On the 6th, the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine will lead off, followed by physics on the 7th and chemistry on the 8th. The scientific community is watching which winners of other science prizes, seen as gateways to the Nobels, will go on to win a Nobel. The Lasker Award, Breakthrough Prize, and Wolf Prize have already produced many Nobel science laureates.
For a time, the Nobel Prize also had the largest cash award, but now it ranks third. So will recently established science prizes surpass the Nobels? The scientific community notes limits such as a narrow pool of eligible fields and few women laureates, but still regards the Nobels as the top science prizes. The achievements of past winners continue to demonstrate the Nobel's prestige.
◇Even with new science prizes, seen as offshoots of the Nobels
With a history well over 120 years, the Nobel Prize boasts the highest prestige in science. Robert Langer, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in Nature on the 3rd, "There isn't yet a prize comparable to the Nobel Prize."
He has already received the Breakthrough Prize, the Kyoto Prize, the Kavli Prize, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, all regarded as major global science prizes. But he said, "In my opinion, none has reached that level." Sara Seager, an MIT professor who won last year's Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, said, "Other prizes are trying to catch up, but for now the Nobel Prize is far ahead," adding, "It was the first, and I don't think any prize can be a competitor."
The Nobel Prize was established according to the will of Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), the Swedish scientist and businessman who invented dynamite. Nobel sought to give the vast fortune he earned from dynamite to those who made great contributions to human welfare.
In line with his will, the Nobel Foundation was established and has awarded prizes annually in physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace. Since 1969, Sweden's Central Bank added the economics prize in Nobel's honor. For reference, at the first ceremony held on Dec. 10, 1901, in Stockholm, Sweden, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen of Germany, who discovered X-rays, received the physics prize.
The Nobel's prestige is evident from the labels attached to other prizes. The Turing Award is often called the "Nobel Prize of computer science." The Breakthrough Prize, created by titans of the ICT (information and communications technology) industry, is dubbed the "Silicon Valley Nobel." The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which named its first winners in 2013, is called the "Nobel of engineering."
The Lasker Award, given by the Lasker Foundation in the United States to those who have contributed to medical and public health research, is known as the "American Nobel." In fact, since 1945, 95 Lasker laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
◇Prize money ranks third, and exclusion of math, engineering, and women is also an issue
Of course, in terms of prize money, the Nobel is not the largest. The Breakthrough Prize awards $3 million (about 4.2 billion won), Taiwan's Tang Prize offers $1.6 million (2.2 billion won), and both the Nobel and Hong Kong's Shaw Prize award $1.2 million (1.7 billion won) each.
There is also criticism that the Nobels honor only certain scientific fields. Mathematics, engineering, and climate science—fields that have enormous impact today—are excluded from the Nobels. For this reason, the top award in mathematics is the Fields Medal, which in 2022 went to June E Huh, a Korean-born mathematician and professor at Princeton University.
In computer science, the Turing Award is regarded as the highest honor. Seager of MIT said, "Despite countless outstanding discoveries, no Nobel Prize is given," adding, "Edward Lorenz, the mathematician and meteorologist who identified chaos theory, the so-called butterfly effect, is an example."
The concentration of laureates among white men in Europe and North America has drawn much criticism. A representative example is British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell not receiving a Nobel. In 1967, as a graduate student, Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars, capturing periodic radio signals from neutron stars, the final stage of a star's demise. The achievement was recognized with the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics.
But the prize went to her adviser, Antony Hewish of the University of Cambridge. The scientific community believes Bell Burnell was likely excluded from the Nobel because she was a graduate student and a woman at the time. Bell Burnell, who later headed the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom, received the Breakthrough Prize in 2017—50 years after the discovery—for her work on radio pulsars.
British scientist Rosalind Franklin also took the X-ray diffraction images that were the key to revealing DNA's structure, yet her achievements were taken by James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of the United Kingdom. Watson and Crick received the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for elucidating DNA's structure. Franklin died in 1958 and thus was ineligible for the Nobel, which is awarded only to the living, but even had she lived, it is highly likely she would have been passed over due to entrenched academic bias.
It is not just the Nobels. According to a paper published last year in the international journal Editor, only 15.4% of 8,747 recipients of science prizes across fields from 1731 to 2021 were women.
To overcome the Nobel's limits, a variety of science prizes have emerged in recent years. Established in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize awards a maximum $3 million to laureates in mathematics, fundamental physics, and life sciences. The Tang Prize, Shaw Prize, Turing Award, Kavli Prize, and Millennium Technology Prize also award more than $1 million.
References
Nature (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03118-0
Data (2024), DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/data9070084