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.
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.
Seymour Benzer should have won for his work in molecular phage genetics, or his later work in behavioral genetics.
Mel Green 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.
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.
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.