By: Sienna Grant
Jan 5, 2022
Nobel Peace Prize handed out to numerous benefactors.
The Nobel Prize award ceremony took place Friday Dec. 10 at Stockholm City Hall in Sweden and Oslo City Hall in Norway. A total of six prizes were awarded to 13 candidates from a pool of 329 for “the greatest benefit to humankind.”
Journalists, writers, physicists, chemists, medical professionals, economists can all receive the Nobel Prize. It is these recipients’ peers— university professors, previous Nobel prize winners, and other respected individuals who initially nominate them. Once nominations are in, the Nobel Committe of the four awarding institutions is responsible for choosing candidates.
The first prize awarded in Sweden was the Nobel Prize in Physics. Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann were awarded “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” and Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
Benjamin List and David Macmillan won the Noble Prize for chemistry “for their development of asymmetric organocatalysis” and David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.” The Literature Nobel Prize went to Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Over in Oslo, Norway, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded and shared between Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Muratov is an advocate for free speech in Russia despite difficult circumstances, and Ressa continues to be recognized in the fight against disinformation.
Finally, in memory of Alfred Nobel’s death, the Sveriges Riksbank’s Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics” and Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of casual relationships.”