Nobel Prize, Stockholm Sweden
December 5 - 14, 2005
Barry J Marshall - Robin Warren co recipients, Medicine
Dagens Nytheter Newspaper December 11, 2005
Only men...
If you thought that women had finally won their
place in the host of penguin-clad celebrities, you
were grievously mistaken.
During the Nobel
ceremony, Stockholm's Concert Hall in its winter
best once more saw the enthronement of ten laureates
in tails. Last year, women won half the prize money,
but this year everything ran to traditional form.
On the podium behind the laureates and the royal family, only seven of the 102 academics were women, and they shone like brightly wrapped chocolates in a bowl of mint-filled licorice.
Shining brightest, as usual, was the royal family. Silvia wore a dress whose colour might be described as cornflower blue, princess Lillian was wearing lime green. Primitive designations, bearing in mind that Physics laureates Roy Glauber, John Hall and Theodor Hänsch have developed a method of using laser light to indicate the wave frequency of any given colour to an accuracy of 15 decimal places.
The three Physics laureates were the first to receive their prizes from the king's hand, but first they listened to the new chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Marcus Storch. He noted that it is now 110 years since Alfred Nobel signed his will.
King Oscar II was highly indignant over the unpatriotic stunt of giving money to foreigners. The labour movement was also critical. Hjalmar Branting wrote the following in the official Social Democratic newspaper: "A millionaire making a donation may personally deserve a great deal of respect, but it would be better to avoid both the millions and the donations"
Today Branting's modern-day successor was conspicuous in the centre of the front row beside his wife, Anitra Steen. She was wearing a dress as red as a May Day banner.
They heard Erik Sunnegårdh sing arias by Puccini and Verdi and saw the very unusual sight of a chemist who never took his PhD receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Yves Chauvin works at a research institute for the oil industry, and laid the foundations for a new method of building organic molecules.
Richard Schrock and Robert Grubbs perfected the method. In his speech, Professor Per Ahlberg of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences compared the method to a dance in which the hosts induce the guests to swap partners. A dance of that kind has probably never been seen at any Nobel Festival.
The Medicine laureate, Barry Marshall, was almost certainly not prepared to celebrate his prize by once again drinking the cocktail that convinced him that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria. That stingaroo consisted of a petri dish of Helicobacter pylori and tepid beef tea.
This year's Nobel laureates weren't able to enjoy Stockholm in the snow, but were able instead to experience the Concert Hall in its winter best with 10,000 white flowers, silver fir and eucalyptus.
If the British dramatist and son of a tailor, Harold Pinter, had not been seriously ill, he would probably have found himself beside one of the Economics laureates, Robert Aumann, on the podium. Just imagine what they might have whispered to each other! Harold Pinter used his Nobel lecture for an intense and incandescent critique of the USA and Great Britain and their war in Iraq. Professor Aumann, an Israeli, thinks that disarmament has made the world less secure.
Aumann himself has been the centre of a large-scale security operation. However, the security service hadn't thought of the risks of using ceremonial candelabra at the Academy of Sciences' banquet on Wednesday evening. Robert Aumann's jacket and shirt caught fire, but the games theorist took the whole thing with composure and made it clear that if you were going to be struck by an accident of this kind, then it was an honour for it to happen on an occasion like this.
This year's Nobel Day coincided with the Jewish sabbath, which meant that the deeply religious professor Aumann went to the synagogue on Saturday morning instead of practising his bows at the dress rehearsal for the prize-giving. He caused a problem for the security service - as Jews are not allowed to use a limousine on the sabbath, Bob Aumann walked from the Grand Hotel to the Concert Hall.
The value of this year's Nobels is the same as last year - ten million Swedish kronor per prize. Since all the prizes awarded at the Stockholm ceremony except one were shared by a number of laureates, the absent Harold Pinter received the fattest cheque.
His publisher Stephen Page accepted the ten million kronor on his behalf, together with a diploma painted by Karin Mamma Andersson.
On the podium behind the laureates and the royal family, only seven of the 102 academics were women, and they shone like brightly wrapped chocolates in a bowl of mint-filled licorice.
Shining brightest, as usual, was the royal family. Silvia wore a dress whose colour might be described as cornflower blue, princess Lillian was wearing lime green. Primitive designations, bearing in mind that Physics laureates Roy Glauber, John Hall and Theodor Hänsch have developed a method of using laser light to indicate the wave frequency of any given colour to an accuracy of 15 decimal places.
The three Physics laureates were the first to receive their prizes from the king's hand, but first they listened to the new chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Marcus Storch. He noted that it is now 110 years since Alfred Nobel signed his will.
King Oscar II was highly indignant over the unpatriotic stunt of giving money to foreigners. The labour movement was also critical. Hjalmar Branting wrote the following in the official Social Democratic newspaper: "A millionaire making a donation may personally deserve a great deal of respect, but it would be better to avoid both the millions and the donations"
Today Branting's modern-day successor was conspicuous in the centre of the front row beside his wife, Anitra Steen. She was wearing a dress as red as a May Day banner.
They heard Erik Sunnegårdh sing arias by Puccini and Verdi and saw the very unusual sight of a chemist who never took his PhD receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Yves Chauvin works at a research institute for the oil industry, and laid the foundations for a new method of building organic molecules.
Richard Schrock and Robert Grubbs perfected the method. In his speech, Professor Per Ahlberg of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences compared the method to a dance in which the hosts induce the guests to swap partners. A dance of that kind has probably never been seen at any Nobel Festival.
The Medicine laureate, Barry Marshall, was almost certainly not prepared to celebrate his prize by once again drinking the cocktail that convinced him that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria. That stingaroo consisted of a petri dish of Helicobacter pylori and tepid beef tea.
This year's Nobel laureates weren't able to enjoy Stockholm in the snow, but were able instead to experience the Concert Hall in its winter best with 10,000 white flowers, silver fir and eucalyptus.
If the British dramatist and son of a tailor, Harold Pinter, had not been seriously ill, he would probably have found himself beside one of the Economics laureates, Robert Aumann, on the podium. Just imagine what they might have whispered to each other! Harold Pinter used his Nobel lecture for an intense and incandescent critique of the USA and Great Britain and their war in Iraq. Professor Aumann, an Israeli, thinks that disarmament has made the world less secure.
Aumann himself has been the centre of a large-scale security operation. However, the security service hadn't thought of the risks of using ceremonial candelabra at the Academy of Sciences' banquet on Wednesday evening. Robert Aumann's jacket and shirt caught fire, but the games theorist took the whole thing with composure and made it clear that if you were going to be struck by an accident of this kind, then it was an honour for it to happen on an occasion like this.
This year's Nobel Day coincided with the Jewish sabbath, which meant that the deeply religious professor Aumann went to the synagogue on Saturday morning instead of practising his bows at the dress rehearsal for the prize-giving. He caused a problem for the security service - as Jews are not allowed to use a limousine on the sabbath, Bob Aumann walked from the Grand Hotel to the Concert Hall.
The value of this year's Nobels is the same as last year - ten million Swedish kronor per prize. Since all the prizes awarded at the Stockholm ceremony except one were shared by a number of laureates, the absent Harold Pinter received the fattest cheque.
His publisher Stephen Page accepted the ten million kronor on his behalf, together with a diploma painted by Karin Mamma Andersson.