If I were on the Nobel Prize committee, I’d feel deeply ashamed seeing the prize reduced to a kind of political currency. It’s meant to recognize extraordinary contributions to humanity, not to be leveraged as a gesture or bargaining chip in political theater.
Just to note that the Peace Prize committee is a completely different one than the other prizes.
The five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament while the Swedish Nobel Committee is composed of institutions proposing laureates and a larger body of experts to choose the recipients. The Norwegian part does both: selecting candidates and choosing the winner.
I think it's important to know so the Peace Prize process doesn't diminish the achievements of the other prizes.
> Earlier in the day the Nobel organizers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.”
> (…)
> Earlier this week, the organisers of the Nobel peace prize announced the award could not be “shared or transferred” after Machado told Fox News she wished to “share” it with Trump. “The decision is final and stands for all time,” they said.
> Machado is not the first Nobel laureate to divest themselves of the award.
> After winning the 1954 Nobel prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway entrusted his medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba – where it was briefly stolen from a sanctuary in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return.
> In 2022, the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his medal to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 Nobel prize for physics, sold his after it had spent 20 years “sitting on a shelf somewhere”.
> Machado appears to be the first person to give away her medal for such explicitly political reasons, although in 1943 the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun gifted his decoration to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, as a sign of his admiration for the Nazis.
Then there's James Watson who was given a Nobel prize medal twice. First by the Nobel Committee, and second by Alisher Usmanov, who had purchased the medal at an auction in order to give it back to Watson, who had put it up for auction.
