“Captured for life by chemistry and by crystals,” as she described it, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin turned a childhood interest in crystals into the ground-breaking use of X-ray crystallography to “see” the molecules of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. Her work not only allowed researchers to better understand and manufacture life-saving substances, it also made crystallography an indispensable scientific tool.
Army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered the parasite causing malaria and the link between mosquitoes and malaria transmission. His Nobel Prize lecture is a fascinating story of examining and observing an endless number of mosquitoes in the hunt for the malaria parasite.
Nobel Prize laureate Tu Youyou turned to Chinese medical texts to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound – artemisinin – that has saved millions of lives. Read her story
Tu Youyou after receiving her Nobel Prize at the Stockholm Concert Hall, 10 December 2015.
The Nobel Foundation has announced that funding has been secured to build the Nobel Center − a home for science, culture and dialogue to be located at Slussen in central Stockholm, Sweden. The Nobel Center will offer a broad range of public activities including exhibitions, school programmes, lectures and conversations about the major issues of the future.
“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda. The Norwegian Nobel Committee is convinced that freedom of expression and freedom of information help to ensure an informed public.”
"I live with the real threat of spending the rest of my life in jail"
“Every day, I live with the real threat of spending the rest of my life in jail just because I’m a journalist. When I go home, I have no idea what the future holds, but it’s worth the risk.”
Watch Maria Ressa deliver her powerful Nobel Prize lecture that she delivered on 10 December 2021.
Artefacts that help tell the stories of the Nobel Prize laureates
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Abdulrazak Gurnah donates a dictionary to the Nobel Prize Museum, 28 April 2022.
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Jacques Dubochet prepares his gift to the Nobel Museum’s collection: the first set-up of the cooling experiment, at the 2017 Nobel Laureates’ Get together at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm on 6 December 2017.
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A pair of glasses were donated by the Dalai Lama to the exhibition “Items for Your Consideration – Treasures from the Nobel Museum’s Collections”.
The Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, has a growing collection of donated artefacts related to the laureates. When a laureate visits the museum a new object is added. See a few of them here.
Bringing extra star power to this year’s Nobel Prize Concert on 8 December will be German soprano Diana Damrau. Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck will lead the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the concert.
Did you know that there is no public list of the current year’s nominees for the peace prize? The complete list of nominees of any year’s prizes is not disclosed for 50 years. The same goes for all the prize categories. Learn more about the nomination process in a Q&A with Olav Njølstad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
The nomination process for Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
How much do you know about blood types? Did you know that human blood groups were discovered by Nobel Prize laureate Karl Landsteiner in 1901?
Learn more about the way to find out about the human blood groups, blood typing and the importance of safe blood transfusions. See if you can save the lives of the patients in the game!
Is it possible to train a dog to drool on command? Learn about conditioned reflexes in this interactive game!
With this animated game, teachers are able to illustrate classical conditioning in the classroom. The object of the game is to train Pavlov’s dog to respond to a signal that it will associate with being fed.
In 1904, Ivan Pavlov was awarded with Nobel Prize for his pioneering studies of how the digestive system works.
Discover the stories of four peace laureates – Malala Yousafzai, Wangari Maathai, Dalai Lama and Fridtjof Nansen – in the new Minecraft universe ‘Active Citizen’.
The game is available in 29 languages and has been created in partnership with Nobel Peace Center, Minecraft: Education Edition and Games for Change. Play the game at Nobel Peace Center
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems” with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
The Nobel Peace Prize 2021 was awarded jointly to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021 was divided, one half awarded to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”, the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”
Now you can bring the achievements made by the 2021 Nobel Prize laureates into the classroom! The lessons are so easy to use that a teacher can look through the guide, watch the slides, print the texts for students and then start the class.
On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will in Paris, France. The Swedish dynamite millionaire, who thought that his invention would end all wars, had now realised that it was a very deadly product. Wanting to make amends, he did what no man of such wealth had done before …
On 10 December 1901 the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Read more about the first prizes.
Chemist, engineer and industrialist Alfred Nobel left 31 million SEK (today about 265 million dollar) to fund the Nobel Prizes. Read more about his life and work.
Molecular biologist Sidney Altman passed away on 5 April. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the the unexpected discovery that RNA is not only a molecule of heredity in living cells, but also can serve as a biocatalyst.
Virologist Luc Montagnier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 for the discovery of human immunodeficiency virus. He passed away on 8 February, age 89.
Desmond Tutu, awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize “for his role as a unifying leader figure in the non-violent campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa”, passed away on 26 December aged 90.
Robert H. Grubbs passed away on 19 December 2021, 79 years old. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005 for “for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis.”
