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 1994 Prize Award Ceremony. We especially welcome this year’s Laureates to the Nobel festivities in Stockholm. Through your outstanding efforts in various fields, you have contributed to the respect and prestige associated with the Nobel Prizes. We hope that your visit to Sweden will include a fruitful exchange of ideas with colleagues in the scientific and cultural realms.

The festivities at which we will pay tribute to the 1994 Laureates follow a traditional pattern. This year, however, the Nobel Foundation has achieved even more extensive global coverage of these events in the news media. This has given Nobel Day – December 10 – greater international publicity, enab­ling viewers and listeners in many corners of the world to follow the Prize Award Ceremony and the Banquet.

Ever since the beginning of this century the prize-awarding institutions have, with a few exceptions, awarded Nobel Prizes annually in their respecti­ve fields. They have selected the person or persons who, in their opinion and in keeping with the will of Alfred Nobel, have rendered the greatest services to mankind during the previous year. The history of the Nobel Prizes has thereby also become part of the history of each respective field of know­ledge, whether it be the sciences, literature or the promotion of peace.

During 1994 a unique Nobel Laureate passed away: Linus Pauling. He occupies a special position among the Laureates, since he remains the only person ever to have received two undivided Nobel Prizes: the Chemistry Prize in 1954 and the Peace Prize in 1962 (presented in 1963).

Pauling is widely regarded as one of the most important chemists of the 20th century. He described the nature of chemical bonds and did epoch­ making work on the structure of proteins. His research work linked physics with chemistry, and chemistry with biology and medicine. He was a colorful person with unconventional working methods. To solve difficult problems, he used his intuition. His close associates maintained that the depth of Pauling’s intuitive understanding of a question was such that he often knew the solution to a problem before having developed a theory to explain it.

Aside from his scientific work, Pauling pursued an indefatigable campaign against nuclear weapons testing, proliferation of nuclear weapons and war in general as a method of resolving international conflicts. Pauling’s intuition undoubtedly also played a role when he raised the issue of the effects of radioactive fallout on human genes. In a speech to the students at Washington University, he said: “I believe that no human being should be sacrificed to the project of perfecting nuclear weapons that could kill hun­dreds of millions of human beings and devastate this beautiful world in which we live.”

This was the speech in which he outlined the main principles of his appeal against nuclear weapons testing, which attracted huge publicity. More than 11,000 scientists from some fifty countries signed the appeal, which Pauling handed to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld.

Pauling continued his propaganda campaign with undiminished zeal, deli­vered hundreds of speeches, organized conferences and participated in demonstrations. He is probably the only man to have marched in an anti­-nuclear arms demonstration in front of the White House, dressed in a tuxe­do, then attended a dinner on the other side of the fence as a guest of the president, John F. Kennedy.

After a long period of apparent total deadlock on this issue, in the sum­mer of 1963 the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty.

One reason I have described Pauling’s life work today is to illustrate what the history of the Nobel Prizes can teach us. Scientists are often criticized for developing methods and techniques without considering the deleterious consequences their work may have for mankind. A knowledge of the long-term impact of various discoveries on the human and natural habitat would undoubtedly be enriching and would dispel misunderstandings. To a large extent, the history of the Nobel Prizes is the history of 20th century science, literature and efforts to further peace.

The Nobel Foundation is currently studying the feasibility of establishing a Nobel museum in Stockholm. Meanwhile the Norwegian Nobel Committee is pursuing discussions on a separate Peace Prize museum, to be located in Oslo. The task of the proposed museum in Stockholm would be to elucidate the life of Alfred Nobel, the history of the Nobel Foundation and, above all, the contributions of the Laureates. Our aim is to utilize modern techniques to illustrate, from a global perspective, the lines of development in the Nobel Prize fields. We thereby hope to explain important advances in science, tech­nology and the humanities during the 20th century.

Among other things, the history of science can shed light on the role of scientific discoveries in the development of the society we now live in. It can also contribute to an understanding of how scientists make discoveries, how they employ and test hypotheses, and perhaps most importantly, how they discover the errors in earlier assumptions.

One of this century’s best-known philosophers of science, the late Karl Papper, argued that there are actually no scientific truths. The need for sci­entific objectivity implies that every scientific generalization must always be provisional. Of course it may be confirmed, but every attempt at confirma­tion is based on other generalizations which, in turn, are provisional. Only our subjective sense of conviction can give us a sense of absolute certainty. Real science means that we consciously search for errors in earlier generali­zations: an approach to scientific endeavor that has been called “critical rationalism.” The final implication of this argument is that we do not become scientists only by possessing knowledge, but by continuously and cri­tically searching for the truth.

The proposed Nobel museum will also contain a literary portion. It should focus on the works of the Laureates in literature and relate them to the cul­tural and social situation in different eras. The provisions of Nobel’s will con­cerning the Literature Prize serve as a natural starting point and are, of cour­se, closely related to the Swedish Academy’s criteria for assessing candidates for the Prize over the years. These criteria should be presented, along with examples of typical writings by the Laureates. Major authors who did not receive the Prize should also be mentioned.

A Nobel museum in Stockholm and a Nobel Peace Prize museum in Oslo could become important centers providing many-faceted information to school youth, university students and researchers in Scandinavia and, via modern media, also on a global basis.

Creating a Nobel museum in Stockholm will require the participation and support of many people, and especially from the Swedish government. By making objects and documents available to the museum, the Laureates themselves can help clarify the various lines of development. Our museum concept has elicited heavy, enthusiastic interest from many quarters.

In closing, I would like to convey the gratitude of the Nobel Foundation to the prize-awarding institutions for the extensive and exhaustive work that preceded the awarding of the 1994 Nobel Prizes. For natural reasons, we hear very little about their research and discussions, since this work is sur rounded by great secrecy. But it was the single-minded and conscientious efforts of these institutions that laid the groundwork for the selection of this year’s Laureates.