Former secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences provides an inside look during talk at university
By: David Campbell
Each year, a select number of the world’s premier researchers receive that fateful pre-dawn phone call from Sweden announcing that they have been selected to receive the Nobel Prize. Professor Erling Norrby, former secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, was one of the men who made those calls.
Professor Norrby spoke Wednesday at Princeton University.
In his lecture titled, "Over 100 Years of Nobel Prizes," he talked about prize founder Alfred Nobel and his family, the formation of the Nobel Foundation and the different prizes. He also touched on the "penumbra" of secrecy surrounding the selection of the prizes, the significance of the Nobel Prizes in raising public awareness about the sciences and those late-night calls to Nobel laureates.
He said they elicited many different reactions from recipients, and joked that they typically involved waking someone up in California to tell them they would have no more sleep that night, and that the international press likely would be calling them shortly thereafter.
Asked by a member of the audience how he made sure he was calling the right number, Professor Norrby said: "You have to have reliable contacts," and said "discreet" inquiry beforehand is also advisable.
He noted that he prefers that Nobel Prize recipients not be referred to as prize "winners," saying that recipients get the prize because they deserve it.
He said Nobel Prizes in the sciences are awarded for revolutionary discoveries, and that, while there have been past controversies surrounding the selection of some prize recipients, painstaking in-depth analysis of nominees is undertaken and such controversies likely would not occur today.
"We’re not interested in whether this is good science or not all of this is good science," he said of the selection process. "We’re interested in the discoveries."
And what constitutes a discovery? "It’s unexpected, it’s unanticipated," he said, and has revolutionary and transformative implications for human society.
Professor Norrby noted that Germans were the predominant prize recipients prior to World War II, and that after the war that distinction passed to the Americans who, he said, place a great premium on scientific achievement.
But he said researchers in the United States are now seeing competition from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and that as the number of scientists in the world has increased, so has the selectiveness of the prize.
He said the Nobel Prize’s prestige derives not from the cash prize that comes with it. "It’s the honor," he said.
He said the Nobel Prize and the annual award ceremony in Stockholm present an opportunity to inform and educate the public about the sciences.
The Nobel Prize is an international award given yearly since 1901 for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for peace. In 1968, the Bank of Sweden instituted the prize in economics.
The prize recipients are announced in October every year. They receive their awards a prize amount, a gold medal and a diploma on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. Prize nominations are confidential for a period of 50 years.
From 1997 to 2003, Professor Norrby served as secretary-general of the institution that annually awards Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and economics. During that time, he also was a member of the board of the Nobel Foundation. He currently is a researcher at the academy’s Center for the History of Sciences.
His talk was hosted by Professor David Botstein, director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.