Award for medicine: start of the Nobel Prize week

This week, the Nobel Prize winners will be announced – the first for medicine. It is eagerly awaited whether the vaccine manufacturer BioNTech will receive an award. There are also several candidates in the “Peace” category.

Now is the time again, that one week of the year when many people around the world hope to get that one call. The winners of the Nobel Prizes will be informed by telephone shortly before the announcement. Nobody knows where the doorbell will ring this year, but there is of course speculation, especially about the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Peace.

The Peace Research Institute in Oslo publishes a list of possible candidates every year. This time in first place for the peace category: The organization Reporters Without Borders, a network for freedom of the press and information.

The director of the Peace Research Institute, Henrik Urdal, would like the award to send a signal: “This year, an award from a pro-democratic movement for human rights would be very important. It would be an award that would warn dictators and autocrats all over the world.”

WHO and the Covax vaccination initiative are candidates

Other favorites for the award include the World Health Organization WHO, the Covax vaccination initiative and the Belarusian opposition activist Svetlana Tichanowskaya. Greta Thunberg is also back on the list.

Well-known names are usually mentioned for the Nobel Prize in Literature: Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami, for example. Last year’s award shows that things can turn out very differently in the end, when the lyric poet Louise Glück surprisingly won.

Only committees, researchers and organizations that have received an invitation specifically for this are allowed to submit proposals. Everything is top secret and nominations are kept under lock and key for 50 years.

The Nobel Prizes have a special meaning this year, so the chairman of the Nobel Foundation Vidar Helgesen: “They are particularly important because there is a war against science. Facts are disputed, authorities take decisions and ignore scientific findings. The UN Secretary General said recently, we need to end the war on science. We need to come to a new consensus on facts, research, and knowledge. “

Nobel Week starts today with the Prize for Medicine: Could it be the German vaccine manufacturer BioNTech, some are asking. Others argue that it is still too early. As in the previous year, the glamorous awarding of the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm is canceled.

It is not foreseeable how the pandemic will develop and whether people will be able to travel around the world, according to Vidar Helgesen, chairman of the Nobel Foundation: “In the past year we have found that some digital elements have received more attention than the traditional Nobel celebrations. We are optimistic that we will succeed again this year, both here in Stockholm and internationally. ”

It has not yet been decided whether the Nobel Peace Prize will also have to be presented on screens in Oslo.