Does the Nobel Peace Prize pose a threat to the Prize's legitamacy?

Great Debates
1

Now that Nobel Prize season is in full swing with only the bastard economics prize still to be announced, I would like to bring up a few questions about the actual importance and legitimacy of the prize.

I can only begin to claim a sufficient knowledge of two, maybe three, of the fields the prize is awarded in, Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, and barely Physics, to begin to judge the choices of the Nobel Committee. And for these two fields, I think that the Nobel Committee does a brilliant job. I look back at the work that has garnered the prize and by and large it seems pretty legitimate. Read through an advanced survey textbook on any of these subjects and there’s an excellent chance that all of the big stuff is covered by a Nobel Prize of some sort; similarly an excellent portion of the awarded Nobel Prizes seem to make it into the textbooks.

What’s more, there’s a very distinct and noticeable flavor the science Nobel’s. It seems to clearly reward advances made by brilliance and creativity on the part of a small number of individuals. Especially in Medicine and Chemistry, it often rewards people that managed to overturn conventional wisdom and thinking, even if the clinical importance of such discoveries might not yet be apparent. For example, the 1989 prize in Chemistry for self-splicing RNA isn’t a huge deal in cellular or molecular biology, but it overturned or provided a major caveat to the, “Central Dogma,” of biology about DNA coding for RNA, RNA coding for protein, and protein doing the chemistry that turned out to be false for a number of more important enzymes such as the ribozyme activity of ribosomes. Similarly, Heliobacter pylori. Stomach ulcers are hardly the leading worldwide cause of mortality, but the fact that they can be caused by bacteria was a bit of a, “whoa!” for established ideas about the etiology and treatment of stomach ulcers. RNA interference, Einstein-Bose condensates, all classic science Nobel Prizes in my view. Along the same lines, I doubt that the NIH will ever win a prize for sequencing the human genome by a semi-brute-force method, even if it might have been an important milestone in the study of human genetics.

What’s more, the Nobel Committee seems to select its science prizes carefully. Often a significant gap follows between the initial publishing of results and awarding the prize to see how things really shape up. As far as I know, there have never been any science Nobel Prizes that have been flat-out overturned or just proven wrong. Refined, of course, but never a result of faked results or a bunch of self-promotional hype.

I’m not an expert in Literature or Economics to know if the same is true for winners in those categories being proven equally important by history, but I presume they are.

But what about that Nobel Peace Prize? Come on, Al Gore? His movie only came out last year, it’s probably a bit hyperbolic on a lot of points, and it seems political. I could maybe defend one for the UN’s IPCC, but Al Gore? Going further back, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, the 14th Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger? I don’t want to debate each of these people ad nauseum, but I generally think that the list has a bunch of people whose actual impact on the world to advance peace is questionable. Certainly, they haven’t had the same ability to specify people of lastingly significant contributions to the cause of peace as they have in the science prizes. I think it’s important the Nobel Committee select prize winners carefully. Most of the Prize’s relevance and fame derives from other winners. It’s not as if the $1.5 million prizes handed out this year are so large that the Nobel Prize can continue to just buy legitimacy like it might have been able to back around the turn of the last century. Some private high-schools probably have endowments that could rival the Nobel Prize’s.

So, shouldn’t the committee step back about five to ten years and make history do a little more to vindicate the efforts of these Nobel Peace Prize winners? Obviously, there are some very, very good picks in the list of prize winners, but it seems to me as if the Nobel Committee should exercise a bit more restraint in selecting the winners of its Peace Prize so that more of the big names that might appear in a history textbook in 2100 will appear on the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners.

2

No, the Peace Prize has always been fairly current and usually somewhat controversial.

The Science prizes I understand are judged very differently and yet are still open to criticism.

This sounds more like you don’t like their decisions on Peace Prizes and so you think it lessens the value of the Science ones.

BTW: A very active debate on this years Peace Prize is already ongoing.
Mr Gore’s Nobel: Like the wife-beater winning for Shelters

Jim

3

All of the Nobel Prizes have had controversial picks now and then; arguably more for the Peace Prize, because it’s so much more subjective/politicized. But the luster and desireability of Nobels have not diminished at all over the years - it’s probably the preeminent recognition of human merit and accomplishment, and likely to remain so. Who wouldn’t want a Nobel Prize?

4

For one thing, entirely different groups of people choose the prizewinners. The winners of the science and literature prizes are chosen by relevant academies or institutes; the winners of the peace prize are chosen by a committee elected by the Norwegian parliament. All of this was set forth in Nobel’s will. This means that the legitimacy of each prize is independent (although obviously they are connected in people’s minds by the fact that they are all Nobel prizes – people occasionally even refer to the “Nobel Peace Prize for Physics” etc.)

Although Nobel did not specifically provide for it, the prizes for peace have always been awarded differently than the other prizes. For one thing, world peace isn’t something that is going to be achieved any time in the near future. So the prize has been used to recognize people who are working toward, or contributing to that goal, rather than people who have accomplished it. Admittedly, the prize has sometimes been awarded to the signers of peace treaties, but more typically it’s a form of encouragement to help continue the fight for a particular goal. I find that admirable in general, although I don’t necessarily agree with all of the awards.

There are a few non-peace awards that were controversial, including the one for lobotomy. Wikipedia has a good section on Nobel Prize controversies that discusses several in physics and other disciplines. Also, take a look at the winners of the Literature prize. Many of them have faded into history. Particularly because the prizes can’t be awarded posthumously, there are always going to be some that are controversial from a historical viewpoint. But I like the idea of giving a prize now to someone who is actually working to improve the world (in the eyes of the committee) rather than looking back and saying, “Hey, the U.S. and Britain are no longer at war – in fact they’ve even become friends – let’s give them a peace prize.”

5

Some of the Peace Prize picks are quite good, I think - Doctors Without Borders comes to mind.

6

Economics is the ugly child. Personally, I have grave doubts as the whether a science of economcs even exists, in any “hard” sense. Now, thats not so much a put down of economics, but I believe that the study of economics must be viewed differently than a science like physics. In hard sciences, you have breakthroughs, "eureka!"s, watershed events that change the whole field in one stroke. In economics, you have only new interpretations, new theories that are equally untestable as the old theories challenged.

As well, economics is so merged and tainted by political ideology that it might as well be political ideology. “Supply side” and the Laughable Curve are still given grave and sombre attention, as if they were anything more than the intellectual window-dressing for a political stance.

So the Nobel awarders are stuck looking for something new and significant in a field that, by its very nature, cannot produce anything of the sort.

7

I’ve read that the science awards may be given out to the wrong people. The groups that determine the winners are academics and they award the prizes for theoretical work. But some people claim that Nobel’s original intent was for the prizes to be given for practical work - Nobel himself was a practical scientist not a theorist and his will stated the prize should be given for “inventions and discoveries”.

8

Literature and Peace are very very PC awards. Lit even more that Peace, IMHO, especially in the last score of years.

9

Oh and every so often, some dudes is mentioned as being “nominated” for the Nobel Peace or Literature prize. Being nominated means nothing in those prizes, here’s who can nominate for Lit (wiki) : "*Nomination procedure

Each year the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Members of the Academy, members of literature academies and societies, professors of literature and language, former Nobel literature laureates, and the presidents of writers’ organizations are all allowed to nominate a candidate…*

But remember this: "The names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they have been considered for the Prize. Nomination records are sealed for fifty years. In practice some nominees do become known. It is also common for publicists to make such a claim, founded or not."

There is a Professor somewhere who nominates a Murderer on Death Row every so often- *or so it is claimed. * It could be true, it could be a lie, but in any case, it is meaningless.

10

As has been noted, the Nobel peace prize picks have sparked controversy for a long time. It was Tom Lehrer, who when asked why he had given up his satirical songwriting said something to the effect of “Satire became superfluous when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.” (The wikipedia page on him seems to imply he may not have ever said this…although it is a bit unclear on this point as it focusses on whether he actually gave up his career because of that rather than whether he ever made such a crack…and, at any rate, it makes a good story and sure sounds like something that he would have said!)

11

PC? What does that even mean in this context?

12

“Politically Correct”.

13

Today’s Wall Street Journal online had a nice round-up of people that, perhaps, deserved the prize more than Mr. Gore:

14

Al Gore did not just make a movie. He has been educating people about environmental issues for a long time. The movie was based on a class that he teaches at a university, but his first book on the environment came about about fifteen years ago.

15

I don’t want to dismiss what Al Gore did in any way, just as I wouldn’t want to dismiss what Jimmy Carter did and still does. And while I have my criticisms of each man, I do try to keep them very specific.

My fear, though, is that the Nobel Committee may be using these prizes to explicitly move American political opinion, and doing so in a way calculated to the benefit of a certain group or party. That doesn’t seem proper to me, frankly. And while it is their right to grant prizes as they see fit, doing so in this fashion will lend itself to an overly politicized and devalued prize.

I wish I couldn’t say this, but the comments the head of the Nobel Committee made when Jimmy Carter was awarded the Peace Prize were so over the top in their criticism of the Bush Administration that this possibility really has to be discussed.

16

Well, what did they say? If they said “Cheney stuffs babies into a blender to keep his withered heart beating”, that would be “over the top”. If they said the Norse equivalent to “crazy as a shithouse mouse”…

We are not beloved of the nations, Moto.

17

This isn’t confined to the Nobel Committee. He was saying what virtually every other nation on earth thinks about the U.S. and the Bush Administration.

I think that this award and Carter’s are a reminder to the American public that we still can be a moral authority in the world. They could easily have given the award to the IPCC alone, but recognized Gore for making this an international issue and speaking clearly that it is going to take political will in the U.S. for change to happen.

18

I’ll concede that the manner in which the committee selects Peace Prize winners does not threaten the legitimacy of the science prizes. Perhaps that was a bit of exaggeration on my part.

Also, I concede that the way the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out isn’t a dramatic departure from the historical means to do it and that it has generated controversy over the entire course of its history. This still doesn’t excuse the manner in which the Peace Prize is decided.

As other alluded to, I understand that there are controversies in the science prizes over attribution and perhaps they’re occasionally unfair or ignore the contributions of a particular person. But again, the long gap in handing them out ensures that the findings of the work are overwhelmingly correct, especially in the modern era (let’s say prizes given out after 1970). You can just introduce a finding, say, “it won a Nobel Prize,” and that’s pretty much that, people will accept it because the other winners of the prize have overwhelmingly proven correct as well.

With the Peace Prize, it just doesn’t have the same virtually unimpeachable record of successfully choosing actual contributors to peace. Again, if the committee would just show the discipline to wait five or ten years, I doubt that you’d be choosing a Kissinger or an Arafat.

Long story short, I guess the Nobel Peace Prize just isn’t worth that much more than the money that comes with it. Kind of a shame if you ask me.

19

Can’t we ask a more basic question? Even if you believe Gore’s work in support of the environment is of the greatest benefit to mankind, isn’t the Nobel Peace Prize supposed to be about Peace? In recent years the prize has been awarded to people who “do good”, not necessarily people who have done something to promote peace. Teddy Roosevelt got the Nobel Peace Prize because he brokered the end of the Russo-Jap War. Woodrow Wilson got it because of his work to create the League of Nations. These efforts directly promoted peace. Does Gore’s?

20

If the Earth heats up causing flooding along most of the major shores of the world, increasing the numbers of dangerous hurricanes and at the same time furthering droughts, perhaps the Nobel committee fears this would cause many wars, perhaps very serious wars of acquisition.

Tensions are already slightly increasing over territorial debates about mineral rights and the North West passage opening up.

Jim