Speech by Professor Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Chair of the Board of the Nobel Foundation

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses,
Esteemed Nobel Prize Laureates, Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Nobel Foundation, it is my great honour and pleasure to warmly welcome you all to the 2025 Nobel Prize award ceremony. In particular, I wish to welcome the Nobel Prize laureates, their families and friends.

As we gather here in Stockholm for the festivities to celebrate this year’s laureates, it is against a dark backdrop in the world at large. With its rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical and tangled developments, it may seem hard to inspire trust and confidence in the future. In this world, Alfred Nobel’s visionary legacy is a forceful reminder of the transformative powers of science, literature and peace.

Science is a lingua franca for humankind in exploring and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.

It is international in nature, and it creates a scientific community across borders, values that extend beyond the limits of science itself. This is particularly important to emphasise in times of division, polarisation and conflict. The prizes honour Nobel’s principle that “no consideration be given to nationality but that the prize be awarded to the worthiest person.”

This year, the physics prize is awarded for experimentally establishing macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling in superconducting systems, leading towards technology for quantum computers; the chemistry prize for the development of stable, extremely porous, materials, materials that can be tailormade to capture carbon dioxide, store hydrogen or deliver pharmaceuticals in the body; and the prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of a crucial complementary mechanism that prevents the immune system from attacking healthy organs, thus raising hopes for treatments of autoimmune diseases and new cancer therapies. They all demonstrate how fundamental research, awarded for the greatest benefit of humankind, can also lead to groundbreaking applications.

And the prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, for analysing and modelling conditions for sustained growth, lays bare the importance of a scientific understanding of technological breakthroughs and how inventions lead to old companies losing out to new ones; that is, the role of creative destruction.

The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded today in Oslo, is dedicated to the struggle for democracy, which is now threatened in so many ways across the globe.

Last, but definitely not least, the prize in literature is awarded to an authorship where melancholy and apocalypse seem to dominate the picture, but where the force of art and creation, unfathomable as it is, may still transcend the dark and violent powers.

As the world is at its darkest here in the Northern hemisphere, the Nobel lights illuminate not only the city, but also the world. Through knowledge, integrity and excellence, through creativity and inspiration, the laureates offer hope. They remind us that it is possible, through different paths, to address and come to terms with the many global challenges we face today. But their work also reminds us of our responsibility and the possibilities that lie within our reach. We must not just be passive spectators, but active contributors in defending the freedom of science and literature and the strive for peace to transform the world into a better place for humankind.

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