Nobel Prize winners from Russia (Лауреаты Нобелевской премии из России)

Nobel Prize winners from Russia Spotlight-10

Nobel Medals

the Peace Prize

in Medicine and Physiology

in Literature

in Physics and Chemistry

in Economics

Nobel Prizes

are awards granted annually to persons or institutions for outstanding contributions during the previous year in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, international peace, and economics.

In addition to a cash award, each Nobel Prize winner also receives a gold medal and a diploma bearing the winner’s name and field of achievement. The judges often divide the prize for achievement in a particular field among two or three people. Dividing the prize among more than three people is not allowed. If more than three people are judged to be deserving of the prize, it is awarded jointly. The fund is controlled by the board of directors of the Nobel Foundation, which serves for two-year periods and consists of six members: five elected by the trustees of the awarding bodies mentioned in the will, and the sixth appointed by the Swedish government. The six members are either Swedish or Norwegian citizens.

To further the purposes of the foundation, separate institutes have been established, in accordance with Nobel’s will, in Sweden and Norway for the advancement of each of the five original fields for which the prizes are awarded. The

first Nobel Prizes

were awarded on

December 10,

1901.

NOBEL Alfred Bernhard

(1833-1896),

a Swedish chemist and

inventor, was born in

Stockholm. After receiving

an education in Saint

Petersburg, Russia; France and the U.S., he returned to St. Petersburg where he worked in his father’s company, developing mines, torpedoes, and other explosives during the Crimean War 1853-56. After the war, his father went bankrupt, and in 1859 the family returned to Sweden.

He invented dynamite in1867 and smoke-less gunpowder in 1887. He built a net- work of factories to manufacture dynamite, and corporations to produce and market his explosives. Nobel registered over 350 patents, many unrelated to explosives (e.g., artificial silk and leather).

Both his worldwide interests in explosives and his large holdings in the Baku oil fields of Russia brought him an immense fortune.

Ivan Pavlov - Physiology and Medicine, 1904

Famous for his experiments with dogs, a pioneer in physiology, Pavlov was Russia’s first ever Nobel prize laureate. He was awarded for his work on digestive physiology.

Born in 1849 in what was still the Russian Empire, Pavlov was the eldest of eleven children raised by a Russian orthodox priest and his wife. Due to an early injury as a child, he was unable to start school until he was eleven years old. Despite this, he showed a high degree of intelligence and academic potential – he was reading independently by the age of seven, and after switching from theology to physiology (moving his studies from Ryazan to St. Petersburg in order to do so) he won prestigious awards while still an undergraduate.

His greatest award, though, was yet to come. After leaving for a stint in Germany to receive his doctorate, he returned to St. Petersburg and was eventually invited to organize the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine there in 1891, which he would go on to transform into a global centre for physiological research.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year after 1901 until winning it in 1904, not for his work with dogs, but “in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged.”

Nikolay Semyonov - Chemistry, 1956

Semyonov was the only Soviet Nobel prize winner in chemistry. He gained the prize for his work on the mechanism of chemical transformation, together with a British physical chemist Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood.

Awarding the Nobel Prize to Nikolay Semyonov

Boris Pasternak - Literature, 1958

After his opus magnum Doctor Zhivago, banned in the USSR, was published in the West (not without CIA involvement), the Swedish Academy awarded him for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. The prize caused a scandal in the Soviet Union and after a campaign of intimidation he was forced to decline the award.

Pavel Cherenkov, Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank - Physics, 1958

Three physicists shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation which was made in the 1930s. Firstly Cherenkov noticed the blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor, and then together with colleagues they researched and described the phenomenon.

  Mikhail Sholokhov - Literature, 1965

The author of the epic novel 'And Quiet Flows the Don' was awarded “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”. This time the Soviet authorities recognized the award.

Andrei Sakharov - the Peace Prize, 1975

One of the founders of thermonuclear weapons, a dissident and human rights activist, Sakharov was awarded “for his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations.” Five years later he would be asked to leave the USSR for his political activism and campaign against the war in Afghanistan.

Zhores Alferov - Physics, 2000

A renowned physicist and Russian parliament deputy, Alferov was awarded “for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics”. He shared the prize with the German-American physicist Herbert Kroemer, who worked in the same field independently.

Since 1904, Nobel Prizes were awarded to 24 Russians : two in Physiology or Medicine, twelve in Physics, one in Chemistry, two in Economic Sciences, five in Literature and two Peace Prizes