Prize and Prejudice: The Story behind Nobel Prize

-Karthik Gurumurthy

The whole Nobel Prize thing started with this interesting dude named Alfred Nobel – a shy, poetry-loving guy who was SUPER into explosives. Ironically, after accidentally killing his brother in an experiment and inventing dynamite, he decided his legacy should be… promoting peace? Talk about a plot twist!

Instead of passing his millions to family, Nobel set up these prizes in 1895 to reward people who “contributed most materially to the benefit of mankind.” Today, a foundation in Stockholm manages his money and gives out the interest as prizes.

But here’s where it gets juicy – these awards are TOTALLY influenced by politics and personal bias. Some of the choices are flat-out ridiculous. The first literature prize in 1901 went to some guy named Sully Prudhomme instead of Leo Tolstoy! Why? Because an old conservative committee member thought Tolstoy was too anarchist. Classic.

Hemingway only got his prize in 1954 because a 90-year-old committee member loved “The Old Man and the Sea” and was retiring. It was basically a retirement gift to the committee member, not for Hemingway!

The Peace Prize has seen some real controversy. In 1935, the Norwegian judges (who were later arrested when Nazis invaded their country) bravely awarded it to Carl von Ossietzky, who exposed Hitler’s secret rearmament. But then in 1973, they gave it to Henry Kissinger, which The New York Times called a “war prize” – two committee members actually quit over that one!

Oh, and get this – they apparently investigate winners’ personal lives before giving awards. When physicist Richard Feynman found out about this practice, he joked that it explained something that had puzzled him: “I made my prize-winning discovery in 1949, but I wasn’t honored until 1965… it was my personal life that kept me from getting the award… until the Nobel Committee finally saw I had settled down with my third wife!”

Despite all this drama and bias, majority of  prizes have gone to truly deserving people, as Nobel intended. It’s just that behind every medal, there’s a committee of humans with all their quirks and preferences making these supposedly objective decisions! It is still prestigious and I would like to check out this place someday. It is definitely in the list of places I would like to see.