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The Nobel Also-Rans

posted by janrinok on Monday October 17 2016, @04:45AM   
from the I've-been-nominated-but-you-won't-see-it-for-50-years dept.

hubie writes:

During this Nobel Prize season where we celebrate the annual winners, Nature has gone through the Nobel archives and compiled a top ten list of the most nominated, but never won people. The "winners" are:

Gaston Ramon: 155 (Physiology or Medicine)

Emile Roux: 115 (Physiology or Medicine)

Arnold Sommerfeld: 84 (Physics)

Rene Leriche: 79 (Physiology or Medicine)

Jacques Loeb: 78 (Physiology or Medicine)

Albert Calmette 77 (Physiology or Medicine)

Rudolf Weigl 75 (Physiology or Medicine)

Christopher Ingold 68 (Chemistry)

Walter Reppe 63 (Chemistry)

Aldo Castellani 61 (Physiology or Medicine)

The Nobel commission doesn't reveal nomination information for at least 50 years, so one can't say who really has the most nominations. There are a plethora of reasons these people never won the award because the prestige of the prize brings in a variety of factors that have little to do with merit.

"A kaleidoscope of human agency is necessarily involved in awarding the Nobel Prize, as with any other prize," says Friedman. "There are no grounds for assuming the winners of the Nobel Prize constitute a unique population of the very 'best' in science."

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Original Submission

• Arnold Sommerfeld (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:03AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:03AM (#415567)

  Arnold Sommerfeld had many students who later went on to win Nobel prizes themselves. He was the teacher of Werner Heisenberg (Physics, 1932), Wolfgang Pauli (Physics, 1945), Peter Debye (Chemistry, 1936), Hans Bethe (Physics, 1967), Linus Pauling (Chemistry, 1954, Peace, 1962), Isidor Rabi (Physics, 1944), and Max von Laue (Physics, 1914). Albert Einstein once commented to him in a letter: "What I especially admire about you is that you have, as it were, pounded out of the soil such a large number of young talents." It might have disappointed him a little to learn he himself had been nominated so many times but never won.

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