STOCKHOLM (dpa) – As the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm celebrates its centenary this year, critics are asking if the coveted prizes, especially in the sciences, have missed the spirit of their founder and fallen behind the times since their inception in 1901.
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrial magnate and inventor of dynamite, gave away his fortune a year before his death in 1896 to establish the prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.According to Nobel’s last will and testament, the prizes were to go to those who had conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind” in their particular field.But the Swedish Academy and its selection committees continue to award prizes for original scientific research using much of the same criteria it used in the early 20th century, critics say.“The role of science has altered radically in ways not reflected in the Nobel awards,” said Professor Joseph Rotblat, the 1995 peace prize laureate.Rotblat, who shared the peace prize with the International Pugwash organization which he heads, pointed out that many scientific breakthroughs nowadays often are made by so-called big science and not individual scientists in their laboratories.“Sometimes there are 50 to 100 authors for a single scientific paper,” said Rotblat. “The science prizes could follow the example of the peace prize in awarding organizations and not just individuals.”Another critic is Jokob von Uexkull, the London-based Swede who founded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobels, which are announced on December 4, a week before the official prizes.“I have a strong feeling that the prizes have missed the spirit of Nobel, for ‘the greatest benefit of mankind’,” said von Uexkull.Criticising the Nobel awards for being “very northern oriented, ignoring the wisdom and knowledge of the East and the South and non- western science”, von Uexkull said the Stockholm prizes were a “product of a rationalist age and belief in scientific progress”.“Recent physics and chemistry awards ignore the difficult decisions facing the world today, such as the dismantling of most of the chemical industry as we now know it,” von Uexkull said.“We would like to see Nobels in other fields, such as ecology and ethical concerns,” said von Uexkull.The ecology prize, which also was proposed by former German president Richard von Weizscker, was rejected by the Nobel Foundation.Von Uexkull complained that the medicine prize never goes to someone outside the western tradition.“Homoeopathy (the treatment of disease by minute doses of drugs), which has helped thousands of people all over the world, acupuncture and Chinese medicine remain unrecognised,” said von Uexkull.“Soft chemistry”, solar physics and work in global warming and depletion of the rain forests are other areas that could be given awards, he said.The Nobel Foundation added has only one new prize during its hundred-year history, and that was in economics, von Uexkull pointed out.The economics prize was instituted by the Bank of Sweden in 1968, and is given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences according to the same criteria as the other Nobel prizes.In the week leading up to the Nobel awards ceremonies in Stockholm on December 10, the Nobel Foundation hosts a series of centennial symposia in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics attended by the laureates and other guests at academic institutes around the country.
