The international aspirations of the Nobel Prize

For all the ambiguity in the bequest that established the prizes in his name, Alfred Nobel made one thing clear: He wanted the prizes’ scope to span political borders. “It is my express wish,” he wrote, “that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.”

Despite the noble intent, Nobel did not establish the ideal means for awarding a truly international prize. For the chemistry and physics prizes, he put the decision making in the hands of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Nobel Prize statutes stipulated that each year’s physics prizewinner was to be selected by a five-person committee of Swedish scientists and then approved by 100 Swedish members of the academy. (The Swedish citizenship requirements were later removed.) That Swedish slant has certainly influenced the physics prize, most egregiously in 1912 with the selection of inventor Nils Dalén.

Due to the innate Scandinavian bias, the selection of nominators became all the more important to increase the geographical diversity of the candidate pool. Besides members of the physics committee and the academy, nominators consisted of physics professors at Nordic universities, previous Nobel laureates, researchers at a rotating set of foreign universities, and individual invitees. Early on, most of the nominators hailed from Sweden and western Europe, particularly Germany.

In an attempt to widen the nominator pool, the Nobel chemistry committee in 1934 instructed scientific secretary Arne Westgren to devise a plan for soliciting nominations from a broader set of foreign universities. The following year he recommended to the chemistry and physics committees a list of universities whose scientists would be worthy of receiving at least an occasional invite, says Karl Grandin, director of the Center for History of Science at the academy. Westgren also compiled a list of nations that should be represented in each year’s nominating list, including the US, Germany, the United Kingdom or Ireland, the Netherlands or Italy, and the Soviet Union or other eastern European countries.

It’s unclear from the Nobel archives when and to what extent the chemistry and physics committees put Westgren’s plan into motion. But as the map above shows, the geographic diversity of the nominees—and, though they’re not depicted, the nominators as well—did steadily increase from 1901 to 1965. The first jump occurred in the 1930s, when the average number of nominations per year rose to 44 from 35 during the previous decade. Another surge came after World War II. By 1950, Grandin says, the Nobel physics committee was specially inviting about 20 individuals around the world per year to nominate, and about 30 by 1965. In the prize’s first 65 years, the most nominations came from the chairs of invited institutions, with previous Nobel laureates and members of the Royal Swedish Academy close behind.

Nominating beyond borders

Nobel nominators faced a predicament in making their selections. They could go along with the sentiment of Alfred Nobel’s bequest and choose the most deserving candidate, regardless of nationality. But the nominators from foreign universities were specifically chosen to ensure a global sampling of worthy candidates. Wasn’t it in the best interest of the prize to honor a compatriot?

In her 1984 book, The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution, historian Elisabeth Crawford devised a clever metric called the chauvinism index to determine the degree of nationalism of the nominators in each country. In that vein, we’ve produced an interactive graphic, below, that breaks down the home countries of the candidates chosen by each country’s nominators from 1901 to 1965.

During the first 65 years of the physics prize, Americans were by far the most likely to nominate one of their own. Of 814 nominations from US nominators, 632 (78%) named an American. German nominators, on the other hand, nominated compatriots 54% of the time.

Those nationalistic trends shifted during specific slices of time. In her book Crawford explains that the Nobel Prizes generally lived up to their international reputation for the first 15 years. But she found that chauvinism skyrocketed when the world went to war. In 1915 and 1916 every German nomination was a German. From 1916 to 1920 scientists from the Allied powers nominated scientists from the Central powers just two times: American George Hale nominated German Johannes Stark in 1916, and Frenchman Pierre Weiss nominated Albert Einstein in 1917. Physicists such as Max Planck, who had long enjoyed wide appeal among researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly generated interest only from Central and neutral nations. Crawford found that the nationalistic behavior continued after the war, with Einstein the lone German physicist whom nominators from France, the UK, and the US could seemingly tolerate.

The chauvinism exercise is trickier for World War II because of the absence of German nominators. Enraged by the awarding of the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize to anti-Nazi writer Carl von Ossietzky, Adolf Hitler forbade Germans from accepting Nobel Prizes and established his own awards for art and science. In the eight years (1938–45) without German representation in the nomination process, 17 nominations went to Germans, mostly Otto Hahn. Among scientists from the other Axis powers, Italians received 13 nominations (11 for Enrico Fermi in 1938, the same year he moved to the US, and 2 for Giancarlo Vallauri) and Japanese, 6 (for Hideki Yukawa).

More improvement needed

For all the improvements in making the Nobels more international, the physics committee still had a lot of work to do for 1967 and beyond. Through 1966 South America and Africa had been almost totally ignored. The lone nominators from Africa were both European: Frenchman Charles J. Nicolle in French-controlled Tunisia and Englishman Reginald W. James in South Africa. Not a single person working in an African country earned a nomination; only one in South America, Santiago Mayolo, was ever put forward for the prize. Outside of Japan and India, Asia was also neglected.

Unsurprisingly, the lack of global representation was reflected in the overall homogeneity, geographic and otherwise, of the nominees and nominators. That trend, unfortunately, hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years, at least judging from the prizewinners. One hopes the post-1966 data, when they become available, will reveal that the pool of worthy candidates considered by the physics committee truly has become more global and diverse—even if the winners have not.

¹Country groupings (italics indicate country was home to only nominators). Africa: South Africa, Tunisia. Other Americas: Canada, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay. Asia & Middle East: Australia, India, Israel, Japan. Other Europe: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Yugoslavia.