How Far Do 10 Million Kronor Go?
Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, was sure his creation would help bring about the end of war. "When two armies of equal strength can annihilate each other in an instant," he once wrote, "then all civilized nations will retreat and disband their troops." Things didn't quite go according to plan. What has worked out, however, is the annual set of awards, established in 1901, that bear his name. They remain the most prestigious intellectual awards in the world. The first 2008 Nobel Prize, in medicine, will be announced October 6.
A lifelong bachelor, Nobel lived a solitary life and spent most of his time tinkering with inventions, amassing 355 patents by the time he died in 1896. Following Nobel's death, his executors discovered that he had secretly created five annual prizes—chemistry, physics, literature, medicine and peace—in his will to honor "the greatest benefit on mankind." It all came as quite a surprise. "It took five years to get the prizes started because everyone had to figure it all out." says Hans Jornvall, secretary of the Nobel Committee at Karolinska Institutet—the group that chooses the Nobel Prize in medicine. Nobel initially donated 33 million Swedish kroner (about $4.6 million); the prizes come from the fortune's annual interest.
Each award is decided by separate institutions which form assemblies to decide the actual prize recipients. Some prizes (medicine) require Nobel assembly members to remain active in their fields, while others (literature) appoint members for life. The Peace Prize is actually decided by five members of the Norwegian parliament. Nobel Prize winners must be living—there are no posthumous awards. Each year, the Nobel committees distribute nomination forms to an undisclosed number of recipients—past winners, prominent institutions, respected members of the field—who are allowed to chose as many nominees as they want. Self-nomination is not allowed. The winner is decided by a simple majority vote.
The literature and peace prizes regularly inspire controversy. Jean Paul Sartre rejected his 1964 prize in literature, though his family tried to reclaim the award money after his death. Pablo Neruda wanted a Nobel Prize so much that he reportedly wined and dined Swedish writers and academics at his seaside villa; he finally won one in 1971. Bob Dylan has been nominated six times, Jerry Lewis once. In 2004, the literature prize went to Austrian feminist Elfriede Jelinek, a move so controversial that one assembly member resigned in protest. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared a 1973 Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War. Tho rejected his award, saying that there was no peace in his country. Kissinger's acceptance caused uproar; apparently the former National Security Advisor's role in a secret war against Cambodia and the overthrow of the Chilean government didn't sit well with some people.
Some Nobel Prizes have gone to discoveries that turned out to be wrong. The 1926 Nobel Prize in medicine went to Johannes Fibiger, for discovering that roundworms caused cancer (they don't). A year later, psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg won for injecting patients with malaria to treat syphilitic dementia (not a good idea). Past laureates have espoused eugenics, opposed public schooling, joined the Nazi party, and claimed that September 11 attacks were an inside job. But the majority of prizes have gone to sound discoveries (x-rays, quantum physics, penicillin) and respected leaders (Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela). This year's winners will come away with a medal, 10 million kroner (about $1.4 million), and the satisfaction of being inducted into one of the most exclusive clubs in history.
When Austrian Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, a television reporter asked what the prize meant to her. Jelinek paused, apparently amused at the foolishness of the question, then replied: financial independence, of course.
The typical Nobel Prize winner is no slouch — he or she has probably already got a good job at a prestigious university — but while winners make an honest dollar, wealthy they are not. Most laureates spend their prize money (about $1.4 million) in mundane ways: to pay the mortgage, buy a car or save for rainier days. MIT's Wolfgang Ketterle, one of three scientists to win the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics 2001, said, "I used the Nobel money to buy a house and for the education of my children." Others, meanwhile, such as the late Franco Modigliani, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1985, buy a sailboat.
Phillip Sharp, a cancer researcher and professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at MIT, is well off compared with most other academic scientists. That is, today. As co-founder of the biotech companies Biogen (now Biogen Idec), Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Magen Biosciences Inc., he's made millions. But when he received his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine back in 1993 for his discovery of RNA splicing, he wasn't nearly there yet. He used his half of the prize money (he shared the prize with British scientist Richard Roberts, who used his winnings to install a croquet lawn in his front yard) to buy an old Federalist house.
American neuroscientist Paul Greengard, a professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two other researchers for their discoveries involving the communication of nerve cells — work that paved the way for the eventual development of antidepressants, such as Prozac. Greengard invested the entire sum of his winnings, about $400,000, to establish a new award: the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.
Greengard's intent in creating the $50,000 "Nobel Prize for women," which he named in honor of his mother who died giving birth to him, was to help offset bias against in women in science. In a 2006 interview with the New York Times, Greengard said, "There [is] still discrimination against women in science, even at the highest levels."
The award is administered by Rockefeller University and has been given yearly since 2004 to biomedical researchers. The fifth annual prize went this year to Vicki Lundblad at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.; Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco; and Carol Greider, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for their work in telomere biology.
After the Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she announced she would use her $1.3 million winnings to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people. Whether that trust ever got off the ground under the repressive regime of the reclusive state is unclear. A trawl of Burmese discussion forums on the Internet suggests that people in the country have never heard of the project and express doubts that Burma's military rulers would have allowed Suu Kyi to go ahead with the endowment. In 2007, a Burmese national newspaper reported that the government had accused Suu Kyi of tax evasion for spending her Nobel money abroad and not in Burma. The accusations were widely interpreted as unjustified and regarded as yet another attack by the government on its most influential critic.
Marie Curie was the first female professor at the Sorbonne and the first female Nobel laureate ever; together with her husband, physicist Pierre Curie, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work in spontaneous radiation (the other half went to Henri Becquerel for discovering it). She was also the only person to ever receive two Nobels in two different scientific categories — she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, also for her work in radioactivity.
Curie was serene, dignified, dedicated. Albert Einstein is said to have remarked that Curie, "of all celebrated beings, [is] the only one whom fame has not corrupted." She spent her winnings the way you'd expect, by pouring it into further research. The payoffs were many and varied, including an unprecedented and unrepeated string of Nobels won by one family: In addition to the prize Pierre shared in 1903, Marie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, and her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. The downsides were also great. Marie's work with radioactive elements inflicted serious burns to her arms and hands — and perhaps triggered the leukemia that killed her at age 58
Rockefeller University's Günter Blobel, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, transferred the entire amount — roughly $1 million — to an account belonging to the city of Dresden, Germany. He earmarked the money for the restoration of the city's cathedral and the construction of a new synagogue. In 1945, from a refugee camp outside town, Blobel witnessed the Allied bombing of the city and the eventual collapse of the massive Dresden Frauenkirche. Later that year, his oldest sister was killed at age 19 in an air raid. "It was one of the great pleasures of my life to donate the entire sum of the Nobel Prize, in memory of my sister Ruth Blobel, to the restoration of Dresden," Blobel wrote at the time of the award
"Back then, I did nothing particular with that money," says molecular biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who pioneered fruit-fly genetics and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995. Nine years later, she contributed a substantial amount of her prize money to the eponymous charity she established to help boost the disproportionately low number of women working in science in Germany. The Christiane Nusslein-Volhard Foundation takes a practical point of view, helping young female scientists with children by funding household duties like childcare or the purchase of a washing machine, and freeing women to pursue their scientific careers.
The Emmy and Oscar were nice, but last year's Nobel Peace Prize (which Gore shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was the former Vice President's absolution. For years, Gore had been dismissed, even ridiculed, for his traveling Power Point extravaganza warning about climate change — captured in the landmark documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Today, few would disagree that Al was pretty much on the money. Unsurprisingly, he sunk his Nobel winnings into the Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization founded and chaired by Gore that builds grassroots momentum to solve the climate crisis and aims within 10 years to have America generating 100% of its electricity from clean energy source
In divorce papers signed in 1919, which finally dissolved Einstein's troubled marriage to his first wife, Mileva Maric, the theoretical physicist left all his Nobel money to Maric and their two sons. There has been a lot of speculation around that decision. Some have suggested that Einstein felt indebted to Maric — it has been rumored that she, herself a budding young scientist, helped author some of Einstein's most famous work. Although there's no clear evidence that she co-wrote any of his papers, few historians doubt that she assisted her husband and often provided him a sounding board.
Perhaps more intriguing is Einstein's bold prescience: He left the money to Maric in 1919 (in a notarized document, no less), yet was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics until 1921
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