Why Does Anyone Care About the Nobel Prize?

“Just go to sleep,” Martin Chalfie’s wife told him late one October night in 2008. Chalfie, a Columbia University chemist, had co-authored an influential paper describing a new method for studying cells with green fluorescent protein, and he was anxiously waiting to see whether it would be recognized. His wife, a fellow academic, tempered his expectations. “It’s a wonderful tool, and lots of people use it,” he recalls her saying. “But, to tell you the truth, it will never win the Nobel.”

So when the call from Sweden came in, Chalfie was asleep. The beginning of his life as a Nobel laureate in chemistry had to wait until morning. He was still in his pajamas when the first journalist got him on the phone. He scolded her for asking whether he believed in God. Academics should not be asked to pontificate outside their fields of expertise! Chalfie was starting to understand that he had become the kind of rarefied figure whose musings on topics unrelated to chemistry were important to the press. He didn’t like it. And yet, he didn’t not like it either. The next thing he did was call his friend Bob—the 2002 Nobel laureate in medicine H. Robert Horwitz—to tell him he wanted to co-sign an open letter of Nobel laureates endorsing Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.

[Read: A Nobel Prize for artificial intelligence]

This past week, the 2024 Nobel class was introduced to the world, creating a new crop of Olympian figures. Chalfie might tell you that the award hasn’t changed his day-to-day life all that much, that his grant applications still sometimes get denied. But the medal radiates from his chest even when he’s not wearing it. Chalfie learned that his graduate-school mentor bragged about having had three postdoc students who went on to win a Nobel. Chalfie’s dentist counted four laureates among his patients. “I became a collectible,” Chalfie says.

The Nobel is the honor above all honors. The achievements it rewards—in science, literature, and peace—contribute “to the greatest benefit of mankind,” a tagline any other respectable award committee would be too shy to claim. How did a single award from the small nation of Sweden become the undisputed highest honor in the world? The marketing whizzes at Harvard Business School haven’t written a case study on the genius of the Nobel Foundation, but perhaps they should. The Nobel is one of the greatest branding exercises in history.

Establishing a prize is easy.  The hard part is getting anyone to care. Alfred Nobel, a businessman who made his fortune selling dynamite and explosives in the 19th century, was not an obvious candidate to become the namesake of the most prestigious distinction in the world. Nor were Swedish scientists, as opposed to French or British, clearly the ones who should award it. Some biographers link Nobel’s idea to establish a prize for sciences, culture, and peace to the moment he learned that a newspaper had prepared an obituary for him with the phrase  “merchant of death” in the headline. That’s not how he wanted history to remember him.

For the Nobel to become the Nobel, a few people had to get a few things really right. When rich individuals bequeath all their wealth to something other than their would-be heirs, their would-be heirs tend to resist. According to the historian Elisabeth Crawford, the author of The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution, this is one of the biggest obstacles rich men have had in using prizes to secure their legacy. The Italian businessman Jerôme Ponti, for example, had more or less the same vision as Nobel. But after his surviving relatives learned that he had donated his fortune to national academies headquartered in London, Paris, and Vienna in 1874, a group of them successfully litigated to void the will. In the 1890s, the executors of Nobel’s estate had to be a bit more clever. They preemptively reached an agreement with Nobel’s two living nephews, one of whom was particularly gracious and persuaded the rest of the family to honor the late Nobel’s wishes.  

A second reason the Nobel prevailed over prizes of similar ambition was that Sweden turned it into a nationalist project. Nobel himself did not mention anything about Swedish interests, but the government and the press interpreted his bequest as a call to action for the nation as a whole. “The Swedish scientific society could not have been invested with a more glorious task,” a newspaper editorial declared. The effort turned out to be well timed. In the early 1900s, a new prize in Sweden might have seemed unlikely to compete in prestige with one given by the French Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society in London. But when World War I struck, neutral little Sweden had a claim to objectivity that the great powers didn’t.

[Read: The political slant of the Nobel Prize in economics]

Finally, both Nobel and the executors of his will designed the rules wisely. Most prestigious prizes at the time were international only in theory; judges tended to favor their countrymen. Nobel requested that each award be given to the “worthiest person, whether or not they’re Scandinavian.” The Nobel Prize committee became the first to systematically solicit nominations from institutions abroad, turning the award into a sort of contest among nations. And one of the executors of the will had the idea of rewarding achievements no matter when they had been made, rather than just the work or discoveries of the previous year. This was a clever move, not just because some discoveries can take time to reveal their worth, but also because it turned winning the Nobel into a more sweeping victory.

Fortified with its elegant design choices, the Nobel quickly established a first-mover advantage. Universities can come up with new medals in physics, but they will never be able to give the same one that Albert Einstein won. Prizes with more generous cash stipends exist—the Breakthrough Prize, created by Mark Zuckenberg and other tech billionaires, pays $3 million, compared with Nobel’s sum of about $1 million, which co-winners must share—but many people would still prefer to win an award that their parents have heard of. The Scottish economist Angus Deaton, who was knighted in Buckingham Palace and has received plenty of prizes throughout his life, told me that nothing comes close to the Nobel ceremony, which he attended in 2015. On the night after he found out he won, Deaton couldn’t keep the news to himself. He told his Uber driver on the way home from dinner in Princeton and watched him become ecstatically happy. The driver at first assumed that Deaton had won the peace prize; when he learned it was for economics, his enthusiasm dimmed, but only slightly. A Nobel is a Nobel.

Architects and mathematicians might protest that the Nobel doesn’t recognize achievements in their professions, that more people should know about the Pritzker and the Fields. But nobody said prizes were fair. What prizes are meant to be is cheap: Societies can save money by having everyone work toward a grand goal and rewarding only the best. Prizes are prestige in material form. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the economics Nobel in 2001, explained to me that this is precisely their advantage. In many markets, say knowledge and cultural industries, people seek excellence for its own sake, and so money is not the best incentive. America would create more total welfare, Stiglitz argues, if instead of rewarding pharma companies with monopoly patents, we gave drug researchers a prestigious prize with a cash stipend. For that plan to work, of course, we would have to convince people that the prize is indeed covetable, like the Swedes did.

Prizes aren’t all great. They distort fields by pushing hopefuls to do the type of work the prize jury will like. According to the economic historians Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, the Nobel in economics—the only one that Alfred Nobel didn’t stipulate in his will—was used to build legitimacy for free-market reforms in Sweden, elevating the precepts of neoliberal economic theory to the same status as laws of physics. The main ideology the Nobel Foundation appears to be committed to, however, is the importance of preserving the prestige of the Nobel Prize—and in this it has succeeded. If there were a prize for prizes, the Nobel would win every year.