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Agence France-Presse

Covid-19 vaccine pioneers, media watchdogs, climate activists and Belarus opposition leaders are just some of those tipped for Nobel glory when the latest prize recipients are announced from Monday against the background of the pandemic.
The medicine prize opens the Nobel season on Monday, followed by the awards for physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and peace on Friday.
The economics prize wraps up the Nobel season on October 11.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded to men, women and organisations for work that has led to great advances for humankind, in line with the wishes of inventor Alfred Nobel.
Here are five things to know about the prizes and their creator.
A misunderstanding?
On April 12, 1888, Alfred Nobel’s elder brother Ludvig died in Cannes, France.
But newspaper Le Figaro mixed up the brothers and announced Alfred’s death on its front page under a rather inflammatory headline: “A man who can hardly be called a benefactor of humanity died yesterday in Cannes. He is Nobel, inventor of dynamite.”
Many credit this slight as the inspiration for Nobel’s creation of the prizes, pointing to the wording in his will that the prizes should go to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.
“But we can only imagine” because the incident is not mentioned in his correspondence, his biographer Ingrid Carlberg said.
As for the visitors who came to offer their condolences at the inventor’s Parisian mansion, they were surprised to be greeted by a very much alive Alfred, as reported by Le Figaro the following day.
Yang Zhenning, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Xi wishes happy birthday to
Older and older discoveries
In Nobel’s will, the rewards were to go to those who had served humanity “during the preceding year”. However, from the awards’ inception in 1901 and onwards, this has rarely been imperative.
It often takes time for the true impact of discoveries to become known, and the number of worthy recipients is accumulating. As a result, work that is several decades old is often rewarded.
John Goodenough, for example, in 2019 became the oldest person to win a Nobel, at the age of 97. He is now the oldest living Nobel laureate, at 99. The youngest was Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 at 17.

Posthumous awards
Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the award may not be given posthumously. But a person may be awarded the honour if she or he dies between the time of the announcement in October and the formal prize ceremony in December.
Before the change, only two people had won a Nobel posthumously.
One was Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish secretary general of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961 but was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later the same year.
And in 1931, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded posthumously to another Swede, Erik Axel Karlfeldt.
In 2011, the medicine prize committee selected Ralph Steinman of Canada, unaware that he had passed away just three days before its announcement.
The foundation decided nevertheless to give him the prize.

Unlikely peace prize nominations
From Adolf Hitler to Michael Jackson via Stalin or Mussolini, the Nobel Peace Prize has seen its share of improbable, far-fetched or eyebrow-raising candidates in its 120-year existence.
Hitler was nominated for the peace prize by a Swedish MP in January 1939, on the brink of the bloodiest conflict in history.
The proposal, which was meant as sarcasm and aimed at discrediting the nomination of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain after the Munich Agreements, was however withdrawn.
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, later tried for genocide, was also nominated, as was Jules Rimet, the “father” of the football World Cup.
More than 100 Nobel Prize winners accuse China of ‘bullying’
Only one in 20 women laureates
While their representation among winners has been steadily increasing in the last decades compared to the early years, women still account for about just six per cent of winners.
Since 2001, 28 women have been awarded all prizes combined, almost three times as many as in the previous two decades.
In 2009, five women received a Nobel Prize, including the first female laureate in economics, American Elinor Ostrom – a record that has yet to be equalled.
“Nobel would have been annoyed by this statistic,” Ingrid Carlberg said.
“He was a feminist before his time, who defended women’s careers and admired female intellectuals.”
Economics has had the fewest women laureates at 2.3 per cent, lower than the science prizes combined which have seen 3.7 per cent women.
While slightly more evenly distributed, literature is still largely a male affair with 13.7 women among laureates, with the peace prize faring slightly better at 15.9 per cent.
Nevertheless, the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice was Marie Curie, in 1903 in physics and in 1911 in chemistry.


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Nobel Prize

Five things to know about the Nobel Prizes

A bust of Alfred Nobel in Karlskoga, Sweden. Photo: AFP

FILE PHOTO: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai poses for photographs during the Education and Development G7 Ministers Summit in Paris, France, July 5, 2019. Christophe Petit Tesson/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

FILE - In this Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020 file photo, a view of the medal to be presented to Nobel Laureate in Physics Roger Penrose from the Swedish ambassador to the UK Torbjorn Sohlstrom at the ambassador's residence in London. The Nobel Prize ceremonies will be reined in for a second year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The winners of this year’s prizes in chemistry, literature, physics, medicine and economics, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize, are set to be announced between Oct. 4 and Oct. 11, 2021. (Niklas Halle'n/Pool via AP, File)

Meet Yang Zhenning, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist even President Xi Jinping wishes happy birthday to

Yang Zhenning is one of China’s most important scientists of the 20th century, and he is about to turn 99 years old. Photo: Getty Images

***PLEASE CLEAR THE COPYRIGHTS BEFORE REUSE*** Handout image shows Chen Ning Yang. [FEATURE POST MAGAZINE]

BEIJING, CHINA - SEPTEMBER 09: Yang Chen-Ning (or Yang Zhenning), Chinese-American Nobel laureate in Physics, makes a keynote report during the 1st Joint Conference by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina on September 9, 2019 in Beijing, China. The Joint Conference with the theme of "Science for Future: All Starts with Basic Research" is held from Sep 8 to 10 at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in Beijing. (Photo by Li Jin/VCG via Getty Images)

UNITED STATES - MAY 14:  Feynman (1918-1988) was a theoretical physicist whose work on the development of the new theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965. Yang Chen Ning (b 1922) is best known for his role as co-discoverer of parity violation. In the mid 1940s he joined the University of Chicago where he collaborated with T D Lee (b 1926). In 1956 they proposed that parity is not conserved when particles interact via the weak force, such as in beta decay. This was proved correct in 1957 and they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965.  (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

More than 100 Nobel Prize winners accuse China of ‘bullying’ after effort to stop Dalai Lama and pro-Taiwan independence chemist from speaking at summit

The Dali Lama has been in exile for more than six decades. Photo: dpa

The President of the International Council for Science (ICSU), Taiwan's Yuan Tseh Lee speaks during the The Future We Choose press conference on June 18, 2012, in the sidelines of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.    AFP PHOTO / ANDRE DURAO (Photo by ANDRE DURAO / AFP)

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The Nobel season opens on Monday with the medicine prize
Here are five things to know about the Nobels and their creator



The medicine prize opens the Nobel season on Monday, followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and peace on Friday. The economics prize wraps up the Nobel season on October 11.


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.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} The Nobel season opens on Monday with the medicine prize Here are five things to know about the Nobels and their creator

The Nobel season opens on Monday with the medicine prize

Here are five things to know about the Nobels and their creator