Nobel Prize and prejudice

The planet's great and good are preparing for the mother of all celebrations: the centennial of the Nobel prize. But it's not without controversy, writes PAUL VALLEY.

Philately will get you nowhere, but they have recalled that too late at the Royal Mail. This week it published a new set of stamps, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize. Sounds uncontroversial? The stamp-issuers should have known better. For controversy seems to dog every step of the Nobel prize process, year in and year out. And this year, it seems, is to be no exception.

The row has developed over a booklet, which comes as part of the stamps' presentation package, in which the Royal Mail asked a British winner of each of the six Nobel prize categories - physics, chemistry, medicine, peace, literature and economics - to write a small article about their award.

The trouble is that physicist Professor Brian Josephson, of Cambridge University, decided to bring together his work on superconductors, for which he won the physics prize in 1973, with his hobby of pondering on the paranormal. His article suggested that quantum physics will one day lead to an understanding of the decidedly scientifically unrespectable subject of telepathy. Oops!

Now it could be that history will one day accord Professor Josephson a place in that distinguished group of geniuses who had scorn poured on them not because they were wrong, but rather because they were right before their time.

On the other hand, he could join the more ignominious ranks of Nobel laureates who ventured disastrously outside their area of expertise. Remember William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, who turned to the study of inherited intelligence and "discovered" that white races were cleverer than black? Or Kary Mullis, who came up with a revolutionary technique allowing scientists to make mass copies of genes, and then went on to suggest that HIV wasn't the cause of Aids?

Paradox has always been at the heart of the Nobel prize, even before it was formally inaugurated in 1901, on the fifth anniversary of the death of the man who left the money to fund it.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel had made his fortune from inventing dynamite. Sadly, in the process, he blew up his factory, causing the death of his youngest brother, and was branded by his neighbours as a mad scientist, and forbidden by the Swedish Government from rebuilding the factory. So he just transferred his experiments to a barge.

Nobel regarded himself as a pacifist, and hoped that the destructive powers of his inventions would help bring an end to wars. When this didn't seem to be happening, he left money in his will - which was bitterly contested by his relatives - to a system of prizes for "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". By the miracle of compound interest, the annual prizes are now worth 10 million Swedish kronor - just under $1 million each.

But the cash has regularly brought not just cachet but controversy. Next week, the winners of this year's prizes will be announced in Stockholm and Oslo amid a razzmatazz that will bring many of the 225 living Nobel laureates together for centenary celebrations and discussions on how the world can avoid conflicts in the 21st century. On past form, the decisions as to who should receive the world's most prized intellectual plaudits will provoke as much contumely as they do celebration.

Usually, the science prizes escape the furore. Partly this is because most people find it impossible to understand what laureate scientists have actually done. Partly it is because in science there exist objective criteria against which achievement can be measured - especially if you wait for peer approbation before awarding a prize, which is what the Nobel committees often do.

This can mean a long wait - the nuclear astrophysicist William Fowler, who explained supernovae, waited nearly 30 years for his, and Peyton Rous, who discovered a cancer virus in 1903, waited 66 years.

But the final results are relatively uncontentious; the list of science laureates reads like a 20th-century history of science, from Wilfred Roentgen (the discoverer of x-rays) onward, through Marie Curie, Alexander Fleming, Albert Einstein, Francis Crick and James Watson, to the present day.

The same cannot be said for the other prizes. Economics has escaped relatively unscathed because the prize is awarded not to those who run central banks and finance ministries but to theorists who do not have the indignity of having to put their notions into practice. The exceptions to this rule, Merton Scholes and Robert Merton, were honoured in 1997 for their work on risk-modelling for Long Term Capital Management in New York. A year later, LTCM crashed.

But the prize for literature is another story. Ever since, in its first year, the prize was awarded not to Leo Tolstoy but to some French poet called Sully Prudhomme, news of the latest Nobel prize for literature has been greeted with discord and disputation. So much so that the list of those who did not get it - Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges - seems to outweigh those who did (see box), even without allowing for the fact that a couple of greats, Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak, turned it down.

Scorn has routinely been poured upon the intellects, judgment and motives of the judges - the 18 members of the Swedish Academy who select the winners from a secret shortlist of five or six, put together by an anonymous committee from the advice of a network of experts and nominations received by Nobel laureates from around the world.

Time, that greatest of judges, refuses to comply with the Nobel committee's deadlines. Political opportunism is thought by many to sit in on the proceedings; the award to Seamus Heaney, some noted, came at a timely point in the Irish peace process, just as Nadine Gordimer's award appeared to mark the death of apartheid; Wole Soyinka's to bolster democracy in Nigeria; and last year's award to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, persona non grata with Beijing, may have been intended to spur China to a better human rights record.

But it is the peace prize that is - irony of ironies - most fiercely fought over. Yet perhaps this is not so surprising, for there are always those with a vested interest in maintaining conflict - so those who bring it to an end are bound to irritate someone.

Even so, it seems odd that the archetypal pacifist Mahatma Gandhi never got the prize, while the war-mongering Henry Kissinger did.

There have even been those wags who suggested that you have to have been a terrorist to be awarded it. Many peace laureates - including Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor, and the Guatemalan Indian-rights activist Rigoberta Menchu - have all had such accusations levelled at them, though the distinction between a terrorist and a freedom-fighter, we are all coming to learn, seems to exist largely in the eye of the beholder.

Worse than that, the Nobel peace prize has sometimes seemed a jinxed trophy. Rabin, like an earlier Middle Eastern peace laureate, the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, died at the hands of one of his own zealots who felt outraged at the betrayal that was peace.

In Ireland, the award to The Peace People in 1976 ended with bitter division between the joint-winners, Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams, over how to spend the prize money, with Williams using her share to seek personal escape to a better life in Florida. And the cheers at the next joint-Irish award, to John Hume and David Trimble, now seem to echo hollowly around Ulster streets, once more racked with gunfire and burning cars.

Perhaps we should take a less jaundiced view. Often, as in Ireland and the Middle East, the peace prize seems to be awarded aspirationally, to encourage further progress. And there can be no doubt that, even in situations mired in blood and oppression, such as Burma, the award has done something to mitigate the harshness of the treatment meted out to individuals such as Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize in 1991.

Certainly, the prestige that the peace prize and the other Nobel awards carry suggests that the handful of Swedes who cast their eye about the world every year from their northern fastness do get it right more often than they get it wrong. For every public slip - like the award for work on insulin in 1923 to a Canadian professor of physiology, John Macleod, who did no more than lend his lab to the real researchers while he went on a fishing trip - there are evidently many blessed decisions taken in private.

Not least among these was the decision not to give the peace prize to the Filipino dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos, who leaned on the Chief Justice of the Philippines to nominate her to the Oslo Committee in 1978.

Nor have the academicians yet succumbed to the inquiry by incarcerated thriller writer Jeffrey Archer as to whether he had any chance of winning the Nobel prize for literature. Self-nomination has always been said automatically to disqualify a person. At least until now.

Who knows what news next week might bring. With the Nobel prize, you just never know.