Nobel Prize history: Marie Curie, Rabindranath Tagore and the one Pasteur missed

How the Nobel Prizes began

Alfred Nobel (1833 to 1896) was a Swedish chemist and industrialist who made a fortune from dynamite, which he patented in 1867, and from explosives factories across Europe. On 27 November 1895, in Paris, he signed a will leaving most of his wealth to fund annual prizes for those who, in the preceding year, had brought the greatest benefit to humankind in five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. He died in San Remo, Italy, on 10 December 1896.

The will was contested by relatives and took years to settle. The Nobel Foundation was set up in 1900, and the first prizes were presented on 10 December 1901, the anniversary of Nobel's death. A sixth award, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was added by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and first given in 1969.

Why the prizes are announced in October

Nominations close on 31 January. Committees spend the spring and summer assessing the shortlisted candidates, and the awarding bodies vote in the autumn. The announcements come over about a week in early October, usually starting with medicine on a Monday, then physics, chemistry, literature, peace and finally economics. The laureates receive their medals and diplomas on 10 December, in Stockholm and in Oslo for the Peace Prize.

A few rules shape the history. A prize can be shared by at most three people. Since 1974 it cannot be given to someone who has died, unless they die after the announcement. And the names of nominees and nominators are kept secret for fifty years, after which they appear in the searchable nomination archive on nobelprize.org. That archive is a useful source for students: it shows who was nominated and missed out.

Marie Curie: the first woman laureate and the first to win twice

Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, studied in Paris from 1891 and in 1898, with her husband Pierre, announced two new elements, polonium and radium. The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was divided: half to Henri Becquerel, who had discovered radiation from uranium in 1896, and half to Pierre and Marie Curie “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel”.

She was very nearly left out. The first nomination named only Becquerel and Pierre Curie. The Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a committee member, warned Pierre, who wrote that if he was being considered, he wished to be considered together with his wife. She was added, and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris in April 1906. Marie took over his chair at the Sorbonne, the first woman professor there, and in 1911 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”. That made her the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and she remains the only person to win in two different sciences.

The second prize came in the middle of a press scandal about her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin. The chemist Svante Arrhenius, of the Nobel committee, wrote suggesting she stay away from Stockholm. She replied that the prize was for the discovery of radium and polonium and that she saw no connection between her scientific work and the facts of private life. She went, and gave her Nobel lecture on 11 December 1911. In 1935 her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie shared the Chemistry prize with her husband Frédéric Joliot for making artificial radioactive elements.

Rabindranath Tagore: the first non-European laureate, 1913

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941), the Bengali poet, songwriter and educator from Calcutta, won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first awarded to anyone from outside Europe. The Swedish Academy's citation praised his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.

The key phrase is “his own English words”. Tagore wrote in Bengali, but in 1912 he translated a selection of his songs and poems into English prose poems. Published in London as Gitanjali (Song Offerings), with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, they made him famous in Britain and Sweden within months. Members of the Academy could read him in English, and some in a Swedish translation. Poem 35 of the English Gitanjali, later much quoted in India, begins:

Tagore did not travel to Stockholm in 1913; the British minister in Sweden received the prize on his behalf. He used the prize money for his school at Santiniketan, which grew into Visva-Bharati University, and gave his Nobel lecture in Stockholm in May 1921. In March 2004 his Nobel medal was stolen from the museum at Visva-Bharati; the Swedish Academy later presented replicas. Many “Tagore quotes” online are not his, so check any quotation against his published works.

Why Louis Pasteur never won a Nobel Prize

Louis Pasteur is the most famous scientist people assume won a Nobel Prize and did not. The reason is simple: he died on 28 September 1895, two months before Nobel signed his will and six years before the first prizes. The prizes have never been awarded for work by someone already dead at the time of the award.

His work runs through the early prizes all the same. The first Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1901, went to Emil von Behring for serum therapy against diphtheria, research built on the germ theory Pasteur had championed. Scientists of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which he founded in 1888, won several: Alphonse Laveran (1907) for the role of protozoa in diseases such as malaria, Élie Metchnikoff (1908, shared) for immunity, Jules Bordet (1919), Charles Nicolle (1928) for showing that lice spread typhus, and in 2008 Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for discovering HIV.

Others missed out for different reasons. Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table, was nominated but never won before his death in 1907. Jagadish Chandra Bose, who demonstrated radio-wave experiments in Calcutta in the 1890s, never received one. The nomination archive shows who was considered, which makes these cases good research questions.

Nobel laureates among the figures you can study

Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to win a Nobel Prize, for brokering the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth between Russia and Japan.

Ideas for Nobel week in class

• Search the nomination archive: students look up who nominated Marie Curie, Tagore or Roosevelt, and who else was nominated the same year.
• Write a citation: after studying a scientist or writer, each student writes a 30-word prize motivation in the Nobel style, then compares it with a real one.
• Mock committee: groups each champion a candidate from history for a prize and argue for them under the real rules (no more than three winners, living people only).
• Read the lecture: Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel lecture is on nobelprize.org. Students find where she credits Pierre and why.
• Interview a laureate: students can ask an AI recreation of Marie Curie or Rabindranath Tagore on Yuga what the prize meant to them, by voice or text. The recreations are built from their writings but are not the real people and can get things wrong, so check answers against the lectures and biographies.

Our questions to ask Marie Curie and How did Marie Curie die? go further on Curie, and women scientists in history lists others to research.