This year’s Nobel Prize winners will be presented with their prizes on Saturday. Ten men, two women and two organizations will receive the prestigious Nobel medals at ceremonies in Oslo and Stockholm this year.
Numerous honorees from the previous two years who were unable to come to Sweden in 2020 and 2021 due to the corona pandemic will also be present at the Stockholm ceremony.
“After two years of canceled celebrations, we can finally welcome the Nobel Laureates to Stockholm,” said the Nobel Foundation’s Executive Director, Vidar Helgesen. This represents a fantastic opportunity to celebrate science, literature and peace efforts. This time, 27 Nobel Prize winners are expected to be present in the Swedish capital.
Today, however, it doesn’t start in Stockholm, but in Oslo. Appropriately, on Human Rights Day, the human rights organizations Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) from Ukraine and Memorial from Russia as well as human rights lawyer Ales Byalyatski from Belarus will be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in the early afternoon in the city hall there. Since Byalyatski has been imprisoned in his home country for a year and a half, his wife Natalya Pinchuk receives his prize.
At the beginning of October, the institutions responsible for the respective Nobel prizes announced who would receive the awards this year. By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights activists, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has broadened the concept of peace this time, as the committee’s chairwoman, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said at a press conference on Friday. One wanted to emphasize that peace efforts sometimes do not come from the state but from civil society. “This is the message we wanted to send: that peace is an achievement that comes with certain values ??that all of our laureates work for.”
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The Nobel Prizes go back to the dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). They are traditionally presented on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10th – the Nobel Peace Prize as the only one in Oslo, all others in Stockholm. This year, the award is once again endowed with prize money of ten million Swedish crowns (around 920,000 euros) for each category.
At the ceremony in Stockholm later in the afternoon, in addition to other exceptional researchers and the Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, a scientist who conducts research in Germany will also be honored: This time the Swedish evolutionary researcher Svante Pääbo, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, will receive the award the Nobel Prize in Medicine. According to the seating plan, Pääbo is allowed to sit next to the heir to the Swedish throne, Crown Princess Victoria, at the pompous Nobel banquet in the evening.
Two previous German laureates will also be there: Benjamin List, one of the 2021 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel, who was one of the 2020 Nobel Prize winners in Physics. One of this year’s honorees in the chemistry category, on the other hand, already knows the procedure: US researcher Barry Sharpless had already received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 21 years ago.
