Nobel prize who is nobel

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Greider and Jack W. Barack H. Oliver E. Mario R. Capecchi , Sir Martin J. Leonid Hurwicz , Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. John C. Mather and George F. Roger D. Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Edmund S. Roy J. John L. Hall and Theodor W. Yves Chauvin , Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Barry J. Marshall and J. Aumann and Thomas C. Gross , H. Richard Axel and Linda B. Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Alexei A. Abrikosov , Vitaly L. Ginzburg and Anthony J. Paul C. John M. Robert F. Clive W. Raymond Davis Jr. Sydney Brenner , H.

Robert Horvitz and John E. Vernon L. Eric A. Cornell , Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. William S. Leland H. United Nations U. George A. Akerlof , A.

Michael Spence and Joseph E. Zhores I. Albert Einstein physics , Marie Curie physics and chemistry , and Harold Pinter literature have also received Nobel prizes. Two people - author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in and Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho in - rejected the prize, and four others were forced to decline by their countries. In , there was uncertainty over whether singer Bob Dylan would accept the literature award before he finally delivered his lecture for the prize in June The Nobel prizes are a series of annual awards given in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

They are awarded to people "who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind" in the previous 12 months. The quote is from the will of Swedish businessman - and inventor of dynamite - Alfred Nobel. He left most of his fortune in a fund to launch the awards, which were first presented in In , an economic sciences prize was added by Sweden's central bank, although it does not count as a Nobel prize.

Different organisations award the prize in each category every year. The last female physics laureate, Maria Goeppert Mayer, was honored in The gap reflects longtime institutional biases against women within the sciences, a lag made worse by the backlog of Nobel-worthy discoveries.

Nobel Museum curators told the BBC that they have no evidence of the committee refusing to give an award because a nominee was a woman. They also say that the committee slightly bent prize rules to ensure that Marie Curie shared the Nobel Prize in physics.

But that may come as small consolation to the supremely qualified female scientists who were never recognized. For instance, Lise Meitner, one of the co-discoverers of nuclear fission, was nominated for the physics prize 29 times from to and the chemistry prize an additional 19 times from to , according to Nobel Foundation archival records. She never won. Astronomer Vera Rubin's groundbreaking work revealing the existence of dark matter received wide acclaim, but she died on December 25, , with no Nobel to call her own.

Read National Geographic's obituary for Vera Rubin. Jocelyn Bell Burnell recently won the Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars , a find also recognized by the Nobel Prize in physics. Nobel Foundation rules say that a Nobel Prize can only be awarded to up to three individuals, reflective of the small-team science that prevailed in the early 20th century. But today, major breakthroughs increasingly come from massive scientific collaborations, and the Nobel Committee has been reticent to award science prizes to broader groups.

The contrast is especially stark in physics, where scientific collaborations can include thousands of researchers—as illustrated by the breakthrough that earned the Nobel Prize in physics.

The prize went to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish for detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. While the trio's contributions were huge, they themselves argue that the prize should have recognized the broader LIGO Scientific Collaboration , which includes hundreds of scientists. After all, the study that announced the detection of gravitational waves has 1, co-authors, by Popular Science 's count.

Just 0. All rights reserved. What is the Nobel Prize? Before the laureates' breakthrough findings at the turn of the millennium, only certain metals and complex enzymes were known to do the trick. The academy said the new generation of small-molecule catalysts were more friendly for the environment and cheaper to produce, and praised the precision of the new tools. Before asymmetric catalysis, man-made catalysed substances would often contain not only the desired molecule but also its unwanted mirror image.

The sedative thalidomide, which caused deformities in human embryos around six decades ago, was a catastrophic example, it said.