# Who is the greatest scientist not to win the Nobel prize? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 18, 2011, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740 "2011-09-18T20:18:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Busy\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d78d45/32.png) [@Busy\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Busy_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/21 "2011-09-19T07:06:37Z")
> [@colonial](#): > > I don’t think that range includes people who died before the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. Correct - I’m not really interested in hearing that Archimedes should have got a Nobel. People who were living 1901 onwards please. Some great suggestions - in hindsight it seems amazing and ridiculous that Mendeleev did not get the Nobel prize for chemistry. I see there’s an explanation on his wiki that he was blocked by his enemy Arrhenius on the committee. Another chemist who should have got it was Christopher Ingold. He pioneered physical organic chemistry - studying how organic reactions work and the importance of mechanism. Probably a level below Lewis, who proposed how bonding and reactions work for all of chemistry, but still a protean figure. The story for his omission is the usual one - he didn’t get on with the chemistry OG of the time, Robert Robinson, and without his support / with his active blocking he never got it. ---
**Author:** ![WarmNPrickly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d78d45/32.png) [@WarmNPrickly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WarmNPrickly)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/22 "2011-09-19T09:42:42Z")
Among physical chemists, I think Louis Hammett would be one of the biggest. ---
**Author:** ![medicated](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@medicated](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/medicated)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/23 "2011-09-19T10:52:49Z")
> [@JoelUpchurch](#): > > Even if you go back before the Nobel Prize, then Darwin is a bad choice. He didn’t publish until he found out someone was about to duplicate his work. Evolution would have emerged at about the same time without him. > > I think James Clerk Maxwell would be a better choice. No, he’d be a great choice imho. He didn’t publish largely because he knew that he needed to make an airtight case. When word came that Wallace was about to publish, he had to hurry up. What makes Darwin great isn’t so much the theory itself, but the mindboggling care with which he argued the case. After a century and a half, it is absolutely amazing how much he got right, and how often the arguments against evolution trotted out even today turn out to be ones that he himself shredded. ---
**Author:** ![SecondJudith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5ac83/32.png) [@SecondJudith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SecondJudith)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 11:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/24 "2011-09-19T11:17:18Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > Rosalind Franklin. Alas, a nagging case of death kept her from sharing the prize with Watson and Crick. This was my immediate thought as well. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/25 "2011-09-19T12:21:45Z")
Here’s a long list of people who supposedly deserved to win the Nobel Prize but didn’t. It includes many of those already mentioned: > **[Nobel Prize controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies)** > > The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, identified with the Nobel Prize, is awarded for outstanding contributions in Economics. Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has occasionally engendered criticism and controversy. 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 pe... ---
**Author:** ![mozchron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@mozchron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mozchron)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/26 "2011-09-19T17:10:33Z")
[Seymour Benzer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Benzer) should have won for his work in molecular phage genetics, or his later work in behavioral genetics. [Mel Green](http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~ctting/History_of_Genetics.html) observed transposable elements in drosophila at the same time Barbara Mclintock observed them in corn. Barbara won the Nobel; Mel didn’t. I used to shoot the shit with Mel in grad school, he was still coming into lab and puttering around (I think he still is). He helped me design some experiments to analyze some mosquito eye color mutants I isolated (he started his work in the 1940’s working on Drosophila mutants). He was a cool guy. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/27 "2011-09-19T17:15:18Z")
What about Einstein, who won for the photoelectric effect but not for relativity? ---
**Author:** ![appleciders](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85f322/32.png) [@appleciders](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/appleciders)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/28 "2011-09-19T17:53:51Z")
He’s an interesting side note, but the Nobel committee gave him the award for the photoelectric effect partly because a few major players in the physics establishment refused to acknowledge relativity and Einstein so clearly deserved a Nobel prize. Besides, he doesn’t fit the OP’s definition: he _did_ win a Nobel prize. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2011, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740/29 "2011-09-19T19:48:14Z")
Edwin Hubble. He discovered that the universe was not just our galaxy, but contained billions of other galaxies. That’s one of the most major changes in our world view in the past century. I understand he did [try to get astronomy categorized as a field of physics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble#Nobel_Prize) and eligible for the Nobel prize in physics, but the change didn’t happen till after his death. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-greatest-scientist-not-to-win-the-nobel-prize/596740.md?page=1)