Nobel Prize Controversies

Controversial exclusions

• Jocelyn Bell first noticed the stellar radio source which was ultimately recognised as a pulsar, but she was excluded from the 1974 prize. Instead, her supervisor Antony Hewish was the second name on the prize (he developed the observational technique and designed the array which detected the pulsar). The prize was officially awarded for Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish's pioneering research in radioastrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. Fred Hoyle famously argued that Jocelyn Bell should also have been included as it was she who first detected the pulsar signal in measurements made by the radio array, although she herself did not believe she should have been included.
• 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.
• Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA, but died before she could receive the prize.
• Fred Hoyle was denied a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983, although the winner William Fowler acknowledged Hoyle as the pioneer of the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis. See also Fred Hoyle#Contribution to cosmogony
• Chung-Yao Chao first captured positron through electron-positron annihilation. He died in 1998 without receiving the prize.
• Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel.
• 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.
• Raymond V. Damadian was denied a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, which was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for developing magnetic resonance imaging. Damadian was overlooked despite making seminal advances in the MRI field. Damadian took out large advertisements in a number of international newspapers complaining about his exclusion from the award.

• The fact that Nobel Prizes may never be posthumously awarded means that future deserving recipients may be overlooked if they die before receiving the award.

Controversial recipients

• 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.
• Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his development of prefrontal lobotomy. The technique turned out to have little objective benefit to patients, and was instituted in highly unethical manner. It is no longer used.
• Yasser Arafat was co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, but had previously been widely regarded as a major backer of terrorism.

External links

• BBC article on Nobel controversies
• CNN overview of Nobel prizes

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