The medicine Nobel skipped Salk and Freud to reward basic discoveries
Everyone expected Jonas Salk or Albert Sabin to win a Nobel for polio vaccines. Instead the prize went to three researchers who first grew the virus in monkey cells, the step that made vaccines possible. The committee behind the medicine prize has long favoured basic discovery over applied triumphs, and sometimes gets it badly wrong.
Alfred Nobel, born in Stockholm in 1833, made his fortune from 355 inventions, dynamite above all, but he also ran his own blood transfusion experiments in labs in France and Italy and funded Ivan Pavlov's research. In 1888 a French paper mistakenly printed his obituary under the headline The Merchant of Death Is Dead; his brother Ludvig was the one who had died. Troubled by how he might be remembered, Nobel rewrote his will to fund prizes for the greatest benefit to humankind, and he insisted the medical one reward a discovery.
The Karolinska Institute handles the award. Until 1977 all its professors voted together, but a Swedish law requiring public access to documents led to an independent Nobel Assembly of 50 professors, which elects a five-member committee. The first laureate, in 1901, was Emil von Behring for serum therapy against diphtheria; Ronald Ross followed in 1902 for showing mosquitoes spread malaria, and Pavlov won in 1904 for digestion. Gerty Cori became the first woman honoured in 1947. By 2024 there had been 232 laureates, only 14 of them women.
The prize has stirred real controversy. In 1949 it went to António Egas Moniz for the prefrontal lobotomy despite protests from doctors. Selman Waksman's 1952 award ended in court, and his unrecognised co-discoverer Albert Schatz won half the patent rights. Freud was never chosen because psychoanalysis offers no experimentally testable hypotheses.
Its scope has also stretched. In 1973 it honoured Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for animal behaviour, and Tinbergen joked about the unconventional choice of men once seen as mere animal watchers. The 2025 prize recognised work on regulatory T cells and immune tolerance.
Source: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
