Nobel Prize controversies

Since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, they have met with criticisms and garnered a stream of controversy, including controversy over instances where apparently deserving persons did not receive the award, instances where overt politics and heady politickings abruptly loom large and seemingly appear to take center stage, instances where the standards for making the award seem not to have been consistently applied or adhered to, incidences where the selections of award tend to give sway to candidate(s)'s sex, visible, prominent or institutional clout, status or position in the scientific establishment of the largely western world, incidences where questionable nominations have been made and later retracted, and awards made to persons who may not have deserved them. In addition, another salient fact of the Nobel awards is that the specifics of the Prizes do not necessarily tally with the true historical records at all: as to priority of discovery or the list of major contributors to the discovery. The Nobel Foundation had also been criticized for its exclusive awardings of the Nobel Prizes to only Norwegians in its earlier history.

A more contentious Nobel-equivalent Prize instituted for economics, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has roused much irk and doubtful questionings on its part as to its actual validity, real effectiveness and true applicability—like no other Nobel Prize's other categories over the years. Another controversial matter is that Nobel Prizes are not posthumously awarded, so that otherwise deserving persons missed out on the Nobel Prizes simply because they expired before the significance of their achievements became fully appreciated: the same can also be said for those same class of Nobel Prize-deserving individuals, scientists, personages and human achievers in history past who had been 'omitted from its scroll' prior to the institution of the Nobel Prize.

Introduction

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Nobel Prize Medals (front and back). Original design ®© The Nobel Foundation.

The Nobel Prizes are a series of awards which were posthumously instituted by bequest of Alfred Nobel (1895). They are currently awarded to persons and organizations that have served humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The Nobel Prizes are generally considered the most prestigious—if not supreme—awards in the world today. Some important, primary fields of human intellectual endeavor—such as mathematics, social studies, and philosophy—have been excluded from the Nobel Prizes. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is related to the Nobel Prize. Recently another new Nobel-equivalent Award, created especially for mathematics, the Abel Prize, came into effect in 2003.

Controversial exclusions

Physics

Tesla greatly influenced life in the 20th and 21st century.

Edison applied "mass production" to the invention process.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates in 1915, but it is believed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was ever given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions. There is some indication that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award; that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first; and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it—as was rumoured in the press at the time. Tesla had a greater financial need for the award than Edison: in 1916, he filed for bankruptcy.

Nikola Tesla did not receive recognition for his work in early radio, much like the case of the poor, little-known Italian mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci (who was finally recognized, in his case, as the inventor of the telephone by the US Congress in 2002, 113 years after his death); in 1909, Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the Nobel Prize "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". In 1947, the United States Supreme Court credited Tesla, and not Marconi, as being the inventor of the radio.

Albert Einstein, though awarded a 1921 Prize, may have deserved 4 total Nobels.

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize award mainly recognized him for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 and "for his services to Theoretical Physics"—due to the often counter-intuitive concepts and advanced constructs of his relativity theory, some of which are so far in advance of possible experimental verifications, until only recently (eg. gravitational waves & lenses, bending of light, black holes, etc.). His other significant contributions in the Annus Mirabilis Papers, on Brownian motion and on special relativity, were not explicitly recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee. This may have been because the committee believed Henri Poincaré, who died in 1912, had at least an equal claim as the originator of special relativity.

Robert Millikan is widely believed to have been denied the 1920 prize for physics owing to Felix Ehrenhaft's claims to have measured charges smaller than Millikan's elementary charge. Ehrenhaft's claims were ultimately dismissed and Millikan was awarded the prize in 1923.

Chung-Yao Chao, while a graduate student at Caltech in 1930, first captured positrons through electron-positron annihilation, but did not realize what they were. Carl D. Anderson, who won the 1936 Nobel Physics Prize for his discovery of positron—using the same radioactive source (ThC) as Chao's—acknowledged, late in life, that Chao had inspired his discovery. Much of Anderson's own work was based on Chao's research. Chao died in 1998— without sharing an honor of receiving a Nobel prize acknowledgment [1].

Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 but received no Nobel recognition [2]. In fact, it was she, not Otto Hahn, who first analysed the accumulated experimental data and figured out fission. In his defense, Hahn was under strong pressure from the Nazis to minimize Meitner's role since she was Jewish. But he maintained this position even after the war.

The 1956 Prize was awarded to Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain for the discovery of the transistor, because the Nobel committee did not recognize numerous preceding patent applications. As early as 1928, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented several modern transistor types. In 1934, Oskar Heil patented the field-effect transistor. It is unclear whether either had really built such devices, but they did cause later workers significant patent problems. Further, Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Walker, at Westinghouse Paris, applied for a patent in 1948 on an amplifier based on the minority carrier injection process. Mataré had first observed transconductance effects during the manufacture of germanium duodiodes for German radar equipment during WW2.

Although the Brazilian physicist César Lattes was the main researcher and the first author of the historical Nature magazine article describing the subatomic particle meson pi (pion, his lab boss, Cecil Powell, alone, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for "his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method". The reason for this apparent neglect is that the Nobel Committee policy until 1960 was to give the award to the research group head only. Lattes was also responsible for calculating the pion's mass, and with USA physicist Eugene Gardner, demonstrated the existence of this particle after atomic collisions in a synchrotron. Again, Gardner was denied the Nobel, because he died soon after and there are no posthumous Nobel Prizes awarded.

Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel [3]. Wu assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—with Chen Ning Yang—by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. Some consider this very instrumental in the creation of the laws, but she did not share their Nobel Prize—a fact widely blamed on sexism on the part of the selection committee. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.

The sole award to Lev Landau of the 1962 Nobel Prize—for his work on the theory of liquid helium—bypassed recognition mainly due Richard Feynman's seminal work (1953-58) on the superfluid behaviour of liquid helium, which was the first successful solved model for the explanation of the phenomenon of superfluidity. Feynman's work incorporated, for the first time, Feynman diagrams and a path integral formulation, now indispensible tools-of-the-trade in condensed matter physics.

The Nobel Committee neglected the equal contributions of Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman in its 1969 Nobel Prize Award to Murray Gell-Mann solely—for his work on the classification of elementary particles and their weak interactions. In 1961, while working at the University of London, Ne'eman independently worked out—using simple Lie group ideas—the same Eightfold Way of hadrons arrangement, by grouping particles in octets, in accordance with their properties (e.g., charges, mass): the essential quark model.

In 1964, George Zweig, then a PhD student at Caltech, espoused the physical existence of aces—possessing several unorthodox attributes (essentially Gell-Mann's quarks, though regarded expressedly by the latter then only as mere theoretical shorthand construct)—at a time which was very 'anti-quark', as he suffered (academic ostracism and career path blocks) from the then-scientific confusion of 'mainstream orthodoxy..'. Despite the awardings of the 1969 Prize for contributions in the classification of elementary particles, coupled with the 1990 Prize for the development and proof of the quark model: Zweig's true dimension and side of the original contributions of the quark model story has largely gone unrecognized.

The 1974 prize was awarded to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish's pioneering research in radioastrophysics; Hewish was recognized for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. Jocelyn Bell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source which was later recognised as a pulsar. Pulsars provide scientists with the first signs of the possible existence of gravity waves. In addition, rotating binary pulsars are also found to be reliable sources for putting Einstein's relativity theories to the stringent of tests. While the astronomer Fred Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the Prize, Bell herself countered that graduate students don't win Nobel prizes—Louis-Victor de Broglie, Douglas Osheroff, Gerard 't Hooft, John Forbes Nash, Jr. and H. David Politzer (all men) are exceptions to this seeming maxim. Incidentally, another interesting, contrasting case occurred in 1978: the Nobel Physics Prize winners Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson of 1978—awarded for the chanced "detection of Cosmic microwave background radiation"—themselves initially did not comprehend the "implications and the working out of the meanings behind" their findings, and similarly had to have their discovery elucidated to them.

Fred Hoyle was denied a share of the Nobel Prize In Physics in 1983, although the winner William Alfred Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis (1946). It is possible that the somewhat unconventional grain that runs through and characterizes many of Fred Hoyle's controversial dissensions and critiquing, as well as his posited 'scientific' theories (e.g. anti-chemical evolution and cosmological steady state theories)—coupled with his criticism of the Nobel committee with respect to omitting Jocelyn Bell, was the contribution for this. Hoyle's obituary in Physics Today [4] notes that " Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler's 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997 Crafoord Prize ".

Chemistry

Dmitri Mendeleev, who originated the periodic table of the elements, never received a prize. He died in 1907, six years after the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. He came within one vote of winning the prize in 1906, but died the next year. [5]

Physiology or medicine

Sir Frederick Banting (right) was awarded a Nobel for the discovery of insulin but his parter Charles Best (left) was not

Charles Best first isolated insulin, but was excluded from the Nobel Prize in favour of his associate John Macleod. This snub so incensed Best's colleague, Frederick Banting, that he later voluntarily shared half of his 1923 Nobel Prize award money with Best.

Oswald Theodore Avery, best known for his 1944 discovery that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are composed, never did receive any Nobel Prize, although two Nobel Laureates Joshua Lederberg and Arne Tiselius unfailingly praised him and his work: as serving as a pioneering platform for further genetic research and advance.

The 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded solely to Selman Waksman for his discovery of streptomycin had omitted recognition due his co-discoverer Albert Schatz. There was a litigation brought by Schatz against Waksman over the details and credit of streptomycin's discovery. The litigation result: Schatz was awarded a substantial settlement, and, Waksman and Schatz would be officially considered co-discoverers of streptomycin.

Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who discovered, respectively, the injected and oral vaccines for polio, never received Nobel Prizes even though their discoveries enabled humankind to conquer a dreaded disease, and, lives of thousands of people had been saved since the late fifties.

Heinrich J. Matthaei broke the genetic code in 1961 with Marshall Warren Nirenberg in their poly-U experiment at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, paving the way for modern genetics; but though Nirenberg became a Nobel Laureate in 1968, Matthaei, who was responsible for experimentally obtaining the first codon (genetic code), somehow did not get to win his deserving share of the Nobel prize.

The 1962 Prize awarded to James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the structure of DNA does not recognize other major contributions. In particular, the work of Rosalind Franklin has not been given a single officially cited credit, and there is further controversy over the behaviour and actual extent of the contribution from her former colleague and collaborator Wilkins. Also the biochemist Erwin Chargaff, who discovered Chargaff's rules—which helped speed up the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA—could have been expected to share the Prize.

The 1975 Prize was awarded to David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Howard Martin Temin "for describing how tumor viruses act on the genetic material of the cell". It had been pointed out, though, in this award: Renato Dulbecco was distantly—if at all—involved in the discovery work. This award did not recognize the significant contributions of Satoshi Mizutani, Temin's Japanese postdoctoral fellow. Mizutani and Temin jointly discovered that the Rous sarcoma virus particle contained the enzyme reverse transcriptase; Mizutani was responsible for the significant experiment confirming Temin's provirus hypothesis.

Literature

Leo Tolstoy and Henrik Ibsen were never awarded the prize in literature due to the former's comments after not receiving the first award and the latter's undecorated realism which proved to be noisomely indigestible and repugnant to the then-prevailing Victorian tastes of his native Scandinavia. Tolstoy was a moral philosopher notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Ibsen was responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama—he was even dubbed "the father of modern drama"). It is said that Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after William Shakespeare. Despite spending much time in exile, living in Germany and Italy, Ibsen is considered one of the greatest Norwegian authors of all times. He is celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians. He is also considered one of the most important playwrights in world history. Another well-known authoress who shared a similar fate with Ibsen and Tolstoy—in terms of prestige and an almost poignant Nobel Prize miss—was the piquant Danish writer Karen Blixen, who wrote in a picturesque, old colonial-era charming style all her own. There were other esteemed writers also, for that matter, like popular writer Graham Greene, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer and the children's book writer Astrid Lindgren—just to mention a few—whom many felt should have landed Nobel Prizes.

Karl Gjellerup had to share his 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature with author Henrik Pontoppidan, because the Nobel Academy didn't believe his work—not well regarded by his own countrymen also—quite fitted the criteria for laureates as set forth by Alfred Nobel.

Jorge Luis Borges is another key writer of the 20th Century who was a potential laureate several times but never achieved the prize. Some considered that this is due to his unpopular political stance, in particular, his perceived support for the South American right-wing military juntas of the 1970's.

Another controversial case seemed to occur in 1986 when most Africans expected, with much African pride, Chinua Achebe—author of the seminal novel, Things Fall Apart—to land the prize. However, it had been suggested that his moral stance and racial charges on Conrad's Heart of Darkness became his bogeyman. The prize was given to Wole Soyinka, a playwright and dramatist of note from the same country as Achebe. Here too, there are some critics who claim that Soyinka writes in rigid English and his plays and poems are rarely read, let alone understood.

Peace

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Gandhi was nominated five times but never won.

Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated for it five times between 1937 and 1948. Einstein commented "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this (Gandhi) ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.". Martin Luther King, Jr. was also known to have been inspired by Gandhi's example and espousal of non-violence resistance movement in the independence struggle of India: Gandhi had also been known, though, to make—at times shocking, at times controversial—life's statements and personal philosophy bordering on extreme idealism and racial judgments. Decades later, though, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. The Nobel Committee may have tacitly acknowledged its error, however, when in 1948 (the year of Gandhi's death), it made no award, stating "there was no suitable living candidate". Similarly, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing the issue.

The Peace Prize has also drawn criticism for excluding deserving candidates such as Pope John XXIII, Steve Biko, Hélder Câmara, Raphael Lemkin and Oscar Romero.

Recent controversial exclusions

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Weinberg was missed in the award of the 1989 Nobel Prize For Medicine.

The 1989 Nobel Prize In Medicine Controversy – Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop were the only two winners acknowledged for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, a landmark study on how genes are spliced—two worthy others were passed up, viz., (1) Dominique Stehelin: Professor at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, who contends as an earlier original contributor to the above said discovery and work, and, (2) Robert Weinberg: Professor of Biology at MIT whom knowledgeable others considered also a worthy contributor who should be in the award.

The 1993 Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene splicing – Philip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts were the only two winners. However, in the opinion of several other scientists in the know, Louise T. Chow, a China-born Taiwanese researcher and accomplished woman scientist (see "Biography"), whose collaborator was Roberts, should also have won part of the prize. In 1976, as Staff Investigator, she carried out the studies of the genomic origins and structures of adenovirus transcripts leading directly to the EM discovery of RNA splicing and alternative RNA processing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1977, the year the discovery was made. Norman Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, Emeritus, at Caltech and well-known expert in electron microscopy—under whom Chow apprenticed as a graduate student—affirmed that Chow operated the electron microscope through which the splicing process was observed and was the crucial experiment 's sole designer, using techniques she herself developed in the previous two years at the lab: another classic case of the 'long-lived' neglected distinguished woman scientist—in the science honor roll.

The 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry credited winner Kary Mullis with the development of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a central technique in molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences. However others disputed that he 'invented' the technique: that, in fact, Norwegian scientist Kjell Kleppe—together with the 1968 Nobel Prize laureate H. Gobind Khorana—had an earlier and better claim (1969) to it. His co-workers at that time also refuted the suggestion that Mullis was solely responsible for the idea of using Taq polymerase in the PCR process. In addition, a book on the history of the PCR method which Paul Rabinow (an anthropologist) wrote in 1996 raised the issue of whether or not Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it. Kary also denied that HIV causes AIDS (The Duesberg Hypothesis), that humans and CFCs cause global warming and chalked up further points of controversy—with a rather bizarre, even outlandish account of having met with a 'talking glowing racoon' late one night near his cabin in the remote northern California wilds, in his 1998 essay collection Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.

The 1994 Nobel Prize In Economics to John Forbes Nash (one of the three recipients that year)—"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games"—was not without controversy, even in the Nobel committee. It was nearly not awarded, because Nash, who formulated the key concepts in 1950, had become mentally ill from 1960 to 1990. Moreover, game theory was regarded by many as abstruse and irrelevant.

The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – awarded singly to Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of prions, had caused a ceaseless stream of academic polemics ever since: as regard the actual validity extent of his work—which had also been criticized by other researchers as not yet proven.

The 1998 Nobel Prize In Medicine – awarded jointly to North american scientists, Dr Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad, for their discoveries in relation to "nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system"—was deemed by many to have omitted unfairly the deserved recognition due Dr. Salvador Moncada's fundamental, equal contributions. More than 90 Universities, Academies, and Societies, have aknowledged, to date, Dr. Moncada's priority in the discovery of the fact that nitric oxide is released by endothelial cells, thus revealing its metabolic way (more than 20,000 citations of their fundamental papers endorse his primacy in this field in the scientific community).

The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – awarded to three pioneering neuroscientists, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel, "for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system." However, many neuroscientists protested that Oleh Hornykiewicz, who helped pioneer the dopamine replacement treatment for Parkinson's disease, was left out of the prize, and claimed that Hornykiewicz's research provided a foundation for some of the scientific progress credited to the three scientists.

The 2000 Nobel Prize In Chemistry – "For the Discovery and Development of Conductive polymers" [6] recognized passive high-conductivity in oxidized iodine-doped polyacetylene black and related materials (reported in 1977) as well as determining conduction mechanisms and developing devices, especially batteries. The citation alleges this work led to present-day "active" devices, where a voltage or current controls electron flow.

Subsequently, a letter to New Scientist pointed out that such an organic polymer electronic device was reported in a major journal (Science) [7] three years before the Nobel prize winner's discovery. Further, the "ON" state of this device showed almost metallic conductivity. Moreover, the citation itself is factually incorrect. In a series of papers 14 years before the Noble-prize-winning discovery, Weiss and coworkers in Australia had reported [8] equivalent high electrical conductivity in an almost identical compound-- oxidized, iodine-doped polypyrrole black. Eventually, the Australian group achieved resistances as low as .03 ohm/cm [9][10]. This is roughly equivalent to present-day efforts. Likewise, this award ignored the much earlier discovery of highly-conductive organic Charge transfer complexes. Some of these are even superconductive.

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry award – to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules was felt by some to have bypassed also recognition due the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas from the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Critics claimed that Koichi's soft laser desorption (SLD) technique is not actually used currently for biomolecules analysis, whereas the more sensitive Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization (MALDI) method of the duo German scientists is widely used in mass spectrometry research laboratories. However, a valid counterargument that has been put across is that: in terms of first breakthrough and citation recognition of work, Koichi Tanaka's invention does claim success and priority over that of the (MALDI) work of the German sicentists.

The 2003 Nobel Prize In Medicine and Physiology – awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. It has two independent controversial exclusions:

Raymond Damadian first reported that NMR could distinguish in vitro between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues on the basis of different proton relaxation times. He later translated this into the first human MRI scan, but used a dead-end methodology. Meanwhile, Damadian's original report prompted Lauterbur to develop NMR into the presently-used method of generating MRI images. Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers protesting his exclusion from the award. Many researchers felt that Damadian's work deserved at least equal credit. Critics have also suggested that Damadian's creationist views were the reason for the exclusion.

Herman Y. Carr both pioneered the present NMR gradient technique and demonstrated rudimentary MRI imaging in the 1950's, based on it. The Nobel prize winners had almost certainly seen Carr's work, but did not cite it. Consequently, the prize committee very likely did not become cognizant of Carr's discoveries, a situation likely abetted further by the unprecedented, high profile, drawn out remonstrances of Damadian - in defense of his pioneering work.

The 2004 Nobel Prize In Physics – Sidney R. Coleman, an eminent theoretical physicist, was given the miss in this year's award, felt by many to be a shame. Instead, H. David Politzer alone—a graduate student of Sidney R. Coleman—was crowned one of the winners. Politzer was recognized for his work in quantum chromodynamics, a field in which Coleman was deeply involved and long acknowledged by all.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of RNA interference. Many of the discoveries credited by the Nobel committee to Fire and Mello, who studied RNA interference in C. elegans, had been previously studied by plant biologists, and it has been suggested that at least one plant biologist who was a pioneer in this field, such as David Baulcombe, should have also been awarded a share of the prize.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by John C. Mather and George F. Smoot (leaders of the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite experiment) "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR).". However, the Prize was thought by some to have precluded deserved recognition due an earlier original discoverer of anistropy of the CMBR. In July 1983 an experiment Relikt, launched aboard the Prognoz-9 satellite, studied cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) via one frequency alone. In January of 1992, Andrei A. Brukhanov was known to have first presented a seminar at Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, where he reported on the discovery of anistropy of CMBR. The published results can be found in journals Soviet Astronomy Letters as well as the Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society.

Controversial recipients

Physicist Philipp Lenard would later become an adviser to Hitler.

Philipp Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize In Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties. An advisor to Adolf Hitler, Lenard became Chief of Aryan Physics under the Nazis. He propagated the idea that there is a race element in science (i.e.,'English science', 'German Science', 'Jewish Science'), referring to Albert Einstein's theories as "the Jewish fraud" of relativity. In his old age, Lenard volunteered to lead a campaign against Jewish science.

Cordell Hull was awarded the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1945 in recognition of his efforts for peace and understanding in the Western Hemisphere, his trade agreements, and his work to establish the United Nations. Hull was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of State during the SS St. Louis Crisis. The St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1939 carrying over 950 Jewish refugees, mostly wealthy, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II. The ship's voyage caused great controversy in the United States: Initially President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed modest willingness to take in some of those on board, but vehement opposition by Hull and from Southern Democrats—some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred. On 4 June 1939 Roosevelt issued an order to deny entry to the ship, which was waiting in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. The passengers began negotiations with the Cuban government, but those broke down at the last minute. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers died in Nazi concentration camps.

Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his development of prefrontal leucotomy. In the United States, a modified version of this procedure, often referred to as the "ice pick lobotomy", was instituted in a highly unethical manner, and was performed somewhat indiscriminately. The procedure has fallen into disrepute and was later prohibited in several countries.

Linus Pauling is the only person ever to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes: Chemistry in 1954, and Peace in 1962. His claims about large-dose vitamin C treatments, especially as cancer therapy, were treated with extreme skepticism by the medical community, and his work was regarded as outright quackery by his critics. His activism against nuclear testing, which led to his Peace Prize, caused his critics in the U.S. to see him as a naïve propagandist for Communism.

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Shockley, co-winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize, espoused eugenics.

William Bradford Shockley was one of the winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics award for the transistor. There was a well-documented controversy over his win—backed up by corroborating accounts from his colleagues (the other two Nobelists in the Prize) and historical facts—which critics characterized as due mainly to Shockley's then-directorship position and self-promotion efforts (his own self-designed 'transistor' did not work at all). It was noted that a change seemed to have come over Shockley's character soon after the Nobel award. Later, he strongly and seriously espoused eugenics, regarding his published works on this topic as the most important work of his career. His ideas are largely based on the research of Cyril Burt, whose research was later generally accepted to be fraudulent. He is the only Nobel Laureate who publicly admitted to donating sperm to Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by eugenicist Robert Klark Graham in the hopes of passing down humans' best genes.

The United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work on the Vietnam Peace Accords, despite having instituted the secret 1969–1975 campaign of carpet bombing against Cambodia which killed or wounded at least 200,000 (and possibly up to 800,000) people.

Karl von Frisch shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 involving the explanation of the "dance language" of bees. However, much controversy was engendered over the years due to the lack of direct scientific proofs of the waggle dance of the bees as exactly worded, postulated by Karl von Frisch. Though the controversy was finally put to rest by a team of researchers from Rothamsted Research in 2005—who tracked the bees by radar as they flew to a food source—the experimental results turn out not to exactly support Karl von Frisch's original formulation, but, in fact support part of his opponent Adrian Wenner's theorythat bees are basically guided to the food source by odor; after the general direction and distance (specific and relative only to the transmitting bees) had been communicated (a still unknown mysterious mechanism) via the dance—as originally postulated.

David Baltimore, who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was implicated in a landmark scientific fraud scandal (with Howard Temin and James Dewey Watson pinning the fault and error on him): involving a convoluted, tortured case over fabricated data of a 1986 scientific paper on immunology with Thereza Imanishi-Kari and othersthat till today is still debated: it also succeeded, for the first time, in sending a disquiet among many eminent and knowing scientists; as to how scientific policing, at a high level, by not the best scientifically qualified people proper—in the assessment of many reputable scientists—somehow allowed into a position of such overriding institutional power and influence, has devolved to a slew of unnecessary contretemps, etiolated muddles and civic costs from what it clearly and simply is. Another comparable famous dispute is the HIV & AIDS Priority Controversy Case: Robert Gallo vs Luc Montagnier.

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the co-recipient (together with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases"—work on kuru, the first prion disease discovered—was charged with child molestation in April 1996, based on incriminating entries in his laboratory entries, statements from a victim, and his own admission. He pleaded guilty in 1997 and, under a plea bargain, was given a 19-month incarceration sentence.

Mikhail Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his somewhat non-descript "leading role in the peace process." The actions of Gorbachev in the years preceding the award led to disintegration of USSR, throwing the country into decade-long chaos and indirectly causing a number of military conflicts in the former Soviet Bloc, such as those in Chechnya and Yugoslavia. To date, Gorbachev is viewed by many residents of the former Soviet Union as having done more harm than good to the region—if not the world. He tried to run for President of Russia in 1996 but failed to receive more than 1% of the popular vote.

Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin were winners of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Yassar Arafat's opponents often described him as an unrepentant terrorist with a long legacy of promoting terrorism and violence. In fact, Kaare Kristiansen, a Norwegian, was a member of the Nobel Committee who chose to resign in 1994 to protest the awarding of a Nobel "Peace Prize" to Yasser Arafat, whom he factually labeled a "terrorist" (whose Fatah movement began as a terrorist organization). Also, Menachem Begin, winner of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize had been involved in violent Irgun activities prior to Israel's independence; his co-winner, Anwar Sadat, had of course launched a war of aggression against Israel in 1973, the Yom Kippur War.

Günter Grass, winner of Prize In Literature in 1999, stated for the first time that he had been conscripted to the Waffen-SS in 1944, and, as a teenager, served full-term with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg until Germany's surrender. Grass kept this secret for more than 60 years. He had consistently and loyally exhorted his German compatriots to come clean with their Nazi past over the years. The incidence managed to raise doubts that impugned on his character's integrity and real intentions.

The United Nations and Kofi Annan received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world". Both the UN and Annan, who in 1994 was Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, have been criticized for not preventing the Tutsi genocide that meant the death of close to 1 million people in the scope of just a few weeks. Further, peacekeeper sex scandals and the corrupt Oil for Food program in Iraq have tarnished this award.

Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmentalist and the first African woman to win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, caused controversy with her reported expressed conviction that HIV was created by "evil scientists" or "agents" from developed nations to decimate the black race or African population—on the one hand, as reported and confirmed by newspapers staff, the news media all over, and, on the other hand, she claimed her expression had all been taken out of context.

Elfriede Jelinek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature: though for the authoress, the real, artistic value of her work was suddenly categorized as morally 'out', untowardly 'confusing', 'unreadable', 'obtuse', subjected to summary negations, widely called into question—as soon as the award became publicly announced, and, it still engenders much heady debates, even vilification from the highest quarters. There had never been quite a Nobel Literature year like it.In 2005, it even caused one member of the the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund, to leave the Academy, in protest against the choice of recipient of the prize: charging Jelinek's work as "chaotic and pornographic".

Orhan Pamuk received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and become the first Turkish person and writer who has been nominated and won a Nobel Prize but in Turkish public opinion it is widely believed that Pamuk won the prize due to his highly criticized declaration about the Armenian Genocide debate to a Swiss newspaper and the criminal case which was held against him. However some other writers and academicians said Orhan Pamuk deserved the Nobel Prize for his literature skills. When Orhan Pamuk has won the prize The Academy's announcement for him was "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, Pamuk has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".

Laureates that declined the prize

• Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Literature prize in 1964, stating that he had always refused official honors.
• Lê Ðức Thọ declined the 1973 Peace prize—jointly awarded to him and Henry Kissinger (see above)—on the stated grounds that his country of Vietnam was not yet at peace (Vietnam War).

Laureates that were forced to decline the prize

• Boris Pasternak at first accepted the Literature prize in 1958, but was later caused by the authorities in the USSR to decline the prize.
• Richard Kuhn, Adolf Butenandt and Gerhard Domagk.
• Although Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn accepted the Literature prize in 1970, he decided not to go to Stockholm to receive it for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return. He finally did receive it however, in December 1974, after he was exiled from the USSR.
• Otto Heinrich Warburg, the recipient of the 1931 Medicine laureate, for his research on the respiration of cells, was selected for a second Nobel Prize in 1944 but was not allowed to accept the prizedue to the policies of the German government at the time.

Recipients who did not receive their award in person

Carl von Ossietzky, the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize winner—was at first required by the Nazi government to decline the Nobel Prize, a demand that Ossietzky did not honor, and then was practically 'prevented' by the same government from going to Olso personally to accept the Nobel Prize (kept under surveillance actually—a virtual 'house arrest'—in a civilian hospital until his demise in 1938), though the German Propaganda Ministry was known to have publicly declared Ossietzky's total freedom to go to Norway to accept the award. After this incident—in 1937—the German government decreed that in the future no German could accept any Nobel Prize.

Andrei Sakharov, the first Soviet Citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1975, was not allowed to receive or personally travel to Oslo to accept the prize. He was described as "a Judas" and a "laboratory rat of the West" by the Soviet authorities. His wife, Elena Bonner, who was in Italy for medical treatment, received the prize in her husband's stead and presented the Nobel Prize acceptance speech by proxy.

Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize but was not allowed to make any formal acceptance speech or statement of any kind to that effect, nor leave Myanmar (Burma) to receive the Prize. Her sons Alexander and Kim accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf.

Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature but declined to go in person to Stockholm to receive the Prize, citing severe social phobia and mental illness. She made a video instead and wrote out the speech text to be read out in lieu.

Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, but was unable to attend the ceremonies owing to poor health. He, too, delivered his controversial, 'all-defying' speech via video.

External links

• BBC article on Nobel Peace Prize controversies
• CNN overview of Nobel prizes
• Declined papers that won Nobel prizes
• Nobel Foundation offical site