Extremely eye news reporter Zhang Yang
On October 4, local time in Sweden, the Nobel Prize Committee announced the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which also marked the official opening of the annual Nobel Prize selection.
Although the Nobel Prize is famous, do you know some of the small stories behind it?
Three amended wills
"I, the signatory, Alfred Bernard Nobel, hereby declare, after serious consideration, that the following is a will concerning the disposition of the property I have left behind after my death:
...... From this fund, a foundation is formed, and the interest generated by the fund is awarded annually to those who have made outstanding contributions to humanity in the previous year. Divide this interest into five equal parts and distribute them as follows:
A prize for those who have made the most significant discoveries or inventions in the world of physics;
A prize for those who have made the most significant discoveries or improvements in chemistry;
A prize for those who have made the most significant discoveries in the medical and physiological worlds;
A prize for those who have created the best work of idealistic tendencies in the literary world;
The final award is given to those who have made the greatest efforts or contributed to the promotion of national unity and friendship, the abolition or reduction of the standing army and the organization and publicity of the Peace Conference.
..... No consideration will be given to the nationality of the winning candidates... Whoever is most eligible should receive the bonus, I hereby declare that it is my urgent desire to award the bonus in this way....."
Nobel, the father of modern dynamite
The above paragraph is an excerpt from the will of Alfred Bernard Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin explosives and the "father of modern explosives", who is also familiar to the world as the founder of the Nobel Prize, or the Nobel Prize was founded according to his will.
In the last years of his life, Nobel made three similar bequests, except that the last will (made in 1895) cancelled the distribution of relatives and friends, and used all the property to set up a reward fund, and in early 1897 (Nobel died on December 10, 1896) was published in Sweden.
A will that almost became invalid
The birth of the Nobel Prize has not been smooth sailing.
At the beginning of the publication of Nobel's will, Swedish public opinion was full of condemnation, some people criticized Nobel as a Swede but distributed his property to people around the world, which was a manifestation of "unpatrioticism"; some people accused That Nobel set up prizes to support individual outstanding figures, which did not help social progress; and some people questioned that the selectors might be at risk of accepting bribes and could not achieve their tasks.
In addition, some Swedish lawyers have also "pricked" the will, saying that the will has legal deficiencies. Because the will does not clearly indicate who is responsible for the custody of all the property, and further points out that the executor has no right to inherit the estate, and the foundation that inherits the inheritance does not exist, the will is invalid.
Part of the manuscript of Nobel's will
Fortunately, Laguna Solman, the main executor of Nobel's will, did not give up, mobilizing financial, scientific and legal experts from various countries to clean up the estate and resolve disputes. After several years of hard work, with the support of members of the Liudubek family, Nobel's second brother, the Nobel Foundation was established.
The King of Sweden finally declared the Nobel Will into force in 1898, and the Swedish Parliament later adopted the Charter of the Nobel Foundation.
On December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death, six people, including the German physicist Roentgen, who discovered X-rays, won the first Nobel Prize.
Supplementary economics prize and the legendary "Nobel Prize in Mathematics"
Attentive readers may also have noticed that in Nobel's will, there were initially only 5 prizes. In 1968, on the occasion of its 300th anniversary, the Riksbank donated a large amount of money to the Nobel Fund, adding the Nobel Prize in Economics, and in 1969, it was awarded for the first time, forming the current six major awards.
And because the name of the Nobel Prize is too big, there are always people who don't know much about it who think that there is a "Nobel Prize in Mathematics", which makes a lot of jokes.
So why isn't there a math prize? The mainstream view of historians is that, limited by his time and scientific view, Nobel could not foresee the great role that mathematics would play in promoting the development of science, so he ignored it.
However, there is also a more romantic view. Some scholars believe that Nobel once had a girlfriend who was 13 years younger than him, but his girlfriend eloped with a mathematician, and Nobel has always been angry about this matter, and the lack of a mathematical prize is related to the frustration of his own love.
However, Nobel did not have a wife and children in his life, and his love was tragic.
How much of Nobel's legacy is
It has been 120 years since the bonus was first awarded in 1901. This year's Nobel prize is as high as 10 million Swedish krona (at the latest exchange rate, about 7.368 million yuan).
After 120 years of issuance and such a high prize money, how much money does a private fund have to be so "squandered"? Let's first take a look at how much of Nobel's legacy was left behind when he died that year.
In fact, Nobel is not very clear about the amount of his assets. According to his will, the conversion of all his assets into cash is in itself a huge project involving the economy and laws of many countries. Fortunately, the executors of his estate, Solman and others traveled between many countries for several years, and finally had a preliminary outline of the cleanup of Nobel's legacy in 1900, which was converted into cash, and was worth about 33.23 million Swedish kronor and about 9.2 million US dollars at that time, of which 31 million kronors were taken out to form the Nobel Fund.
List of Nobel's legacy
Since the inaugural edition, the individual prizes of the Nobel Prize have increased as a whole: 150,000 crowns in 1901, 1 million crowns in 1980, 6 million crowns in 1991, 9 million crowns in 2000 and 10 million crowns in 2001. According to incomplete statistics, from 1991 to 2014, the Nobel Prize was issued a total of 163.35 million crowns, which has far exceeded the initial 31 million crowns.
The Nobel Fund, which once faced bankruptcy
In fact, nobel's will at the beginning of this article states that it is "to establish a foundation with this fund and reward others with the interest generated by the fund".
That is to say, 31 million is the principal, not put there and do not move the annual money, the Nobel Prize should be the interest generated by its investment to be issued.
In the beginning, because the interest rate of the fund was not high, the bonus was not generous. In 1901, the single prize money for the first edition was only 150,000 crowns, the second was 140,000 crowns, and then it decreased year by year, and the 115,000 crowns in 1923 was the all-time low of the Nobel Prize (only numerically).
The amount of the Nobel Prize awarded from 1901 to 2019
In the early days of the foundation, the investment strategy was quite conservative, and in order to avoid any risk, the funds were fully invested in bank deposits and government bonds. The income from bank deposits and public debt investments is quite limited, and the Nobel Foundation, in addition to paying bonuses every year, also has to maintain the cost of operation, and the operating conditions are not ideal. More than 50 years after the fund was founded, the Nobel Fund's assets have lost nearly 60%.
In 1953, the foundation's assets were only more than 3 million US dollars, and considering inflation and currency depreciation, the 3 million US dollars at this time was only equivalent to 300,000 US dollars in 1896, and the value of the bonuses issued was also reduced year by year, and the foundation was almost facing the risk of bankruptcy.
With the help of the government, the foundation's assets rose more than 90 times
Beginning in 1953, as the Nobel Foundation was in danger of bankruptcy, the Swedish government came to the aid and allowed the foundation to invest independently in projects that were risky but highly profitable.
With the government as a backer, since then, the investment income of the Nobel Foundation has gradually improved. In 1968, the Riksbank donated a large amount of funds to the foundation as a principal, which further promoted the development of the Nobel Foundation.
In early 1990, the Nobel Foundation made a fortune by selling all its shares in the "recruiter" company before the Swedish financial crisis. By the end of 1999, the total market value of the Nobel Foundation's assets had reached an all-time high of SEK 3.938 billion, far exceeding the principal of 31 million.
Proportion of the Nobel Foundation's asset investment from 2015 to 2019
However, the market is risky and investment needs to be cautious. This sentence applies to everyone.
The Dot-com bubble of 2001 and the global financial crisis of 2008 also affected the Nobel Foundation, losing nearly one-fifth of its investment. As of 2011, the total assets of the Nobel Foundation are 2.86 billion crowns, which is still more than 90 times the principal.
How to determine the amount of the Nobel Prize prize, and how to issue it
For individual prizes, if one person wins, then he owns the entire prize money alone. For example, Mo Yan, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, received a prize of 8 million Swedish kronor, or about 7.5 million yuan.
If two people share a prize, the winner splits the entire prize money equally. For example, the scientists David Julius and Arden Patapultian, who have just won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine this year, will divide the 10 million prize equally, each receiving 5 million Swedish kronor.
If three people win the prize, the prize money is distributed in a 2:1:1 ratio. For example, in the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Tu Youyou won 4 million Swedish kronor, and the other two scientists divided the remaining 4 million equally.
Nobel Medal on the official website of the Nobel Prize Committee
In fact, according to Nobel's original wishes, the ideal prize amount should be able to ensure that a scholar can still focus on scientific research work after 20 years without doing other work to make a living. The first SEK 150,000 was awarded in 1901, which was roughly equivalent to the salary of a professor for 20 years at that time.
However, due to the poor management of the aforementioned foundation, the amount of the Nobel Prize was once very low. In the later period, even if the value exceeded 150,000 crowns, the amount of the prize money has not been able to achieve the original intention of establishing the foundation, taking into account factors such as inflation and depreciation.
It was not until 1991 that the amount of the Nobel Prize was adjusted to SEK 6 million, and the nominal and actual value of the prize was equivalent to that of the 1901 prize, and the Nobel Prize did not return to its original intention until 90 years after it was first awarded, and has since increased year by year.
Winners spend money in a variety of ways
As of 2019, the Nobel Prize has been awarded 597 times, with 950 winners. With so many people winning prizes, how do they spend their prize money?
There are house buyers, everyone knows Mo Yan, in that year, he used the prize money to buy a 200-square-meter new house outside the fifth ring road of Beijing; there were debts, the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature winner and Finnish writer Silampa owed a total of 2.5 million Finnish marks to the publishing company before winning the award; others, there are also tourism, public welfare, continue to invest in scientific research and so on.
One of the more famous was Einstein, a famous scientist who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. He made an agreement when he divorced his first wife that if he received a bonus, it would be given to his ex-wife and two sons, and he did fulfill this agreement.
(The data comes from Nobel's official website, wiki, Zhihu, and Global Network, and the source comes from Nobel's official website)
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