Nobel scandals of all time

The Royal Academy of Sciences’ e-mail fad may be embarrassing, but it easily stands up to ill-mannered prime ministers, infidelity affairs and the tribute to the father of lobotomy.

Here is the list of 120 years of Nobel scandals – big and small.

1901: Wrong Writer Won!

The French poet Sully Prudhomme (1839–1907) is awarded the first Nobel Prize in Literature. 42 Swedish cultural figures, including August Strindberg and Anders Zorn, rage and attack the Swedish Academy. They believe that Prudhomme is inferior and that the award should have gone to the more innovative Russian Lev Tolstoy instead. In the rearview mirror, it is easy to see that team Strindberg was right: Tolstoy is today a giant in literary history, while Prudhomme is rather forgotten.

1908: Rudolf Who?

The German philosopher Rudolf Eucken receives the literature prize. The only problem is that no one has heard of him. Later it turns out that the prize winner was a compromise between two rival phalanxes within the Swedish Academy – a compromise that no one wanted.

1911: Curie turns scandal into success

Marie Curie is awarded a chemistry prize. But just before the award ceremony, it is discovered that she has been flirting with a married colleague, Paul Langevin. The scorned wife gossips to the French press, who write frantically. The totally male-dominated Academy of Sciences urges Curie to stay at home. She comes anyway – and makes a smash hit.

1919: Allies rage

The chemistry prize goes to the German Fritz Haber for a large-scale method of producing ammonia from the nitrogen and hydrogen of the air. Ammonia is an important component of fertilizers, the very foundation of modern agriculture. So far so good. But the same Haber had also developed combat gases during the First World War, something that causes the allied countries to go through the roof over the price.

1936: Hitler rages

The German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky is awarded the peace prize. In 1931 he had been sentenced to prison for treason after protesting Germany’s rearmament, but was pardoned after international protests. When the Nazis then came to power, he was put in a concentration camp.

The peace prize infuriates Adolf Hitler. He forbids all Germans to accept Nobel Prizes, and Ossietzky’s books are burned at the stake. Ossietzky dies two years later in the aftermath of his camp stay.

1949: Lobotomy is rewarded

The Portuguese António Egaz Moniz receives the medicine prize for the “discovery” of lobotomy, a treatment method that later ended up on the smelliest rubbish heap of medical science.

1958: Dictatorship denies prize

Boris Pasternak, the man behind “Doctor Zhivago”, receives the literary prize, but is forced to decline by the former Soviet Union. Only in 1988 could “Doctor Zhivago” be printed in Pasternak’s homeland.

1964: Too nice for the Nobel?

The French writer Jean Paul Sartre voluntarily declines the literature prize. However, rumors claim that he later regretted it and wanted the prize money, which he did not get.

1970: Cowardly, says Moberg

The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn considers himself forced to decline the Nobel Prize – for fear of not being allowed to return to the Soviet Union if he came to Sweden. In a well-known TV debate, Vilhelm Moberg attacks Prime Minister Olof Palme and accuses the government of having acted cowardly.

1973: Enemies may divide

The two mortal enemies Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s negotiator Le Duc Tho share the peace prize. The latter declines.

1974: Equal among winners

Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson will share the literature prize. Embarrassingly, they are both members of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. A heated argument breaks out.

2003: Bitter struggle

The American Raymond Damadian believes that he too should have been praised for the discovery of the magnetic resonance camera, which was awarded that year’s medicine prize. But instead of digging into his pocket, he buys full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. The ads, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, consist of an image of an upside-down Nobel medal with the text: “The shameful wrong must be righted”.

2003: Call, Call!

The then Prime Minister Göran Persson is talking on his mobile phone – in the middle of the finest dinner of them all. Persson later defended himself by saying that he had to. Badly! said style expert Magdalena Ribbing.

2007: Another breach of etiquette

Persson’s successor as prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, makes the mistake of licking his fingers during dinner. Ooops! In the years since, he takes care of himself and keeps his hands where they should be.

2011: Laureate was dead

Shortly after the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology had been presented, it became known that the laureate, Ralph Steinman, had died a few days earlier. The Nobel Foundation’s board called an extra meeting – which concluded that the prize would be awarded anyway.

2016: Reluctant laureate

Bob Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A songwriter receiving the Nobel Prize is a sensation, but Dylan himself seems moderately interested in the award. It takes several weeks before the Academy hears from him, he misses the ceremony and delivers his mandatory Nobel lecture — a recorded talk — only at the last second.

2017: Disclosure of the cultural profile and crisis in the Academy

A deep rift within the Swedish Academy arose after 18 women testified in Dagens Nyheter about how they were subjected to sexual abuse by the “culture profile” – a man with close connections to the Academy. Permanent secretary Sara Danius announces shortly after the disclosure that all ties to the cultural profile are cut. Fierce internal disputes follow and several members choose to leave the work at the Academy. Later, Danius also resigns and leaves his seat. In May 2018, it was announced that no Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded that year. The cultural profiler is sentenced the same year for two cases of rape.

2023: The Swedish Academy of Sciences shoots itself in the foot

As usual, the Royal Academy of Sciences presents this year’s chemistry prize winners at a formal press conference in Stockholm at lunchtime. But already at half past seven that morning, the newsrooms’ e-mail boxes are ringing since the academy succeeded in the feat of sending out the announcement roughly four hours early. Stressed members and press spokespersons do their best to convince the press that no decision has in fact been made – but when the time comes for the press conference, it turns out that the cards have been laid.