The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed on "those who conferred the greatest benefit on humankind" in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences,[1] instituted by Alfred Nobel's last will, which specified that a part of his fortune be used to create the prizes. Each laureate (recipient) receives a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money, which is decided annually by the Nobel Foundation.[2] They are widely recognized as one of the most prestigious honours awarded in the aforementioned fields.[3]
First instituted in 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a total of 965 individuals and 27 organizations .[4] Among them, 28 Swiss nationals have been honored with the Nobel Prize. Additionally, two laureates acquired Swiss citizenship through naturalization after the award: Wolfgang Pauli and Jack Steinberger.
Nine organizations headquartered in Switzerland have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been awarded twice, and the International Committee of the Red Cross three times.[5] Five of these organizations were also founded in Switzerland, and eight of them had their headquarters in Geneva, a city hosting more than 40 international organizations and 750 non-governmental organizations.[6]
The first Nobel Prize for Peace, awarded in 1901, went to the Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant. The latest Swiss laureates are Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019. The 28 prizes are distributed as follows: nine for medicine, seven for chemistry, seven for physics, three for peace, and two for literature. No Swiss national has yet received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Switzerland is among the countries with the highest number of Nobel laureates, both in total and per capita.[7] Several factors have been suggested as possible explanation, including large public funding for research, the presence of highly ranked universities such as ETH Zürich and EPFL,[8] and the neutrality of Switzerland in the two World Wars, which attracted scientists from abroad. The Nobel Prize has also been often recognized as being biased towards Western countries.[9] [10] [11] According to Nobel laureate Werner Arber, the large number of awards to Swiss nationals is "likely a statistical anomaly", while Richard R. Ernst believes the number of Swiss laureates will keep increasing as the country still attracts talent.[12]
| Year | Image | Laureate | Born | Died | Field | Rationale | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1901 | , co-founder of the Red Cross | in Geneva | in Heiden | Peace | "for his humanitarian efforts to help wounded soldiers and create international understanding"[13] prize shared with Frédéric Passy | |||
| 1902 | , politician and director of the Permanent International Peace Bureau | in Tramelan | in Bern | Peace | "for his eminently practical administration of the Inter-Parliamentary Union"[14] prize shared with Élie Ducommun | |||
| 1902 | , peace activist and director of the Permanent International Peace Bureau | in Geneva | in Bern | Peace | "for his untiring and skilful directorship of the Bern Peace Bureau"[15] prize shared with Charles Albert Gobat | |||
| 1909 | , physician who introduced scientific methods in surgery | in Bern | in Bern | Physiology or Medicine | "for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland"[16] | |||
| 1913 | , professor at the University of Zurich | in Mulhouse, France acquired Swiss citizenship in 1894[17] | in Zurich | Physiology or Medicine | "in recognition of his work on the linkage of atoms in molecules by which he has thrown new light on earlier investigations and opened up new fields of research especially in inorganic chemistry"[18] | |||
| 1919 | , poet and writer | in Liestal | in Lucerne | Literature | "in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring"[19] | |||
| 1920 | , physicist, head of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures | in Fleurier | in Sèvres, France | Physics | "in recognition of the service he has rendered to precision measurements in Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys"[20] | |||
| 1921 | , theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity | in Ulm, Germany acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901[21] | in Princeton, USA | Physics | "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"[22] | |||
| 1937 | , organic chemist known for his contributions on vitamins | in Moscow, Russia | in Zurich | Chemistry | "for his investigations on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B2"[23] prize shared with Norman Haworth | |||
| 1939 | , chemist, professor at ETH Zurich | in Vukovar, Austria-Hungary acquired Swiss citizenship in 1917[24] | in Zurich | Chemistry | "for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes"[25] prize shared with Adolf Butenandt | |||
| 1946 | , poet, novelist and painter | in Calw, Germany acquired Swiss citizenship in 1924[26] | in Montagnola | Literature | "for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style"[27] | |||
| 1948 | , chemist at J. R. Geigy AG who synthesized DDT | in Olten | in Basel | Physiology or Medicine | "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods"[28] | |||
| 1949 | , physiologist and professor at the University of Zurich who mapped areas of the brain | in Frauenfeld | in Ascona | Chemistry | "for his discovery of the functional organization of the interbrain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs"[29] prize shared with Egas Moniz | |||
| 1950 | , chemist and professor at the University of Basel who contributed to the isolation of cortisone | in Wloclawek, Poland acquired Swiss citizenship in 1914[30] | in Basel | Physiology or Medicine | "for their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects"[31] prize shared with Edward Calvin Kendall and Philip Showalter Hench | |||
| 1951 | , South African-American virologist and physician | in Pretoria, South Africa | in New Haven, USA | Physiology or Medicine | "for his discoveries concerning yellow fever and how to combat it"[32] | |||
| 1952 | , physicist, first director-general of CERN and among the developers of nuclear magnetic resonance | in Zurich | in Zurich | Physics | "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith"[33] prize shared with Edward Mills Purcell | |||
| 1957 | , pharmacologist who discovered antihistamines | in Neuchâtel | in Rome, Italy | Physiology or Medicine | "for his discoveries relating to synthetic compounds that inhibit the action of certain body substances, and especially their action on the vascular system and the skeletal muscles"[34] | |||
| 1975 | , organic chemist, professor at ETH Zurich | in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary acquired Swiss citizenship in 1959[35] | in Zurich | Chemistry | "for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions"[36] prize shared with John Cornforth | |||
| 1978 | , microbiologist and geneticist, professor at the University of Geneva and Basel | in Gränichen | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Physiology or Medicine | "for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics"[37] prize shared with Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith | ||
| 1986 | , physicist, IBM Fellow | in Buchs | in Wollerau | Physics | "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope"[38] prize shared with Gerd Binning and Ernst Ruska | |||
| 1987 | , physicist, IBM Fellow | in Basel | in Zurich | Physics | "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials"[39] prize shared with J. Georg Bednorz | |||
| 1991 | , physical chemist, professor at ETH Zurich | in Winterthur | in Winterthur | Chemistry | "for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy"[40] | |||
| 1992 | , biochemist, professor at the University of Washington | in Shanghai, China acquired Swiss citizenship in 1947[41] | in Seattle, USA | Physiology or Medicine | "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism"[42] prize shared with Edwin G. Krebs | |||
| 1996 | , professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich | in Basel | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Physiology or Medicine | "for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defence"[43] prize shared with Peter C. Doherty | ||
| 2002 | , chemist and biophysicist, professor at ETH Zurich and The Scripps Research Institute | in Aarburg | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Chemistry | "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution"[44] prize shared with John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka | ||
| 2017 | , biophysicist, professor at the University of Lausanne | in Aigle | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Chemistry | "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"[45] prize shared with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson | ||
| 2019 | , astrophysicist, professor at the University of Geneva | in Lausanne | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Physics | "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star"[46] prize shared with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz | ||
| 2019 | , astronomer, professor at the University of Cambridge and Geneva | in Geneva | data-sort-value="2999-12-31" | — | Physics | "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star"[47] prize shared with Jim Peebles and Michel Mayor |
| Year | Image | Laureate | Born | Died | Field | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | , Austrian theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics | in Vienna, Austria naturalized Swiss in 1949 (place of origin: Zollikon)[48] | in Zurich | Physics | "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle"[49] | ||
| 1988 | , American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos | in Bad Kissingen, Germany naturalized Swiss in 2000 (place of origin: Geneva)[50] [51] | in Geneva | Physics | "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino"[52] prize shared with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz |
| Year | Logo | Organization | Founded | Headquarters | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1910 | Permanent International Peace Bureau | Bern (1891 - 1924) | "for acting as a link between the peace societies of the various countries, and helping them to organize the world rallies of the international peace movement"[53] | |||
| 1917 | International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) | Geneva | "for the efforts to take care of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war and their families"[54] | |||
| 1938 | — | Nansen International Office for Refugees | Geneva | "for having carried on the work of Fridtjof Nansen to the benefit of refugees across Europe"[55] | ||
| 1944 | International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) | Geneva | "for the great work it has performed during the war on behalf of humanity"[56] | |||
| 1954 | Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) | Geneva | "for its efforts to heal the wounds of war by providing help and protection to refugees all over the world"[57] | |||
| 1963 | International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) | Geneva | "for promoting the principles of the Geneva Convention and cooperation with the UN"[58] prize shared with the League of Red Cross Societies | |||
| 1963 | League of Red Cross Societies | Geneva | "for promoting the principles of the Geneva Convention and cooperation with the UN"[59] prize shared with the International Committee of the Red Cross | |||
| 1969 | International Labour Organization (ILO) | 1919, Geneva | Geneva | "for creating international legislation insuring certain norms for working conditions in every country"[60] | ||
| 1981 | Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) | Geneva | "for promoting the fundamental rights of refugees"[61] | |||
| 1999 | Doctors Without Borders | Geneva | "in recognition of the organisation's pioneering humanitarian work on several continents"[62] | |||
| 2007 | Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) | Geneva | "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"[63] prize shared with Al Gore | |||
| 2017 | International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) | 2007, Australia | Geneva | "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons"[64] |