The Nobel Prize remains the highest regarded prize given for intellectual achievements. Recipients have ranged from Albert Einstein to Wole Soyinka to Barack Obama. The selection process is highly low-key, with the award given to six fields: Economics, Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Peace.
Multiple people, depending on their achievements, can be awarded in the same category. Marie Curie is the first woman who has two awards from two different categories—chemistry and physics. She won them years apart. Who could forget Malala’s brave story of being shot in the head due to her fight for women’s education?
The recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel are as listed below.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced by Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General for the Nobel Assembly and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, on Monday 5 October. Drs. Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday received the prize for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus. The Nobel committee said the three scientists had “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”
The Nobel Prize in Physics was announced by Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Tuesday 6 October. Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the prize on Tuesday for their discoveries that have improved understanding of the universe, including work on black holes.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced by Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Wednesday 7 October. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their work on the development of Crispr-Cas9, a method for genome editing.
The Nobel Prize in Literature was announced Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on Thursday 8 October 2020. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Gluck, a remarkable poet, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
The Nobel Peace Prize was announced by Berit Reiss-Andersen, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, on Friday 9 October. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the World Food Program “for its efforts to combat a surge in global hunger amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has swept around the world with devasting impact.”
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was announced by Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Monday 12 October.
The Nobel Economic Science Prize Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson were awarded the Nobel in economic sciences on Monday for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.
