What’s so noble about the Nobel Prize?

Katalin Karikó thought the call was a joke. It was 3 a.m. on October 2, 2023. Her husband answered the phone. As someone who maintains buildings, “he quite frequently gets calls for fixing this and that,” Karikó says. But this time he handed it over. “It is for you,” he said.

Only half awake, Karikó heard a scientist from Sweden congratulate her: Karikó had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Karikó works at the University of Szeged in Hungary. She also works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she had been asleep that day in October. A biochemist, she has spent much of her career studying messenger RNA. This molecule carries instructions from a cell’s DNA so they can be translated into proteins.

Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman learned how to tweak that RNA. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, their findings allowed other scientists to leap into action. In less than a year, scientist teams made a vaccine using mRNA. So thanks to Karikó, you may have gotten a vaccine to protect you from COVID-19.

This work definitely sounds worthy of a big prize. And the Nobel is the biggest science prize of them all. Winners receive a solid gold medal imprinted with the face of Alfred Nobel (more on him later). They also get a large cash prize to split among as many as three scientists in each field.

In 2024, the 11 million Swedish kroner prize was valued at about $1 million U.S. (Karikó shared this prize with Weissmann, also a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania.) Every year, the Nobel Foundation awards prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Sweden’s central bank also gives a prize in economics.

The Nobel Prize is more than a gold paperweight and a nice chunk of money, though. It’s a sign that someone and their work are very important.

Katalin Karikó received her Nobel Prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10, 2023. In this image from the event are several Nobel laureates (from left): Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov (chemistry), Karikó and Drew Weissman (physiology or medicine) and Jon Fosse (literature).JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/Contributor/Getty Images

Scientists who win a Nobel Prize are famous while they’re alive — and that fame will live on in history books for years after. This may lead others to care what the winners think — even in areas where the scientists might not be experts.

But Nobel Prizes spotlight only a narrow slice of science — and very few scientists.

Many fields of science don’t fit the prize categories. And only three people can share one prize, even though hundreds may have worked on a discovery. Most of those others end up unrecognized for their role in prize-winning work.

The Nobel Prizes also tend to honor people — mostly men — in wealthy countries.

Prizes can be important. They may inspire young scientists. The hubbub around these prizes tells the general public that science matters. But the scientists who choose the winners are human and bring their own values and biases to the process. So which scientists get celebrated — and which don’t — can be political and sometimes biased.  

Noble Nobel?

These prizes are named for Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist in the 1800s. His most famous invention was dynamite. He designed the explosive to help build railroads more safely and to tunnel through rocks while mining. But it also was soon used for war and violence. Over time, Nobel grew fabulously wealthy from dynamite and his other inventions.

Nobel had planned to leave his fortune to relatives. But in 1888, his brother, Ludvig, died. At the time, a newspaper in Paris, France, made a mistake. They printed an obituary for Alfred, not Ludvig. (An obituary is a news story at someone’s death outlining their life and achievements.) This story was titled: “The merchant of death is dead.” It pointed to how Nobel’s inventions had killed many people in battle.

Alfred Nobel invented hundreds of things, including processes for making synthetic rubber and artificial silk. But he was most famous for inventing dynamite, a reliable explosive. The Nobel Foundation Archive

Nobel never said how he felt about reading his own death notice in the morning paper. But “he saw himself described in rather unflattering terms,” says Marshall Lichtman, a physician and teacher. Lichtman, who works at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, wrote a 2017 article on Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize.

Seven years after reading his premature obituary, Nobel decided his fortune would fund what has come to be called Nobel Prizes. Sweden, his home country, would choose the winners. Nobel specified that he wanted awards in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

Nobel probably didn’t intend for the prize to become like the Olympics of science, Lichtman says. “What he was hoping to do, I think, was to provide [winners] with a prize that would allow them to continue this exceptional work.”

The Nobel Prizes quickly became famous. One reason: There weren’t other big prizes like it. And these prizes would be open to everyone. “That meant that the very best people in the world were going to be recognized,” Lichtman says.

If Nobel’s plan had been to change his reputation, it worked. Now he isn’t known as “the merchant of death.” Instead, he’s the founder of a prize that makes people think of scientific genius.

Picking prizes

Choosing who wins Nobels takes almost a year. It’s a huge honor to be involved, says Juleen Zierath. She’s a physiologist, someone who studies the human body, at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

She’s also part of the 50-person assembly that works with a smaller committee to choose who wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Zierath was the first woman to chair a Nobel committee and remains in the assembly.

Every year, scientists around the world have from September to January to nominate candidates for the Physiology or Medicine prize to the Karolinska Institutet. Nominations for the physics and chemistry prizes go to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, nominations for the peace prize go to a group in Norway. And nominations for literature go to The Swedish Academy.

Only invited people can submit those nominations. These are very accomplished scientists and previous prize winners. And they cannot nominate themselves.  

Explainer: The Nobel Prize

After the nominations come in, a smaller committee gets to work.

To sort through the hundreds of nominations, the committee pulls in more scientists. Experts in what the nominated scientists study will prepare reports describing what the nominees have done. These must be turned in by August. They’ll be evaluated in September. In the meantime, the smaller committee consults back and forth with the 50-person assembly.

“We are only allowed to award a discovery,” not a person, Zierath explains. “So we have to sort through who’s been nominated. Are these people the right people? Did they really make a discovery? … We have to think a lot.” Once the committee has made a short list of especially good candidates, they send it to the assembly.

The final vote for the Physiology or Medicine prize takes place on the first Monday of every October. (Other prizes get voted on later in the week.) It starts at 9 a.m. in Sweden. The voting is kept a tight secret. The voting room has double doors. No one can bring a phone or laptop.

In another room, journalists from all over the world wait to hear the results. But first, each winner gets a call.

A life-changing call

The time difference between Sweden and the United States is big. So late-morning decisions in Stockholm result in middle-of-the-night phone calls to U.S. winners. And that call will be just the start.

Soon after Karikó received her call in 2023, the three phones in her house began ringing nonstop. By 7 a.m., journalists were knocking on her door. When Karikó answered, she got her picture taken still wearing her pajamas.

Nobel Prizes ran in the Curie family. Marie Curie (seen here) shared her first Nobel Prize with her husband Pierre. Their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Everett Collection/Shutterstock

Winning a Nobel Prize means your life will never be the same, says Victor Ambros. He works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worchester. A developmental biologist, he studies how organisms grow. And he took home a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024 for discovering microRNAs. These tiny bits of genetic material help control how cells make proteins.

Nobel’s goal with his prize was to help support scientists with the prize money — to let them keep doing their work. Ironically, Ambros has less time than ever to do research.

“Before this, I was working in the lab and doing experiments,” he says. “I have not been able to get back to that.” He is constantly traveling to give talks. Everyone wants to meet a Nobel Prize winner and hear what they have to say. When something changes in the world of science, journalists want to know what Ambros thinks.

“Nobody would have called me before,” he says. (Now, he even gets recognized while out shopping.)

In a way, the Nobel Prize is famous just because it’s famous. “If you look at the media attention, there is no other prize worldwide that can compete with [it],” says Nils Hansson. He’s a science historian who studies the Nobel Prize at Heiner University in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Journalists tell him that they don’t generally cover science prizes — except the Nobels. “The brand of the Nobel is so much bigger and more well known than the laureates,” he notes.

The power of a prize

Most scientists — even very successful ones — will never win a Nobel Prize. Those who do tend to look a certain way. Most are men and tend to be white. They’re also usually from wealthy places like the United States or Europe.

In 2023, Karikó became one of only 13 women to have received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even fewer have won in chemistry or physics.

The assemblies work hard to avoid bias, says Zierath. “We’re 50 members on this assembly … to ensure it is not one person [making] a decision,” she explains. And “we’re not restricting our nominations to only one region,” she adds. “We’re reaching people throughout the world and requesting that they nominate.”

But most of these awards in science still go to people from the United States or Europe. That’s largely because these regions have long invested in funding science and encouraging people to become scientists, Zierath notes. However, bias — preferring one type of person or country or discovery over another — can creep into decision-making. The assembly knows this. “One way to try to deal with biases is to identify that you have them,” she says.

To be seen as prizeworthy, scientists have to make big discoveries. Often, this means working in big labs at important universities. This can be hard to do if someone comes from a low-income area or country, is a member of a minority or faces other challenges.

People of color or white women face a lot of barriers to succeeding in science, notes Harriet Zuckerman. She’s a sociologist — someone who studies how people behave together — at Columbia University in New York City. There’s an “array of obstacles that line the course of women’s careers,” she says. These “make it less likely” for them to reach a place where they can do the type of work likely to win a prize.

“In order to get the Nobel Prize, normally it takes — from the first nomination until you get the prize — 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years,” notes Hansson. “So you have to have a group of friends around you that nominates you all the time, over and over again.” As a result, that prize might recognize work done at a time when even fewer women and people of color were at the top of science than there are today.

And of course, of the impressive scientists considered, only three people can win for any discovery. Those scientists are most often the heads of their labs. Others who work in the labs may go unrecognized.

Ambros, for example, won the 2024 Nobel Prize with collaborator Gary Ruvkun. Ruvkun is a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. But Ambros’ wife, Rosalind Lee, is a scientist, too. She manages Ambros’ lab and contributed just as much to the work. She, however, did not share the Nobel Prize.

“Here’s a life partner, [my] partner at home, [my] partner in the lab, [my] science partner,” Ambros says. “It would have been … terrific, right, if we could have shared” the prize.

Victor Ambros (left) was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His wife, Rosalind Lee (right), manages Ambros’ lab and contributed to the science for which he won the prize. But she was not included in his prize.Boston Globe/Contributor/Getty Images

The Nobel Foundation is unlikely to change anything about these prizes. They are largely bound by limits that Alfred Nobel wrote into his will, such as: Three or fewer scientists per prize. Only discoveries are awarded. And in science, only discoveries in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine will be considered.

That leaves out a lot of science. “Where does ecology fit in?” asks Robert Marc Friedman, a historian of science at the University of Oslo in Norway. Or the study of oceans? Weather and climate? Geology? Discoveries in these fields can be just as important as those in physics, chemistry or medicine. But most won’t qualify for a Nobel Prize.

People also shouldn’t make the mistake that all Nobel Prize winners are geniuses on everything, Friedman says. Doing great work in physics, for example, doesn’t mean a scientist may know anything about politics or medicine. In fact, it may only mean they know a lot about one area of physics.

Still, Lichtman thinks that the Nobel Prize is important. It shines a light on science as a whole. “The average person doesn’t sit at home and say, ‘Boy, I hope there are a lot of good people going into chemistry or going into physics,’” he says. The Nobel Prize shows the world that science can change our lives.

Ambros agrees — and not just because he won one. “It’s all about science and celebrating science,” he notes. “I’ve talked more about my research publicly in the last couple of months than I did in my whole previous career.” When people have heard he won the Nobel Prize, they don’t only get curious about him and his work — they get curious about science.