The Nobel Prize

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00:00:06.19 00:00:10.06 So, my name is Erling Norrby.
00:00:10.07 00:00:12.19 I have a background in the field of medicine.
00:00:12.20 00:00:16.25 I'm also a Professor of Virology at the Karolinska Institute for 25 years.
00:00:16.26 00:00:21.01 And then I moved to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
00:00:21.02 00:00:23.13 where I serve as the so-called Permanent Secretary,
00:00:23.14 00:00:27.28 so I have the special title of being the former Permanent Secretary.
00:00:27.29 00:00:31.12 I had my office at the Center for the Institute for Science,
00:00:31.13 00:00:34.15 which tells you that I have become more and more interested
00:00:34.16 00:00:41.02 in how does science evolve. And in studying that, I've taken advantage
00:00:41.03 00:00:42.24 of absolutely unique material that we have
00:00:42.25 00:00:46.13 at both the Karolinska Institute and at the Royal Swedish Academy
00:00:46.14 00:00:50.10 of Sciences, and these are the archives of the Nobel prizes.
00:00:50.11 00:00:56.04 Now the Nobel prizes have been distributed for more than a hundred years.
00:00:56.05 00:01:00.28 And it's by far the most prestigious prize that there is in science.
00:01:00.29 00:01:06.22 And the reason for that is that one has developed a very efficient technique
00:01:06.23 00:01:09.06 to select Nobel prize laureates.
00:01:09.07 00:01:14.03 And what I will tell you first will be how do we go about it,
00:01:14.04 00:01:16.17 but maybe we should start actually
00:01:16.18 00:01:23.00 with the will that Alfred Nobel wrote in 1895.
00:01:23.01 00:01:25.25 and I have just extracted a part of that will
00:01:25.26 00:01:30.15 in order to emphasize some of the specifications that he gave.
00:01:30.16 00:01:33.18 And you can see from this text here
00:01:33.19 00:01:37.26 that there should be... one prize should be given in the field of physics.
00:01:37.27 00:01:45.09 And that should be for the most important discovery or invention.
00:01:45.10 00:01:48.02 And then there should be another prize in chemistry,
00:01:48.03 00:01:51.16 and that should be for a discovery or an improvement.
00:01:51.17 00:01:57.06 And the third prize in natural sciences is to physiology or medicine
00:01:57.07 00:02:00.14 and that can only be given for a discovery.
00:02:00.15 00:02:06.08 So we have to reflect very carefully on what is a discovery, and that is an ongoing debate
00:02:06.09 00:02:09.18 even a hundred years after the first prizes.
00:02:09.19 00:02:16.10 In Nobel's will, it specified who is going to be responsible
00:02:16.11 00:02:19.13 for selecting the prize recipients.
00:02:19.14 00:02:22.20 The so-called Nobel Institutes.
00:02:22.21 00:02:28.01 So there are four bodies that are responsible for selecting the prize recipients.
00:02:28.02 00:02:29.14 Those are the prize-giving institutions.
00:02:29.15 00:02:34.01 The first institution is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
00:02:34.02 00:02:38.13 which is responsible for both the prize in Physics and in Chemistry.
00:02:38.14 00:02:45.08 And then the Karolinska Institute is responsible for the prize in Physiology or Medicine.
00:02:45.09 00:02:51.08 And the Swedish Academy of Literature is responsible for the prize in Literature.
00:02:51.09 00:02:54.16 And there is also a Peace prize, and that is given by a committee
00:02:54.17 00:02:59.12 selected by the House of Parliament in Norway.
00:02:59.13 00:03:01.23 And it's a 5 member committee.
00:03:01.24 00:03:06.07 In order to implement Nobel's will,
00:03:06.08 00:03:10.07 which actually took quite some time. He died in 1896,
00:03:10.08 00:03:14.28 and it wasn't until 1900 that one could start giving Nobel prizes.
00:03:14.29 00:03:19.18 The reason was there was not a formal body that could receive the money
00:03:19.19 00:03:20.22 or take care of the money.
00:03:20.23 00:03:25.05 And therefore one created something called the Nobel Foundation.
00:03:25.06 00:03:30.00 The Nobel Foundation is not actually in the will,
00:03:30.01 00:03:33.16 but it serves a very important, or several important functions
00:03:33.17 00:03:35.10 for the prize giving institutions.
00:03:35.11 00:03:37.24 One, it is of course to take care of the money
00:03:37.25 00:03:44.20 and secure that the money is well cared for and that one can keep the prize at a good level.
00:03:44.21 00:03:49.00 The other is for legal aspects.
00:03:49.01 00:03:53.02 So the Nobel Foundation is responsible for making sure that the legality
00:03:53.03 00:03:57.00 of the way the work is done is correct.
00:03:57.01 00:04:01.05 The third is that for practical reason the Nobel Foundation arranges the prize ceremony,
00:04:01.06 00:04:06.29 in Stockholm which includes all prize recipients except the Peace prize of course,
00:04:07.00 00:04:09.08 which has its own ceremony in Oslo.
00:04:09.09 00:04:15.22 So these are the bodies, and how do these different bodies go about selecting the members.
00:04:15.23 00:04:19.22 In order to understand that, we need to look at something I call the Nobel Year.
00:04:19.23 00:04:28.05 And this is a comprehensive process that has evolved over many, many years,
00:04:28.06 00:04:32.03 but there are certain absolute specifications that need to be addressed.
00:04:32.04 00:04:34.13 The first is that in order to be considered for a Nobel prize,
00:04:34.14 00:04:36.12 you have to be nominated for the prize.
00:04:36.13 00:04:43.01 And only invited people can nominate someone for the prize.
00:04:43.02 00:04:48.09 And if you see in this clock the yellow blurbs that we call them,
00:04:48.10 00:04:54.08 they illustrate that first we select who is going to invite to give...
00:04:54.09 00:04:57.13 to potentially give a recommendation for a prize,
00:04:57.14 00:05:01.04 and then this is sent out.
00:05:01.05 00:05:08.05 And the red circle here illustrates that the nominations should be in before January 31st
00:05:08.06 00:05:11.00 in the year when the prize is going to be given.
00:05:11.01 00:05:18.04 And over all these years, of course there have been variations in the number of invitations sent out,
00:05:18.05 00:05:22.22 and the number of nominations, but at the present time,
00:05:22.23 00:05:30.10 we send out invitations to nominate to more than two to three thousand individuals or organizations,
00:05:30.11 00:05:35.18 and we get overall three, four, sometimes even five hundred nominations,
00:05:35.19 00:05:38.04 so it is a huge material to manage.
00:05:38.05 00:05:45.09 Once all the nominations are in, then of course the Nobel Committee starts to do its work.
00:05:45.10 00:05:49.26 What the committee... Nobel committees have sat down almost since the very beginning
00:05:49.27 00:05:57.11 is to make in depth reviews, very careful reviews of a certain proposal.
00:05:57.12 00:06:03.29 and then reviews are prepared during the summer, and in August each year,
00:06:04.00 00:06:10.06 then the committee compiles all the different reviews.
00:06:10.07 00:06:16.27 and starts to really make further prioritization to see which are the real runner's up.
00:06:16.28 00:06:21.08 And in September this discussion goes on
00:06:21.09 00:06:25.29 and hopefully then the committee comes to an agreement that this year we would like
00:06:26.00 00:06:28.13 to propose this particular candidate.
00:06:28.14 00:06:33.03 Most often this candidate had been discussed for many years before that.
00:06:33.04 00:06:39.28 The whole process... it is important that one can consolidate this and one can make repeated reviews.
00:06:39.29 00:06:43.24 So what is in the Nobel Archives that make it so interesting?
00:06:43.25 00:06:48.19 That is first of all, nominations, and they can be in many different languages.
00:06:48.20 00:06:53.07 Could be in Spanish, or in French or in German or whatever.
00:06:53.08 00:07:02.24 And then the reviews are in Swedish, and this material is a unique, real time evaluation of science.
00:07:02.25 00:07:05.21 The way one looked at science at that particular time.
00:07:05.22 00:07:12.00 And then there is one more thing to the archives, and that is when I started to understand
00:07:12.01 00:07:13.22 that they were interesting material.
00:07:13.23 00:07:17.09 One decided that there should be fifty year secrecy.
00:07:17.10 00:07:23.00 So we are not allowed to look at the material until fifty years pass.
00:07:23.01 00:07:25.21 But after that, they are available for scholarly work.
00:07:25.22 00:07:30.27 It's not for journalists to go in there just out of curiosity, but for scholarly work.
00:07:30.28 00:07:35.20 And I have come to be involved in using this unique material
00:07:35.21 00:07:38.13 and the more I work with this material,
00:07:38.14 00:07:44.00 the more impressed I have been of what a unique kind of material it is.
00:07:44.01 00:07:54.01 It started way back in 2005. It so happened that Dr. Stan Prusiner here at UCSF
00:07:54.02 00:07:57.11 who has his own Nobel Prize for his discovery of prions,
00:07:57.12 00:08:04.07 he and I were both interested in understanding the Nobel prize of 1954
00:08:04.08 00:08:07.06 to Thomas Weller, Frederick Robbins and John Enders.
00:08:07.07 00:08:09.21 And this is a very important Nobel Prize.
00:08:09.22 00:08:14.29 They would show that poliovirus can grow in any kind of cells.
00:08:15.00 00:08:22.14 And before that the dogma was that poliovirus can only replicate in nerve cells.
00:08:22.15 00:08:28.05 And because they could show this, all of a sudden it became possible to make a vaccine against polio.
00:08:28.06 00:08:35.24 And that was a most dramatic achievement because during the first half of the 20th century
00:08:35.25 00:08:44.11 polio was the number one disease that was a scare in society, and that is forgotten today
00:08:44.12 00:08:48.18 because we have been so successful in vaccinating and removing the disease.
00:08:48.19 00:08:52.11 But the question here was why did the Nobel committee rush it?
00:08:52.12 00:08:56.09 Why didn't they wait and include Jonas Salk in the prize?
00:08:56.10 00:09:04.09 We could really get some insight into that and could write a rather interesting evaluation
00:09:04.10 00:09:08.04 of the way one discussed this in the Nobel committee.
00:09:08.05 00:09:14.06 And we could publish this in a regular scientific journal.
00:09:14.07 00:09:19.18 At that stage I realized that maybe one could actually turn it into a book,
00:09:19.19 00:09:25.07 and that led to that in 2010, I published a book on Nobel Prizes and Life Sciences.
00:09:25.08 00:09:30.26 So it includes both the background material about Alfred Nobel,
00:09:30.27 00:09:38.22 about how the will came about, about how... the formal aspects of the prize.
00:09:38.23 00:09:44.01 It discusses phenomena like serendipity and then the field that I mention there
00:09:44.02 00:09:53.19 It also discusses nucleic acids, which are of course a very central field when it comes to changes in attitude.
00:09:53.20 00:09:56.26 And I call that chapter, "A Drama in Five Acts".
00:09:56.27 00:10:01.03 And I am not going to go into any detail on that,
00:10:01.04 00:10:05.25 but just to mention that a part of this was a very careful evaluation of Oswald Avery
00:10:05.26 00:10:13.04 and his... the discussion about him in the Nobel Prize context.
00:10:13.05 00:10:16.11 This is a person who should have received a Nobel Prize, but who never did.
00:10:16.12 00:10:18.25 And there are several reasons for that.
00:10:18.26 00:10:27.29 He was way ahead of his time when he in 1944 published that if you extracted DNA out of Pneumococcus,
00:10:28.00 00:10:32.00 you could change the properties of other Pneumococcus by simply transferring DNA.
00:10:32.01 00:10:35.06 And it was not believed by the scientific community,
00:10:35.07 00:10:41.09 and a lot of antagonists even in his own institution at the Rockefeller Institute as it was called,
00:10:41.10 00:10:42.17 and then later on Rockefeller University.
00:10:42.18 00:10:51.04 But he was discussed carefully. In fact the year after he died there was a posthumous nomination of him
00:10:51.05 00:10:54.06 and that was evaluated, for a prize in Chemistry,
00:10:54.07 00:10:57.26 that was evaluated by the Swedish Nobel laureate Arne Tiselius,
00:10:57.27 00:11:01.04 and he said that had this material been available
00:11:01.05 00:11:03.18 before, and had he been alive, he should have had a Nobel prize.
00:11:03.19 00:11:11.09 So this is an example of a name that should have been in the list of Nobel laureates, but it's not there.
00:11:11.10 00:11:19.10 Now inspired by this, in the first book I continued to review the archives.
00:11:19.11 00:11:22.11 Now this new book, which is 50% larger than the previous one,
00:11:22.12 00:11:28.03 it discusses mostly prizes between 1960 and 62.
00:11:28.04 00:11:31.27 And these are very important years of course.
00:11:31.28 00:11:40.09 There was the very important prize in immunology in 1960 for so-called induced tolerance.
00:11:40.10 00:11:47.03 That is, that our immune system must be of the kind that it does not react against our own cells.
00:11:47.04 00:11:52.05 And therefore during the embryonic development,
00:11:52.06 00:11:58.02 the immune system, the cells that can react with our own body are obliterated.
00:11:58.03 00:12:03.24 And it's a very important mechanism. This is interesting to discuss, Burnet and Medawar,
00:12:03.25 00:12:08.10 because Burnet was a virologist. He was a dominating virologist of his generation.
00:12:08.11 00:12:16.04 And the committee discussed this from 1948 and onward and said the Nobel prize should be given to Burnet.
00:12:16.05 00:12:22.08 He is such an outstanding virologist, but couldn't really find a good discovery among all the things that he had discovered.
00:12:22.09 00:12:30.21 And therefore, but Burnet was also a fantastic life science philosopher,
00:12:30.22 00:12:34.24 and he speculated about the defense mechanism, the immune defense mechanism.
00:12:34.25 00:12:39.22 And he postulated that such a phenomenon of tolerance must exist.
00:12:39.23 00:12:44.18 And therefore in 1960, the Nobel committee, on its own initiative,
00:12:44.19 00:12:47.23 combined Burnet who was a virologist,
00:12:47.24 00:12:51.15 but had postulated that you could induce this tolerance,
00:12:51.16 00:12:56.08 and Medawar who had proven that in various experiments with his collaborators.
00:12:56.09 00:13:01.26 These two, Peter Medawar and Macfarlane Burnet are two giants in science.
00:13:01.27 00:13:03.24 Really statesmen of science.
00:13:03.25 00:13:07.06 And they influenced science in many different ways,
00:13:07.07 00:13:11.12 not the least through the fantastic books that they have written.
00:13:11.13 00:13:16.22 And I wanted to share with you this picture because it is quite a historical picture.
00:13:16.23 00:13:20.27 The man in the middle here is Lawrence Bragg.
00:13:20.28 00:13:23.25 He is the youngest Nobel laureate ever.
00:13:23.26 00:13:31.27 He got the Nobel prize, together with his father when he was 25 years old.
00:13:31.28 00:13:34.29 And in Medicine the youngest one is actually 32 years.
00:13:35.00 00:13:40.19 But what makes this picture unique is that this was taken in 1943,
00:13:40.20 00:13:43.08 in the middle of World War II.
00:13:43.09 00:13:46.13 Bragg was representing something called the British Council,
00:13:46.14 00:13:51.07 and that was to further cultural contacts between the different countries in Europe.
00:13:51.08 00:13:55.26 But there wasn't very many countries that he could contact, but Sweden was one of them
00:13:55.27 00:13:59.06 because Sweden managed to stay out of the Second World War.
00:13:59.07 00:14:04.17 So here Bragg flies in to Stockholm and visits Uppsala
00:14:04.18 00:14:07.15 and the people you see if you look from the left to the right are
00:14:07.16 00:14:14.15 all these major actors, The Svedberg, the Nobel laureate in 1926,
00:14:14.16 00:14:17.19 Arne Fredga, who was a member for a long, long time,
00:14:17.20 00:14:19.15 Arne Tiselius, the Nobel laureate, 1948,
00:14:19.16 00:14:28.01 and Gunnar Hagg to the right of Bragg, and then there's also a physicist Axel Lindh, who was there.
00:14:28.02 00:14:34.05 But it's nice to reflect on that fact that this is just 1943.
00:14:34.06 00:14:39.07 Now Bragg is a very, very central person to our story.
00:14:39.08 00:14:44.15 And the story has to do with what happened in 1962.
00:14:44.16 00:14:48.27 But then, as you probably all know, in 1953
00:14:48.28 00:14:54.24 Watson and Crick published the double helix structure of DNA.
00:14:54.25 00:14:58.12 And that was published on April 28th that year.
00:14:58.13 00:15:04.09 One would think then that this is the number one discovery of the previous century.
00:15:04.10 00:15:08.18 That this would be immediately taken up by the scientific community,
00:15:08.19 00:15:13.05 processed and really interpreted, and integrated in the science of the day.
00:15:13.06 00:15:21.05 But the step that was to be taken, namely to conclude that DNA is the information carrying molecule
00:15:21.06 00:15:23.25 was a very major step and it took time.
00:15:23.26 00:15:32.19 And this is reflected in a quite surprising phenomenon, namely that it took until 1960
00:15:32.20 00:15:35.07 before there was even a nomination for a prize
00:15:35.08 00:15:40.02 to Watson and Crick. And the one person who took the initiative of that was Bragg.
00:15:40.03 00:15:47.16 It was Bragg who was responsible for the Cavendish Laboratory and he knew both what was going on
00:15:47.17 00:15:52.13 in the Watson and Crick discovery, but also the protein stuff that was done in Cavendish.
00:15:52.14 00:15:59.15 And to be tactical, the way Bragg did this, he nominated the protein crystallographer, Perutz,
00:15:59.16 00:16:05.14 and Kendrew and actually also another crystallographer, Hodgkin, for a prize in Physics.
00:16:05.15 00:16:12.05 And then he nominated Watson and Crick, and since he knew what a complicated story,
00:16:12.06 00:16:15.26 he also included Wilkins. And so they were nominated for a prize in Chemistry.
00:16:15.27 00:16:21.19 The Physics committee immediately said no, this is not our responsibility,
00:16:21.20 00:16:25.27 so the Chemistry committee have to consider both these nominations.
00:16:25.28 00:16:33.19 And that led to long discussions and followed up through the years, you can see the number of nominations here.
00:16:33.20 00:16:36.05 Notice that most of the nominations are for Watson and Crick.
00:16:36.06 00:16:38.14 But some nominations also include Wilkins,
00:16:38.15 00:16:42.26 and that is because of a long story in itself.
00:16:42.27 00:16:48.18 So, the prizes were awarded in 1962, and Wilkins was included.
00:16:48.19 00:16:51.07 Here you can see Crick receiving the prize.
00:16:51.08 00:16:55.11 Watson stands behind him, and Wilkins further back.
00:16:55.12 00:16:58.03 And to the left are Perutz and Kendrew.
00:16:58.04 00:17:07.29 This was a year of scientific giants, and a lot can be said about these particular prizes.
00:17:08.00 00:17:14.10 It is striking that when these three recipients, Crick, Watson and Wilkins were going to give their Nobel lectures
00:17:14.11 00:17:18.23 Crick certainly did not talk about the structure of DNA.
00:17:18.24 00:17:20.10 He talked about the genetic code
00:17:20.11 00:17:25.29 because immense things had happened in these years between '53 and '62.
00:17:26.00 00:17:31.06 Watson spoke about the importance of RNA, not about the DNA double helix.
00:17:31.07 00:17:35.09 Wilkins was the only one that talked about the structure of DNA.
00:17:35.10 00:17:40.07 Jim Watson when he received the Nobel prize,
00:17:40.08 00:17:50.05 was 34 years old and he is the third youngest among those who received the prize in physiology or medicine.
00:17:50.06 00:17:55.14 The youngest is Banting who received the prize for discovering insulin.
00:17:55.15 00:17:58.29 And then Josh Lederberg was 33.
00:17:59.00 00:18:03.22 But Watson was 34, and being in good health,
00:18:03.23 00:18:07.25 he could re-visit Sweden in 2012
00:18:07.26 00:18:14.16 to celebrate his 50 year anniversary of receiving the Nobel prize.
00:18:14.17 00:18:19.27 And here he is on stage with Matt Ridley, who is interviewing him and asking him
00:18:19.28 00:18:26.23 what happened in the morning of February 28, 1953
00:18:26.24 00:18:31.17 when you were the first one who understood the structure of DNA.
00:18:31.18 00:18:34.26 And that is history alive.

This Talk

Speaker: Erling Norrby

Audience:

General Public
Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: November 2013

Talk Overview

The Nobel Prize is the most prestigious award in all of science. The prize, given out as directed from Alfred Nobel’s will, is given in the fields of natural sciences in physics (a discovery or an invention), in chemistry (a discovery or an improvement) and in physiology or medicine (a discovery). In his talk, Erling Norrby describes the Nobel Prize selection process, and tells us stories he has learned from researching nominations, reviews, and notes from the Nobel Archives, which are kept secret for 50 years after the awards are made.

Speaker Bio

Erling Norrby

Erling Norrby was a professor of Virology for 25 years at the Karolinska Institute, the School of Medicine in Stockholm, and during these years he was heavily involved in the selection process for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He then served as Permanent Secretary at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for six… Continue Reading