In the month of October every year we hear the announcements of Nobel Prize winners. And in December every year, for nearly 120 years, we have seen them being awarded to – arguably - to the world's greatest men and women in their respective fields.
Since 1901, a total of 935 individuals and 25 organizations have been given this prestigious award. And, I thought, a brief retrospective comment on this Nobel Prize history could be share-worthy.
Like, for instance, that Marie Curie is the only lady who won twice. Once in Physics (1903) and then, again, in Chemistry (1911).
Becoming a bit curious about this Curie, I dug deeper. And as Curie’s cat, not Schrödinger’s (Schrödinger, by the way, also won a Nobel in Physics in 1933), I found some startlingly pleasant information.
Apart from Marie Curie, there are others who have won the Nobel Prize twice. Linus Pauling received Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (1954) and Peace (1962), John Bardeen twice, in Physics (1956 and 1972), and Frederick Sanger twice, in Chemistry (1958 and 1980).
Marie and Pierre Curie’s is, perhaps, the only family that can be correctly called 'a family of Nobel Laureates'. Their daughter, Irene Curie won a Nobel Prize, later.
And, fascinatingly, Irene Joliot nee Curie - like her father and mother – also shared the Nobel with her husband, Fredric Joliot (Chemistry, 1935).
Like these two couples, another wife-husband couple, Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, also won Nobel Prizes, but it was not a shared Prize. Gunnar won it in Economics (1974), and Alva won it for Peace (1982).
A father-son couple included Sir William Lawrence Bragg, who at age 25, was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize, until Malala Yusufzai (Peace, 2014) became the youngest by getting the award at 17 years.
Famously, the Nobel Prize was refused twice. The French writer Jean Paul Satre refused the Prize for Literature on the grounds that such honours could interfere with a writer's responsibilities to his readers. And the Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago, was forced not to accept it, by the then Soviet Government.
Interestingly, six Indians have won the Nobel Prizes, so far, and in almost every category. Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1913), C V Raman (Physics, 1930), Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979), Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998), and Kailash Satyarthi (Peace, 2014). The Chemistry Prize has been evading the Indian subcontinent.
Nobel laureates born in India, but who’d become US or UK citizens were: Hara Gobind Khorana (Medicine, 1968), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry, 2009) and Abhijit Banerjee (2019, Economic Sciences).
No woman had won the award for economics until 2009, when Elinor Ostrom received the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
However, to be technically correct, there was one woman who received money for economics earlier. Robert E. Lucas in 1995 had to, on personal account, share his Economics prize money with his ex-wife. She had had her lawyer cleverly insert a clause in their divorce papers, to make the husband share the money if he ever won a Nobel!
Another amazing piece of information I stumbled across, on the internet is this. That Bronx Science High School, Bronx, New York, is the high school from where the most number of Nobel Laureates came than from any other high school in the world !! It has eight Nobel laureates among its alumni!
So you now know in which high school you must join your kid if you want him or her to become a Noble Laureate. But be sure that he or she becomes a US citizen first.
And maybe marrying a descendant of the Curies could prove extremely helpful!
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For this article - an older version - published in my weekly column in Daily Tribune, click here
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