The History of the Nobel Prize in Medicine

 

"Attributing Excellence in Medicine: The History of the Nobel Prize" offers readers a deep dive into one of the most prestigious accolades in medical science, the Nobel Prize. But this book isn’t just a chronicle of achievements; it’s a compelling exploration of the human side of scientific greatness, a journey through the politics, personalities, and groundbreaking discoveries that have shaped modern medicine.

The authors take us behind the scenes of the Nobel Prize process, revealing not only how laureates are selected, but also the intense rivalries and philosophical debates that have defined some of the most consequential decisions in medical history. What makes this work so fascinating is its balance between historical rigor and personal storytelling. You’ll find yourself not just reading about the medical breakthroughs that saved millions of lives but understanding the often overlooked figures who were passed over for the prize—sometimes controversially so.

One of the book’s strengths is its wide scope. It traces the origins of the Nobel Prize, contextualizing Alfred Nobel’s vision of rewarding those who "conferred the greatest benefit to mankind," and follows the evolution of the prize through times of war, political upheaval, and rapid scientific advancement. The book addresses how the Nobel Prize has adapted (and sometimes struggled) to keep pace with new medical paradigms, such as the rise of genetics, biotechnology, and global health initiatives.
The authors also delve into the personal stories of laureates, shedding light on their perseverance, moments of serendipity, and even their human flaws. The narrative brings to life figures like Marie Curie, Alexander Fleming, and many lesser-known but equally pivotal contributors to medical science. Their struggles to advance knowledge in the face of adversity are inspiring, and the authors have a knack for drawing out the emotional resonance of their stories.

Yet, this book isn’t just about heroes. The authors don’t shy away from addressing the controversies surrounding the Nobel Prize, particularly the debates over who deserved recognition and who was unjustly overlooked. The inclusion of behind-the-scenes accounts of committee deliberations adds depth, illustrating the often subjective nature of deciding who gets to stand in the spotlight.

For anyone interested in the intersection of medicine, history, and human ambition, "Attributing Excellence in Medicine" is a fascinating read. It not only captures the grandeur of scientific achievement but also reflects on the complexities of recognizing and rewarding it. The result is a book that inspires both admiration for the laureates and a critical awareness of the Nobel Prize's legacy in shaping modern medicine.

This is an Open Access book.

 

Science History: the Babylonians and Egyptians

Sumerian god Enki, with characteristic symbols: bird, goat and water flows

The early Sumerians and Babylonians have contributed to later generations important units for the measurement of time and of angles. Babylonian in origin is the week of seven days, also the division of the day and of the night into twelve hours each. The Babylonians made quite extensive use of the sexagesimal scale in writing integral numbers and fractions; using the same scale, they divided the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. The circle was subdivided into 360 degrees, the degree into 60 minutes of are, and the minute into 60 seconds. The most humble worker of the present day measures the time of work by the hour, as did the Babylonians of perhaps 5000 years ago. The most noted engineer and the most distinguished astronomer of the present time measure angles in degrees, minutes and seconds, much as did the astronomers at the Euphrates and Tigris eons ago. Early Babylonian astronomical records indicate a surprising precision. An achievement of the first magnitude was the discovery of that slow motion of the equinoctial points on the ecliptic called the precession of the equinoxes. This was done by the Babylonian astronomer Cidenas, who directed an astronomical school at Sippra, on the Euphrates, about 343 B.C.

Primitive sun-dials and water-clocks served for measuring time. For finding the angular altitude of the sun (at noon time), they used the gnomon which consisted essentially of a vertical rod of known length. The length and direction of its solar shadow afforded the necessary data. The beam-balance served for weighing medicine and precious articles. The medical recipes described in the Egyptian papyrus Ebers indicate the use of weights as small as 0.71 grams.

A Very Short History of Astronomy

2,500 BC - Stonehenge, one of the most famous sites in the world today, once served as a burial ground. Archaeoastronomers claim that Stonehenge represents an ancient observatory, and that the site had astrological and spiritual significance as well.

650 BC - Babylonian Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa is the oldest significant astronomical text that we possess. This document, recorded on cuneiform tablets, lists the first and last visible risings of Venus over a period of 21 years.


Stonehenge (Andrew Dunn); ................. Solar eclipse (Luc Viatour); .......... Thales; .................. Hipparchus

585 BC - Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse. A battle in progress between the Lydians and the Medes is spontaneously halted by this eclipse.

150 BC - Hipparchus, the greatest astronomer of antiquity, uses parallax to determine that the distance to the Moon. In 134 BC, he discovers the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus ranks stars in six magnitude classes according to their brightness: he assignes '1' to the brightest stars, and '6' to the stars which can be barely seen with the naked eye.

46 BC - Julius Caesar adopted a calendar based upon the 365 1/4 day year length originally proposed by Greek astronomer Callippus. 46 BC had 445 days due to the errors that had accumulated in the pre-Julian calendar.

628 - Brahmagupta, the head of the astronomical observatory at Ujjain, writes a text on astronomy, Brahmasphutasiddhanta (The Opening of the Universe).

990 - Abu-Mahmud al-Khujandi builds a huge observatory near Tehran, Iran, and observes a series of meridian transits of the Sun, which allowed him to calculate the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the Sun.

1054 - Crab Supernova (SN 1054) is observed on Earth by Chinese, Japanese, Arab, and American Indian astronomers. It was bright enough to see in daylight for 23 days.


Crab Nebula (NASA); ........................... Nicolaus Copernicus; ............................... De Revolutionibus

1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus' epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, is published just before he died. This is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy.

1577 - Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant objects and not atmospheric phenomena. Tycho is credited with the most accurate astronomical observations of his time.

1609 - Johannes Kepler states his first two laws of planetary motion: 1. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus; 2. A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.


Tycho Brahe; ................... Johannes Kepler (Aldaron); .................... Galileo facing Inquisition

1610 - Galileo Galilei uses a small telescope to make the greatest astronomical discoveries of all time: the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, lunar mountains and craters, the phases of Venus, the Milky Way as a multitude of densely packed stars, and the observation and analysis of sunspots.

1687 - The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, mathematical principles of natural philosophy, a three-volume work by Isaac Newton, is published on 5 July 1687. It contains the foundation of classical mechanics, as well as the law of universal gravitation and a derivation of Kepler's laws for the motion of the planets.

1705 - Edmund Halley predicts the periodicity of Halley's comet and computes its expected path of return. In 1718, he discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks.


Newton's telescope (Andrew Dunn); ........... Comet Halley (NASA); ....................... Charles Messier

1771 - Charles Messier publishes his first list of nebulae. The purpose of the catalog was to help comet hunters to distinguish between permanent and transient objects in the sky.

1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus. He constructed more than 400 telescopes, discovered two moons of Saturn and two moons of Uranus, created extensive catalogs of nebulae and double stars, and concluded that the Milky Way is in the shape of a disk.

1814 - Joseph von Fraunhofer invents the spectroscope, and discovered 574 dark absorption lines appearing in the Sun's spectrum.

1838 - Friedrich Bessel, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, and Thomas Henderson measure stellar parallaxes, providing the first accurate measurements of interstellar distances.


Planet Uranus (NASA); ......................................... Herschel's 40 foot telescope; ................ Kirchhoff's first spectroscope

1860 - Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen discover that each element has its own distinct set of spectral lines and use this fact to explain the solar dark lines.

1908 - Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity relation, providing an important yardstick for measuring distances in the Universe.

1910 - Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell study the relation between magnitudes and spectral types of stars. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram represented a huge leap forward in understanding stellar evolution.

1915 - Albert Einstein completes his theory of general relativity. 'Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move'.

1922 - Alexander Friedmann finds a solution to the general relativity field equations which suggests a general expansion of space.

1923 - Edwin Powell Hubble profoundly changes our understanding of the universe by demonstrating the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way. Hubble also devises a system for classifying galaxies, according to their appearance in photographic images.


Andromeda Galaxy (John Lanoue); ........... Hubble's law (Brews Ohare); ............ George Gamow

1929 - Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason formulate the empirical Hubble's law -- the linear redshift-distance relation, thus showing the expansion of the universe.

1929 - George Gamow, a Russian-born physicist and cosmologist, proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for stars. He discovered alpha decay via quantum tunneling and worked on star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang nucleosynthesis, etc.

1930 - Clyde Tombaugh discovers the dwarf planet Pluto.

1930 - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers the white dwarf maximum mass limit. The limit describes the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, above which a star will ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole.

1931 - Karl Guthe Jansky, American physicist and radio engineer, discovers radio waves emanating from the Milky Way. He is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy.

1931 - Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître proposes his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom', what became known as the Big Bang theory.

1933 - Fritz Zwicky applies the virial theorem to the Coma galaxy cluster and obtains evidence for unseen matter, what is now called dark matter. Zwicky was an original thinker, with many important contributions in astronomy.


Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; ... Cosmic Microwave Background (NASA); ... The Horn Antenna in Holmdel Township

1965 - Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation, predicted in 1948 by Ralph Alpher, George Gamow and Robert Herman.

1967 - Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish discover the first radio pulsars, the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century.

1971 - Cygnus X-1, a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus, is identified as a binary black hole candidate system.

1980 - Alan Guth, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, proposes the inflationary Big Bang universe as a possible solution to the horizon and flatness problems.

1998 - Published observations of Type Ia supernovae by the High-z Supernova Search Team, followed in 1999 by the Supernova Cosmology Project, suggest that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.



Further reading:

Archaeoastronomy and Stonehenge
Astronomiae Historia
C41/ICHA website
Society for the History of Astronomy
Wikipedia History of astronomy

A Very Short History of Mathematics

70,000 BC there are drawings that indicate some knowledge of elementary mathematics and of time measurement based on the stars. Paleontologists have discovered ochre rocks adorned with scratched geometric patterns.

20,000 BC - The Ishango bone, found in northeastern Congo, is the earliest known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers and of Ancient Egyptian multiplication.

3,000 BC - The Indus Valley Civilization of North India and Pakistan developed a system of measures that used the decimal system, and an advanced brick technology which utilized ratios.

2,500 BC - The Sumerians wrote multiplication tables on clay tablets and dealt with division problems. The traces of the Babylonian numerals also date back to this period.

1,650 BC - The Rhind papyrus, a major Egyptian mathematical text, is an instruction manual in arithmetic and geometry. It gives area formulas, multiplication methods, working with unit fractions, composite and prime numbers, arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means.

550 BC - Pythagoras of Samos is credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem, though the statement of the theorem has a long history. He expressed the theorem algebraically rather than geometrically.

400 BC - Jaina mathematicians from ancient India began studying mathematics for the sole purpose of mathematics. They developed transfinite numbers, logarithms, fundamental laws of indices, cubic equations, quartic equations, set theory, sequences and progressions, permutations and combinations, etc.

370 BC - Eudoxus developed the method of exhaustion, a precursor of modern integration. The Pythagoreans proved the existence of irrational numbers.

300 BC - Euclid wrote Elements, the most important mathematics book ever written. It is the first example of the format still used in mathematics today: definition, axiom, theorem, proof.

230 BC - Archimedes of Syracuse used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave remarkably accurate approximations of Pi.

400 - The Surya Siddhanta, classical Indian mathematician, introduced the trigonometric functions of sine, cosine, and inverse sine, and laid down rules to determine the true motions of the luminaries, which conforms to their actual positions in the sky.

650 - Brahmagupta lucidly explained the use of zero as both a placeholder and decimal digit, and explained the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

825 - Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi wrote several books on the Hindu-Arabic numerals and on methods for solving equations. The word algorithm is derived from the Latinization of his name.

1000 - Al-Karaji, a Persian mathematician, gives the first known proof by mathematical induction. He proved the binomial theorem, Pascal's triangle, and the sum of integral cubes.

1170 - Bhaskara, another Indian mathematician first conceived differential calculus, the concept of the derivative, differential coefficient and differentiation. He also stated Rolle's theorem and investigated the derivative of the sine function.

1202 - Fibonacci produced the first significant mathematics in Europe since the time of Eratosthenes, a gap of more than a thousand years. His book introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe, and discussed many other mathematical problems.

1654 - Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat set the groundwork for the investigations of probability theory and the corresponding rules of combinatorics in their discussions over a game of gambling.

1665 - Isaac Newton brought together the concepts now known as calculus. Independently, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed calculus and much of the calculus notation still in use today.

1736 - Leonhard Euler, the most influential mathematician of the 18th century, solved the Koenigsberg bridge problem. He founded the study of graph theory named the square root of -1 with the symbol i, made contributions to the study of topology, etc.

1799 - Karl Friedrich Gauss proves that every polynomial equation has a solution among the complex numbers. Gauss did revolutionary work on functions of complex variables, in geometry, and on the convergence of series.

1807 - Joseph Fourier announced his discoveries about the trigonometric decomposition of functions, but the demonstration was not altogether satisfactory. The final solution of the problem was given in 1829 by Jacques Charles François Sturm.

1822 - Augustin Louis Cauchy proved the Cauchy integral theorem for integration around the boundary of a rectangle. He started the project of formulating and proving the theorems of infinitesimal calculus in a rigorous manner and was thus a pioneer of analysis.

1829 - Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky publishes his work on hyperbolic non-Euclidean geometry, where uniqueness of parallels no longer holds.

1832 - Evariste Galois presents a general condition for the solvability of algebraic equations. Galois and Niels Henrik Abel proved that there is no general algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of degree greater than four.

1843 - William Rowan Hamilton in Ireland discovers the calculus of quaternions and deduces that they are non-commutative.

1847 - George Boole devised Boolean algebra, in which the only numbers were 0 and 1 and in which, famously, 1 + 1 = 1. Boolean algebra is the starting point of mathematical logic and has important applications in computer science.

1854 - Bernhard Riemann introduces Riemannian geometry, which unifies and vastly generalizes the three types of geometry, and he defined the concept of a manifold, which generalize the ideas of curves and surfaces.

1899 - David Hilbert presents a set of self-consistent geometric axioms in Foundations of Geometry. In 1900, he set out a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. These problems formed a central focus for much of 20th century mathematics.

1928 - John von Neumann, a Hungarian American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, begins devising the principles of game theory and proves the minimax theorem.

1931 - Kurt Goedel shows that mathematical systems are not fully self-contained. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Goedel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century.

1950 - Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann present cellular automata dynamical systems. Stanislaw Marcin Ulam was a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project and proposed the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons.

1961 - Daniel Shanks and John Wrench compute pi to 100,000 decimal places using an inverse-tangent identity and an IBM-7090 computer. Shanks is best known for his book Solved and Unsolved Problems in Number Theory.

1983 - Gerd Faltings shows that there are only finitely many whole number solutions for each exponent of Fermat's Last Theorem.

1987 - Yasumasa Kanada, Jonathan Borwein, Peter Borwein, and David Bailey, use iterative modular equation approximations to elliptic integrals and a NEC SX-2 supercomputer to compute pi to 134 million decimal places.

1995 - Sir Andrew John Wiles, working in secrecy, proves Fermat's Last Theorem. This surprisingly lengthy proof has stood up to the scrutiny of the world's experts.


Sources & further reading:

MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
History of Mathematics Home Page
The History of Mathematics
Biographies of Women Mathematicians
Fred Rickey's History of Mathematics Page
Wikipedia.org: History of Mathematics