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 you to the 1995 Prize Award Ceremony. I would especially like to welcome this year’s laureates and their families to the Nobel festivities in Stockholm.

In 1995, a century has passed since Alfred Nobel signed his will. The Nobel Foundation therefore celebrated the 100th anniversary of this event – which led to the creation of the Nobel Prizes – in a ceremony at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, where the signing took place.

Before Alfred Nobel drafted his will, he had built up a successful industrial empire. He had tamed the violent power of nitroglycerine, patenting his product in 1866 under the name of dynamite. Various forms of dynamite, together with the blasting cap also invented by Nobel, were among the world’s most important explosives for nearly a century. However, Nobel was not only a skilled inventor but also a leading businessman, who personally held together a worldwide corporation consisting of more than 90 compa­nies in some 20 countries.

Alfred Nobel’s extensive correspondence reveals that he often pondered the purpose of his life. In this context, he expressed a wish to help improve the human condition.

This desire found partial expression in two wills, one dated 1893 and the other 1895. Under the earlier will, part of his fortune would go to a fund managed by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Every year, the income from this fund would be distributed as “a reward for the most important pio­neering discoveries or works in the field of knowledge and progress.”

Nobel’s final will, dated November 27, 1895, is handwritten. He drafted it without the help of lawyers. In this will, Nobel declared that the return on the bulk of his fortune should be divided among five prizes: in physics, chem­istry, physiology or medicine, literature and efforts to promote peace.

Alfred Nobel’s 1893 will does not mention the literature prize. Only the final will entrusts the Swedish Academy with awarding a prize in literature. According to some, this change of attitude may be related to Nobel’s renewed interest during 1895 in his own writing. Among other things, he was working on a drama, Nemesis. However, Nobel had been deeply interested in literature from an early age. In his youth, he had written poetry in English and showed a certain talent, according to some observers. The phrase “of an idealistic tendency,” which occurs in the passage on the literature prize, has been interpreted in many different ways. It is thus not surprising that the values on which the Swedish Academy has based its selection of the laureates in Literature have changed over the years.

Another difference between Nobel’s final will and the one from 1893 is that he clearly defined the various science prizes. We do not know what thoughts underlay his change of mind. Because these prizes are clearly delin­eated, the prize adjudicators do not have to weigh greatly divergent areas against each other. Meanwhile the prize fields are so broad that they allow the awarding institutions to honor contributions to a relatively large portion of the whole scientific spectrum. However, these considerations are only one of the factors that have given the Nobel Prizes a clear advantage compared to many other prizes. Another circumstance that has also played a major role in giving the Nobel Prizes the prestige and respect they enjoy is their international character. In his will, Nobel wrote:

“It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration what­ever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not.”

To Alfred Nobel, a man with a cosmopolitan upbringing and humanist values who had built up an industrial corporation with broad international roots, this was a natural position to take. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, though, it was strongly criticized. Many felt Nobel was “unpatriotic” not to restrict the prizes to Swedes, or at least Scandinavians.

Every year, proposals for candidates stream into the prize-awarding institutions from all parts of the globe. Every October, the eyes of the world turn to Stockholm and Oslo to find out who has been honored with the year’s Nobel Prizes. The result of this year’s prize-adjudication process was also sent out via the Internet. With the assistance of auxiliary computers in various loca­tions around the world, they received instant global distribution.

The prize-awarding bodies are sometimes criticized because they give Nobel Prizes for discoveries that occurred many years earlier. This criticism carries special weight because in his will, Nobel stated that the prizes should be awarded “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” The Nobel Prizes were naturally intended to honor those who had made important scientific advances, for example. But one reason behind the wording of the will may be that Nobel primarily intended to promote research by ensuring complete financial independence to those who could be expected, on the basis of their earlier work, to make further advances.

The prize-awarding bodies cannot immediately reward important scientific discoveries because the significance of the research in question does not become apparent until many years later. The history of various sciences pro­vides many examples of the importance of basic scientific advances in solving practical problems and broadening our horizons, making way for advances that affect all of humanity.

Another factor contributing to the time-lag between a discovery and a Nobel Prize is that for centuries, the scientific community has always tested new scientific discoveries. It does so by repeating reported work in other laboratories and confirming or questioning its conclusions. In the next stage, a discovery is used as a springboard for new advances. In a process that resembles the evolution of species, our knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings moves forward.

It is the task of the prize-awarding institutions to reflect these advances by identifying the important steps in the development process. They must ensure that the resulting structure, which represents the history of the Nobel Prizes, does not have too many defective parts. Nor may too many of the most important building blocks be missing.

Today in Stockholm we are paying tribute to some of the foremost figures in scientific research and literature, and in Oslo a prize is being awarded to prominent representatives of efforts to promote peace. On behalf of the Nobel Foundation, I would like to convey our warm gratitude for your important contributions. It is the importance of your work that determines the global reputation of the Nobel Prizes.