Speech by Professor Bengt Samuelsson, Chairman of the Board of Directors, The Nobel Foundation. (Translation of the Swedish text.)

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Nobel Foundation, I welcome all of you to the 1993 Prize Award Ceremony. Nobel Day, December 10, has become a national day of celebration. The Swedish Royal Family, Government and Parliament are represented here, along with people from many segments of our society. However, the Nobel festivities are not only a national affair. Over the years, Nobel laureates have come from different corners of the world and repre­sentatives of many countries have honoured us with their presence. This year, the international character of the Nobel festivities has been strength­ened further by inviting a number of foreign cultural personalities and members of the scientific and scholarly community.

Alfred Nobel was an inventor and an international industrialist. He searched tirelessly for ideas that could provide the basis for new products or methods with commercial value. In this way, he hoped to promote econom­ic growth and better living conditions. Nobel realized that a continuous flow of new knowledge is needed to ensure technological progress, and that the day this flow diminishes or ceases, the material resources of society also stop growing. The Nobel Prizes for the most important discoveries in the fields of physics and chemistry should be seen in this light.

Nobel was also interested in medical questions. In his laboratory journals, he frequently made notations about ideas that should be tested in order to “alleviate or cure illnesses.” He designated the medical prize as being “for the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine,” which indicates that here too, Nobel realized the significance of basic research.

This year, symposia are being held in many places to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. Two young researchers, a 36-year-old Briton named Francis Crick and a 24-year­ old American named James Watson, decisively influenced the course of biological and medical research. Their famous 1953 article in the journal Nature, describing the structure of DNA, closed with one of the greatest understatements in the scientific literature: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

For their work concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids, Crick and Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkins of Britain. Wilkins had used X-ray diffraction techniques to demonstrate that DNA chains were arranged in the form of twisted spirals. On the basis of this knowledge, Watson and Crick explained how these spirals were connected into pairs.

Their Nobel Prize could just as well have been awarded in the field of chemistry, illustrating how close to each other these two prize categories sometimes come. For a number of years, the prize committees in chemistry and medicine have also held annual joint meetings to decide the field in which certain proposed candidates should be classified.

The work of Watson and Crick also clearly illustrates that most scientific discoveries usually do not occur merely as the result of observations using modern techniques. It is important to have an idea that stretches beyond what is known and accepted. Scientific progress is often made because a researcher visualizes something no one has previously seen or for which there is actually no direct support. In the case of Watson and Crick, this is highly apparent. They conducted no experiments, but engaged in lively discussions between themselves and with others at their laboratory, and occasionally they built models. It reached the point that when an extra room became available at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the directors of the laboratory, Max Perutz and John Kendrew, told Crick: “We are going to put Jim and you in the same office, and you can talk to each other and not disturb the rest of us.” One illustration of the need for both new methods and ideas to ensure scientific progress is the fact that Perutz and Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the same year that Watson and Crick were awarded the Prize in Medicine.

Crick’s and Watson’s 1953 article laid the groundwork for the branch of science known today as molecular biology, Since then the pace of progress has been dazzling, and we are penetrating more deeply into the processes that control human evolution and functions. Yet as Crick has pointed out, the decades during which we have been aware of the structure of DNA are almost like a blink of the eye compared with the hundreds of millions of years that RNA and DNA have existed in all forms of life.

Scientific discoveries play a key role in the evolution of modern society. To a researcher, the moments when scientific discoveries occur are the most stimulating of his or her life. According to one widespread view it is impossible, in the true sense, to predict discoveries. It is important for those who plan research programs at various levels to realize this. The everyday work of science consists of conducting observations or experiments aimed at finding out whether our hypotheses bear any resemblance to reality. In other words, a creative imagination underlies every real improvement in our knowledge. It was not a scientist or philosopher, but a poet, who first classified this intellectual activity and found the right word to describe it. The poet was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the word was poesis, meaning the art of creation.

Using this broader definition of the word, Shelley declared in his famous essay “A Defense of Poetry” that poetry encompasses all science. He thus placed scientific creativity on an equal footing with the form of creativity we ordinarily associate with literature or the fine arts. Shelley also believed that a person cannot say “I shall write poetry.” Not even the greatest poets can say that. In the same way, a scientist cannot say “I shall make a scientific discovery.” Not even the greatest scientists can say that.

Shelley also served as a major inspiration for the Nobel Prize in Litera­ture. Even as a young man, Alfred Nobel had been stimulated by Shelley’s poetry and influenced by his philosophy of life. When Nobel wrote his drama Nemesis in 1895, there was a clear kinship with Shelley’s Renaissance tragedy The Cenci. Both works were expressions of self-pity, something the misanthropic Alfred Nobel felt at that time.

Nobel’s interest in literature, and his own literary ambitions, probably influenced his inclusion of a Nobel Prize in Literature in his final 1895 will. This decision provided a welcome opportunity to honor and encourage prominent writers. At the same time, the Nobel prizes thereby reflected Alfred Nobel’s personality in a more complete way.

Shelley is also of interest in another context. Nobel’s great passion for the cause of peace had been stimulated by Shelley’s clear stand against the madness of war. Nobel often speculated about the effects of deterrent weapons and uttered to Bertha von Suttner the now familiar words, “I would like to invent something, a machine or a substance, that would achieve such frightening mass destruction that war would become an impos­sibility for all time.” Von Suttner nevertheless awakened Nobel’s interest in the goals and working methods of the new peace movement. In 1892, he also participated in a peace congress in Bern. It was probably somewhat later the same year, during an excursion on Lake Zurich with von Suttner and her husband on Nobel’s yacht “Mignon” that the idea of the Peace Prize was born. Today, the Nobel Prize for efforts to promote peace is being awarded in Oslo, Norway, and we send our kindest wishes to the laureates and other participants in that ceremony.

In closing, I would like to thank the prize-awarding institutions for their extensive and important work. They have fulfilled the awesome task of serving as an international forum to assess the performance of candidates in scientific and literary fields, or of efforts to promote peace. I would also like to extend a special welcome to the 1993 Nobel Laureates and express our appreciation and gratitude for your outstanding efforts. Your work for the benefit of humanity has made a vital contribution to the prestige and international stature of the Nobel Prizes. I would like to convey our warm­est gratitude for this on behalf of the Nobel Foundation.