Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has engendered controversy and criticism. After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel established that an annual prize be awarded for service to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Similarly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, first awarded in 1969, is awarded along with the Nobel Prizes. Nobel sought to reward "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". Awards committees have historically rewarded discoveries over inventions. No Nobel Prize was established for mathematics and many other scientific and cultural fields. An early theory that envy or rivalry led Nobel to omit a prize to mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler was refuted because of timing inaccuracies. Another myth that states that Nobel's spouse had an affair with a mathematician (sometimes attributed as Mittag-Leffler) has been equally debunked: Nobel was never married. A more likely explanation is that Nobel did not consider mathematics as a practical discipline, and too theoretical to benefit humankind, as well as his personal lack of interest in the field and the fact that an award to mathematicians given by Oscar II already existed at the time. Both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize have been described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics". The most notorious controversies have been over prizes for Literature, Peace, and Economics. Beyond disputes over which contributor's work was more worthy, critics most often discerned political bias and Eurocentrism in the result. A major controversy-generating factor for the more recent scientific prizes (Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine) is the Nobel rule that each award can be shared by no more than two different research areas and no more than three different individuals each year. This rule was adequate in 1901, when most of the science research was performed by individual scientists working with their small group of assistants in relative isolation. In more recent times science research has increasingly become a matter of widespread international cooperation and exchange of ideas among different research groups, themselves composed of dozens or even hundreds of researchers. The three person limit has then led to glaring omissions of key participants in awarded research. Multiple commentators have noted that the two area, three person limit, without prizes to organizations, is mentioned nowhere in Nobel's will. These limitations were added by the award committee, and could be easily changed. The Nobel Peace Prize, for example, is often granted to organizations. This would certainly have been appropriate for the physics discoveries made by huge research consortiums such as ATLAS/CMS (2013) or LIGO (2017).
Chemistry
1918: Haber The 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Fritz Haber for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, which allowed for the efficient synthesis of ammonia, leading to the economical mass production of chemical fertilizers. The award was controversial, as Haber had overseen Germany's chemical weapons program during World War I. The Nobel Prize committee considered his war activities but noted his ammonia synthesis process was "the greatest benefit to mankind".
1922–1946 From 1922 to 1946, the American scientist Gilbert N. Lewis, who was widely known for his coining of the covalent bond, electron pair, Lewis structure and other seminal contributions that have become near-universal conventions in chemistry, was nominated 41 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry but never won. It has been speculated that while working in Walther Nernst's lab, Lewis developed a lifelong enmity with Nernst. In the following years, Lewis started to criticize and denounce his former teacher on many occasions, calling Nernst's work on his heat theorem "a regrettable episode in the history of chemistry". A friend of Nernst's, Wilhelm Palmær, was a member of the Nobel Chemistry committee. There is evidence that he used the Nobel nominating and reporting procedures to block a Nobel Prize for Lewis in thermodynamics by nominating Lewis for the prize three times, and then using his position as a committee member to write negative reports.
1935: Joliot-Curies In 1935, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of induced radioactivity. Afterwards, Ștefania Mărăcineanu who also worked with the Curie family, claimed priority over the discovery.
2003: Agre and McKinnon Peter Agre was awarded the 2003 prize "for the discovery of water channels". Agre published his study about aquaporin in 1988; Gheorghe Benga had shown the existence of a protein water channel in the red blood cell membrane in 1986. The omission of Benga from the 2003 prize has been called a mistake in the awarding of Nobel Prizes. Agre acknowledged the contribution of Benga and others to the field discovery of aquaporins in his Nobel Lecture: "Their [aquaporins] existence was suggested by a group of pioneers in the water transport field who preceded us by decades".
2007: Ertl Gerhard Ertl, who was the sole recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the catalytic effects of metal surfaces, has expressed surprise and disappointment that Gábor Somorjai, a foundational pioneer in modern surface science and catalysis, did not share the prize. Somorjai and Ertl had previously shared the Wolf Prize for Chemistry in 1998. The Nobel Prize committee's decision to exclude Somorjai was criticized in the surface-science community.
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