coordinate research contributors had been left out of the Prize altogether(see also discovery of penicillin).

The Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his development of prefrontal leucotomy. In the United States, a modified version of this procedure, often referred to as the "ice pick lobotomy", was instituted in a highly unethical manner, and was performed somewhat indiscriminately. It was Dr. Walter Freeman, Moniz' American disciple, who gave it the name of lobotomy popularized in the press as far back as 1938 when The New York Times ran a headline "Surgery used on the Soul-Sick; Relief of Obsessions is Reported". Even Joseph Kennedy, the father of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, had his daughter Rosemary lobotomized when she was in her twenties. Dr. Walter Freeman, the American authority on the subject, performed the operation after having performed more than four thousand lobotomies. By the time Moniz was awarded the Prize in 1949, with the New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine on his side, lobotomy had become quite popular so that from 1949 to 1952 around five thousand lobotomies are said to have been performed in the United States alone. Moniz died in 1955 as his medical procedure faded into disuse. The procedure has fallen into disrepute and was later prohibited in many countries. It is rarely performed now.

Karl von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 involving the explanation of the "dance language" of bees. However, much controversy was engendered over the years due to the lack of direct scientific proofs of the waggle dance of the bees as exactly worded, postulated by Karl von Frisch. Though the controversy was finally put to rest by a team of researchers from Rothamsted Research in 2005—who tracked the bees by radar as they flew to a food source—the experimental results turn out not to exactly support Karl von Frisch's original formulation, but, in fact, support part of his opponent Adrian Wenner's theory that states that bees are basically guided to the food source by odor; after the general direction and distance (specific and relative to the transmitting bees) had been communicated (a still unknown mysterious mechanism) via the waggle dance—as originally postulated by the 1973 Nobelist.

David Baltimore, who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was implicated in "The Baltimore affair" or "Imanishi-Kari affair", a landmark science-fraud scandal case (with Howard Temin and James Dewey Watson pinning the error and fault on him): involving a scandal over fabricated data in a 1986 scientific paper on immunology with Thereza Imanishi-Kari and others that is still debated today:

Another earlier and equally famous (or infamous, and comparable) dispute, handled by the same NIH appeals panel as handled the Baltimore Affair, is the Robert Gallo vs Luc Montagnier: HTLV-III/LAV Priority Controversy Case. The name HIV was a compromise by US and French negotiators to allow a co-discovery of the AIDS virus to be claimed. Incidentally, the claim that Francoise Barré-Sinoussi was generally credited as the discoverer of HIV while working in Montagnier's lab has also been disputed—in an article that disputes the generally-accepted conclusion that HIV causes AIDS. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi were awarded with the Nobel Price in Medicine in 2008. They share one half of the award while the other half is taken by Harald zur Hausen for his research on cancer.

Peace

President Theodore Roosevelt—the 26th President of the United States—received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for helping negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. However, he played a role in the suppression of a revolt in the Philippines.

Cordell Hull was awarded the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1945 in recognition of his efforts for peace and understanding in the Western Hemisphere, his trade agreements, and his work to establish the United Nations. Hull was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of State during the SS St. Louis Crisis. The St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1939 carrying over 950 Jewish refugees, mostly wealthy, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II. The ship's voyage caused great controversy in the United States: Initially President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed modest willingness to take in some of those on board, but vehement opposition by Hull and from Southern Democrats—some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred. On 4 June 1939 Roosevelt issued an order to deny entry to the ship, which was waiting in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. The passengers began negotiations with the Cuban government, but those broke down at the last minute. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers died in Nazi concentration camps.

The United States Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work on the Vietnam Peace Accords, despite having instituted the secret 1969–1975 campaign of bombing against infiltraiting NVA in Cambodia, the alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor—a mid-1970s campaign of kidnapping and murder coordinated among the intelligence and security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—as well as the death of French nationals under the Chilean junta. He also supported the Turkish invasion in Cyprus resulting in approximately 1/3 of the island being occupied by foreign troops since 1974.

Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt during a war against Israel in 1973, the Yom Kippur War, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Menachem Begin, in 1978 for their contributions to the successful closure to the Camp David Accords in the same year.

Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, in part for her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu. In 1999 she was accused by David Stoll of having fabricated events in her family history in the book to further the guerilla cause. See Rigoberta Menchú for details.

Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were winners of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat was regarded by critics as a terrorist leader for many years. His critics often described him as an unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of promoting violence. Kåre Kristiansen, a Norwegian member of the Nobel Committee, resigned in 1994 in protest at the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, whom he labelled a "terrorist".

Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, for the "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." The announcement of the award came shortly after the U.S. House and Senate gave President George W. Bush authorization to use military force against Iraq in order to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring that Baghdad give up weapons of mass destruction. Asked if the selection of the former president was a criticism of Bush, Gunnar Berge, head of the Nobel committee, said: "With the position Carter has taken on this, it can and must also be seen as criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq." Carter declined to comment on the remark in interviews, saying that he preferred to focus on the work of the Carter Center.

Wangari Maathai, 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was reported by the Kenyan newspaper Standard and Radio Free Europe to have stated that AIDS was originally developed by Western scientists in order to depopulate. She later denied these claims, though the Standard stands by its reporting. Additionally, in a Time magazine interview, she hinted at its non-natural origin, saying that someone knows where it came from and that it "...did not come from monkeys."

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics

See Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences#Controversies and criticism

Laureates who declined the prize

Involuntary refusals

In 1936, Adolf Hitler was offended with the Nobel Foundation when the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, a German writer who publicly opposed Hitler and Nazism. (At that time, the prize was awarded the following year.) Hitler reacted by issuing a decree on 31 January 1937 that forbade German nationals from accepting any Nobel Prize in the future. Awarding the peace prize to Ossietzky was itself considered controversial. While fascism had few supporters outside of Italy and Germany, those who did not necessarily sympathize with fascism felt that it was wrong to offend Germany by awarding the prize to someone opposed to the current German regime.

Hitler's decree made it forbidden for three subsequent German nationals to accept the Nobel Prize: Gerhard Domagk (1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), Richard Kuhn (1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and Adolf Butenandt (1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). The three later received their diplomas and medals, but not the prize money.

On 19 October 1939, about a month and a half after World War II had started, the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute met to discuss who would be the 1939 Nobel Laureate in physiology and medicine. The majority of the professors at the Institute were in favor of giving the prize to Domagk and someone leaked the news, which was then passed on to Berlin. The Kulturministerium in Berlin replied with a telegram stating that a Nobel Prize to a German was "completely unwanted" (durchaus unerwünscht). Despite the telegram, a large majority of the Institute voted to give the prize to Domagk on 26 October 1939. Domagk received the news later that day by phone and telegram. Being aware of Hitler's decree but unsure if it only applied to the peace prize or all of the Nobel Prizes, Domagk sent a request to the Ministry of Education in Berlin asking if it would be possible to accept the prize. Since he didn't receive a reply after more than a week had passed, he felt it would be impolite to wait any longer with responding, and on 3 November 1939 he wrote a letter to the Institute thanking them for the distinction, but added that he had to wait for the government's approval before he could accept the prize. He was subsequently ordered to send a copy of his letter to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, and on 17 November 1939, was arrested and taken by the Gestapo to police headquarters. He was released after one week only to be arrested again. On 28 November 1939, he was forced by the Kulturministerium to sign a prepared letter, addressed to the Institute, declining the prize. Since the Institute had already prepared his medal and diploma before the second letter arrived, they were able to award them to him later, during the 1947 Nobel festival.

Domagk's forced refusal of the prize was the first time the prize was declined. Due to his refusal, the statutes for the Nobel Prizes were changed so that if a laureate declined the prize or failed to collect the prize award before October 1 of the following year, the money would be allocated back to the funds.

On 9 November 1939, the Royal Academy of Sciences awarded the 1938 Prize for Chemistry to Kuhn and half of the 1939 prize to Butenandt. When notified of the decision, the German scientists were forced to refuse the prizes by threats of violence from the German government. Their refusal letters arrived in Stockholm after Domagk's refusal letter, helping to confirm suspicions that the German government had forced them to refuse the prize. After World War II in 1948, they wrote a letter to the Academy expressing their gratitude for the prizes and their regret for being forced to refuse them in 1939. They were awarded their medals and diplomas at a ceremony in July 1949.

Otto Heinrich Warburg, a German national that won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, is rumored to have been selected for a second Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1944, but was forbidden to accept it due to Hitler's decree. According to the Nobel Foundation, this story is not true. (See Otto Heinrich Warburg for details.)

Boris Pasternak at first accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, but was forced by the authorities in the USSR to decline it because the prize was considered a "reward for the dissident political innuendo in his novel, Doctor Zhivago." Pasternak died without ever receiving the prize. He was eventually honored by the Nobel Foundation at a banquet in Stockholm on 9 December 1989, when they presented his medal to his son. Mstislav Rostropovitch, a renowned Russian cellist and close friend of Boris Pasternak, played a Bach suite in his memory at the banquet.

Voluntary refusals

• Jean-Paul Sartre declined the 1964 Prize in Literature, because he always refused official honors.
• Le Duc Tho declined the 1973 Peace Prize—jointly awarded to him and Henry Kissinger—because Vietnam was not yet at peace.

Sources

• Bishop, J. Michael (2003), How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00880-4.
• Hager, Thomas (2006), The Demon under the Microscope: from battlefield hospitals to Nazi labs, one doctor's heroic search for the world's first miracle drug, New York: Harmony Books, ISBN 1-4000-8213-7.
• Nasar, Sylvia (1998), A Beautiful Mind, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-81906-6.
• Ryan, Frank (1993), The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won — and Lost, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 0-316-76380-2. First published in the United Kingdom as Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told.
• Schück, Henrik; Sohlman, Ragnar; Österling, Anders; Liljestrand, Göran (1950), Nobel: The Man and His Prizes, Stockholm, Sweden: Nobel Foundation.
• Schück, Henrik; Sohlman, Ragnar; Österling, Anders; Bernhard, Carl Gustaf (1972), Nobel Foundation; Odelberg, W. (eds.), Nobel: The Man and His Prizes (3rd ed.), New York, NY: American Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc, ISBN 0-444-00117-4.

External links

• Article on Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
• BBC article on Nobel Peace Prize controversies
• CNN overview of Nobel prizes
• Declined papers that won Nobel prizes
• Nobel Foundation official site