Controversial recipients was to be awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in
1973, two of the Norwegian Nobel Committee members resigned in protest Among other criticisms, the Nobel Committees have been accused of having a political agenda, and of omitting more deserving candidates. They have also been accused of
Eurocentrism, especially for the Literature Prize. ;Peace Prize Among the most criticised Nobel Peace Prizes was the one awarded to
Henry Kissinger and
Lê Đức Thọ. This led to the resignation of two Norwegian Nobel Committee members. Kissinger and Thọ were awarded the prize for
negotiating a ceasefire between
North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973 during the
Vietnam War. However, when the award was announced, both sides were still engaging in hostilities. Critics sympathetic to the North announced that Kissinger was not a peace-maker but the opposite, responsible for widening the war. Those hostile to the North and what they considered its deceptive practices during negotiations were deprived of a chance to criticise Lê Đức Thọ, as he declined the award. The satirist and musician
Tom Lehrer has remarked that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Yasser Arafat,
Shimon Peres, and
Yitzhak Rabin received the Peace Prize in 1994 for their
efforts in making peace between Israel and Palestine. Immediately after the award was announced, one of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members denounced Arafat as a terrorist and resigned. Additional misgivings about Arafat were widely expressed in various newspapers. Another controversial Peace Prize was that awarded to
Barack Obama in 2009. Nominations had closed only eleven days after Obama took office as
President of the United States, but the actual evaluation occurred over the next eight months. Obama himself stated that he did not feel deserving of the award, or worthy of the company in which it would place him. Past Peace Prize laureates were divided, some saying that Obama deserved the award, and others saying he had not secured the achievements to yet merit such an accolade. Obama's award, along with the previous Peace Prizes for
Jimmy Carter and
Al Gore, also prompted accusations of a
liberal bias.
Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Peace Prize in 1991. However, in 2015, when she came into power in
Myanmar, she was criticized for being silent on human rights violations under her rule and especially over the
Rohingya genocide and calls were made to strip her of her Nobel Peace Prize. ;Literature Prize The award of the 2004 Literature Prize to
Elfriede Jelinek drew a protest from a member of the Swedish Academy,
Knut Ahnlund. Ahnlund resigned, alleging that the selection of Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art". He alleged that Jelinek's works were "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure". The 2009 Literature Prize to
Herta Müller also generated criticism. According to
The Washington Post, many US literary critics and professors were ignorant of her work. This made those critics feel the prizes were too Eurocentric. The 2019 Literature Prize to
Peter Handke received heavy criticisms from various authors, such as
Salman Rushdie and
Hari Kunzru, and was condemned by the governments of
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Kosovo, and
Turkey, due to his history of
Bosnian genocide denialism and his support for
Slobodan Milošević. ;Science prizes In 1949, the neurologist
António Egas Moniz received the Physiology or Medicine Prize for his development of the
prefrontal lobotomy. The previous year,
Walter Freeman had developed a
version of the procedure which was faster and easier to carry out. Due in part to the publicity surrounding the original procedure, Freeman's procedure was prescribed without due consideration or regard for modern
medical ethics. Endorsed by such influential publications as
The New England Journal of Medicine, leucotomy or "lobotomy" became so popular that about 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States in the three years immediately following Moniz's receipt of the Prize.
Overlooked achievements , although nominated five times, was never awarded a Nobel Peace Prize , one of the controversial omissions of the
Nobel Prize in Literature Although
Mohandas Gandhi, an icon of
nonviolence in the 20th century, was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize five times, in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and a few days before he was assassinated on 30 January 1948, he was never awarded the prize. In 1948, the year of
Gandhi's death, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate". In 1989, this omission was publicly regretted, when the
14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize, the chairman of the committee said that it was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".
Geir Lundestad, 2006 Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee, said Other high-profile individuals with widely recognised contributions to peace have been overlooked. In 2009, an article in
Foreign Policy magazine identified seven people who "never won the prize, but should have". The list consisted of Gandhi,
Eleanor Roosevelt,
Václav Havel,
Ken Saro-Wiwa,
Sari Nusseibeh,
Corazon Aquino, and
Liu Xiaobo. The Literature Prize also has controversial omissions.
Adam Kirsch has suggested that many notable writers have missed out on the award for political or extra-literary reasons. The heavy focus on European and Swedish authors has been a subject of criticism. The Eurocentric nature of the award was acknowledged by
Peter Englund, the 2009 Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, as a problem with the award and was attributed to the tendency for the academy to relate more to European authors. This tendency towards European authors still leaves many European writers on a list of notable writers that have been overlooked for the Literature Prize, including
Leo Tolstoy,
Anton Chekhov,
J. R. R. Tolkien,
Émile Zola,
Marcel Proust,
Vladimir Nabokov,
James Joyce,
August Strindberg,
Simon Vestdijk,
Karel Čapek; the
New World's
Jorge Luis Borges,
Ezra Pound,
John Updike,
Arthur Miller,
Mark Twain; and Africa's
Chinua Achebe. Candidates can receive multiple nominations the same year.
Gaston Ramon received a total of 155 nominations in physiology or medicine from 1930 to 1953, the last year with public nomination data for that award . He died in 1963 without being awarded.
Pierre Paul Émile Roux received 115 nominations in physiology or medicine, and
Arnold Sommerfeld received 84 in physics. These are the three most nominated scientists without awards in the data published .
Otto Stern received 79 nominations in physics 1925–1943 before being awarded in 1943. The strict rule against awarding a prize to more than three people is also controversial. When a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators, one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, the prize was awarded to
Koichi Tanaka and
John Fenn for the development of
mass spectrometry in
protein chemistry, an award that did not recognise the achievements of
Franz Hillenkamp and
Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the
University of Frankfurt. According to one of the nominees for the prize in physics, the three person limit deprived him and two other members of his team of the honor in 2013: the team of
Carl Hagen,
Gerald Guralnik, and
Tom Kibble published a paper in 1964 that gave answers to how the cosmos began, but did not share the 2013 Physics Prize awarded to
Peter Higgs and
François Englert, who had also published papers in 1964 concerning the subject. All five physicists arrived at the same conclusion, albeit from different angles. Hagen contends that an equitable solution is to either abandon the three limit restriction, or expand the time period of recognition for a given achievement to two years. Similarly, the prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by an individual or collaborator who dies before the prize is awarded. The Economics Prize was not awarded to
Fischer Black, who died in 1995, when his co-author
Myron Scholes received the honor in 1997 for their landmark work on option pricing along with
Robert C. Merton, another pioneer in the development of valuation of stock options. In the announcement of the award that year, the Nobel committee prominently mentioned Black's key role. Political subterfuge may also deny proper recognition.
Lise Meitner and
Fritz Strassmann, who co-discovered nuclear fission along with
Otto Hahn, may have been denied a share of Hahn's 1944 Nobel Chemistry Award due to having fled Germany when the
Nazis came to power. The Meitner and Strassmann roles in the research was not fully recognised until years later, when they joined Hahn in receiving the 1966
Enrico Fermi Award.
Emphasis on discoveries over inventions Alfred Nobel left his fortune to finance annual prizes to be awarded "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". He stated that the Nobel Prizes in Physics should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics". Nobel did not emphasise discoveries, but they have historically been held in higher respect by the Nobel Prize Committee than inventions: 77% of the Physics Prizes have been given to discoveries, compared with only 23% to inventions. Christoph Bartneck and Matthias Rauterberg, in papers published in
Nature and
Technoetic Arts, have argued this emphasis on discoveries has moved the Nobel Prize away from its original intention of rewarding the greatest contribution to society.
Gender In terms of the most prestigious awards in
STEM fields, only a small proportion have been awarded to women. Out of 210 laureates in Physics, 181 in Chemistry and 216 in Medicine between 1901 and 2018, there were only three female laureates in physics, five in chemistry and 12 in medicine. Factors proposed to contribute to the discrepancy between this and the roughly equal
human sex ratio include biased nominations, fewer women than men being active in the relevant fields, Nobel Prizes typically being awarded decades after the research was done (reflecting a time when
gender bias in the relevant fields was greater), a greater delay in awarding Nobel Prizes for women's achievements making longevity a more important factor for women (one cannot be nominated for the Nobel Prize posthumously), and a tendency to omit women from jointly awarded Nobel Prizes. Despite these factors, Marie Curie is to date the only person awarded Nobel Prizes in two different sciences (Physics in 1903, Chemistry in 1911); she is one of only three people who have received two Nobel Prizes in sciences (see Multiple Laureates above).
Malala Yousafzai is the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When she received it in 2014, she was only 17 years old.
Status of the Economic Sciences Prize Peter Nobel describes the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel as a "false Nobel prize" that dishonours his relative Alfred Nobel, after whom the prize is named, and considers economics to be a pseudoscience. == Refusals and constraints ==