The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony 2023 - Opening address
Speech by Professor Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Chair of the Board of the Nobel Foundation, 10 December 2023.
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Esteemed Nobel Prize laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Nobel Foundation, it is my great honour and pleasure to welcome you all to the 2023 Nobel Prize award ceremony. In particular, I wish to welcome the Nobel Prize laureates, their families and friends.
Earlier today, in Oslo, Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in her absence, “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”. Her absence was due to her being imprisoned, together with many other prisoners of conscience, in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. In spite of these circumstances, her strong message, smuggled out of prison and read by her daughter, is finally one of hope: “Victory is not easy, but it is certain.” We look forward to receiving her family here in Stockholm in a few days.
The message of Alfred Nobel, transmitted to us through his will, is equally clear. He believed in the unique powers of science, literature and actions for peace to help transform the world to the benefit of humankind. And for all of this, international collaboration and respect for knowledge are key. I am convinced that this message is all the more important since it may seem untimely today, when the optimism of Nobel’s time is being replaced by radical pessimism or even resignation, and when new, interconnected crises challenge our understanding of our mission in academia, culture and civil society. But on the contrary, I am convinced that at this moment in history – with increasingly polarised views which tend to tear our societies apart, with democracies being undermined, and with wars and conflicts throughout the world which continue to cause so many victims – we need, more than ever, to keep Nobel’s vision in mind. He believed in knowledge, enlightenment and the pursuit of truth. The development of our world is not decided by destiny. It lies in our own power to decide on our future, and on how to transmit our heritage to new generations. Our new capacities as humankind – both with digitisation, which makes the world come closer than ever, and with artificial intelligence, which contains endless possibilities as well as risks – need to be addressed both scientifically and culturally.
Through free, fundamental research, science explores and expands the frontiers of human knowledge, laying the foundations for applications and development work and thus also providing preparedness for unexpected and unpredictable future events in our world. The scientific breakthroughs of this year – the physics prize for experiments with light which capture the shortest of moments, the chemistry prize for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots (artificial atoms) or the ground-breaking findings behind the prize in physiology or medicine that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines, and for the prize in economic sciences, research uncovering key drivers of gender differences in the labour market – all serve as powerful examples of the importance of forerunners who pave the way, as well as of the manifold faces of science. Together, we see their strength. Last, but certainly not least, the prize in literature explores, through what I am tempted to call fundamental research in literature, the boundaries of human existence by giving voice to the unsayable.
The laureates being awarded tonight, each in a unique way, testify to the power of science and literature. They show us that individually and together, we have it within ourselves to change the world.