Chemists grumble that their Nobel Prize keeps going to biologists
In the thirty years up to 2012, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went ten times to biochemistry or molecular biology, and in the final decade of that stretch only four awards honoured purely chemical work. Critics say biology is borrowing chemistry's medal, but Alfred Nobel's will never created a biology prize to begin with.
Nobel's final will, signed in Paris on 27 November 1895, set aside 94 percent of his fortune, 31 million Swedish kronor, for prizes rewarding the greatest benefit to humanity. Doubts about the document meant Norway's parliament did not approve it until April 1897, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was named to judge chemistry. The first chemistry prize went in 1901 to the Dutch chemist Jacobus van 't Hoff for laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure.
Selection is slow and secret. A five-member committee sends forms to about three thousand people, whittles the nominations to roughly two hundred names, and passes them to experts who cut the list to about fifteen. Nominees are never told, and records stay sealed for fifty years. Because achievements must be tested by time, awards usually trail discoveries by about 20 years, and some scientists die before recognition arrives. No more than three people can share a prize, and laureates receive a gold medal, a unique diploma handed over by the King of Sweden, and a cash sum that has varied with the foundation's funds.
By 2025 the prize had gone to 198 people. Frederick Sanger and K. Barry Sharpless each won twice, and Marie Curie, honoured in 1911, remains the only person with Nobels in two different sciences. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie followed in 1935, and in 2020 Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna shared it.
The Economist has pointed out that the academy is bound by a bequest written when biology was young, which also left out mathematics and assumed discoveries come from individuals rather than huge teams. A 2020 analysis found molecular chemistry the dominant winning field within chemistry.
Source: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
