Nobel Prize Facts You Must Know

The first of the 2021 Nobel Prizes are announced Monday with the naming of the winner, or winners, in the field of physiology or medicine.

Also Read: COVID Vaccine May Win Nobel Medicine Prize: Check Winners Till Now

A panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm will announce the recipient after 11:30 a.m. (0930 GMT).

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over USD 1.14 million).

The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics

On April 12, 1888, Alfred Nobel's elder brother Ludvig died in Cannes, France. But newspaper Le Figaro mixed up the brothers and announced Alfred's death on its front page. This inspired Alfred to create a will that the awards should go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.

 The awards' first inception happened in 1901.

John Goodenough, in 2019 became the oldest person to win a Nobel, at the age of 97. He is now the oldest living Nobel laureate, at 99.

The youngest was Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 at 17.

Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the award may not be given posthumously and only two people had won a Nobel posthumously.
One was in 1931, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded posthumously to a Swede, Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1931 and to Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish secretary-general of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961.
In 2011, the medicine prize committee selected Ralph Steinman of Canada, unaware that he had passed away just three days before the honour's announcement. The foundation decided to nevertheless give him the prize.

A total of 590 Nobel awards have been given to 935 Nobel Laureates between 1901-2018.

Women still account for about just six percent of winners. Since 2001, 28 women have been awarded all prizes combined, almost three times as many as in the previous two decades.

In 2009, five women received a Nobel prize, including the first female laureate in economics, American Elinor Ostrom.

The first person to win the Nobel prize twice was a woman Marie Curie, in 1903 in physics and in 1911 in chemistry.

John Bardeen is the only Nobel Laureate who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice- in 1956 and 1972.