Ten men, two women and two organizations will receive the prestigious Nobel Medals this year at ceremonies in Oslo and Stockholm. Numerous awards from the past two years that were unable to come to Sweden in 2020 and 2021 due to the corona pandemic will also be present at the ceremony in Stockholm.
“After two years of canceled celebrations, we can finally welcome the Nobel laureates to Stockholm,” said Nobel Foundation Executive Director Vidar Helgesen. This is 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.
It does not start in Stockholm on Saturday, but in Oslo. Appropriately, on Human Rights Day, human rights organizations Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) from Ukraine and Memorial from Russia, as well as human rights lawyer Ales Byaljazki from Belarus will be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in the early afternoon at City Hall in the early afternoon. Since Byalyatski has been imprisoned in his homeland for a year and a half, his wife Natalya Pinchuk receives his award.
At the beginning of October, the institutions responsible for the respective Nobel Prizes announced who would receive the prizes this year. By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights activists, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has this time broadened the notion of peace, the committee’s chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen said at a press conference on Friday. They wanted to emphasize that sometimes peace efforts 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 our laureates work for.”
The Nobel Prizes go back to the dynamite inventor and prize giver Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). They are traditionally awarded on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10 – the Nobel Peace Prize being the only one in Oslo, all others in Stockholm. This year, the prize is once again endowed with prize money of ten million Swedish kronor (approximately €920,000) for each category.
At the ceremony in Stockholm later in the afternoon, alongside other exceptional researchers and Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, a scientist who conducts research in Germany will be honored: this time the Swedish evolution researcher Svante Pääbo, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI). -EVA) in Leipzig, receives the Nobel Prize for Medicine. According to the plan, Pääbo is allowed to sit next to the heir to the Swedish throne, Crown Princess Victoria, during the pompous Nobel banquet.
Two former German laureates will also be present: Benjamin List, one of the 2021 Nobel laureates in chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel, one of the Nobel laureates in physics in 2020. In contrast, one of this year’s honorees in the chemistry category already knows the procedure : The American researcher Barry Sharpless already received the Nobel Prize for chemistry 21 years ago.
(SDA)