Award ceremonies: Nobel Prize winners are honored | STERN.de

This year’s Nobel Prize winners receive their awards today. First, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo will be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for its commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons at a ceremony in Oslo City Hall from 1 p.m. Three hours later, the celebratory Nobel Prize ceremony begins in the Stockholm Concert Hall, where all other prize winners receive their prestigious Nobel medals.

The grassroots movement Nihon Hidankyo of survivors of the nuclear weapons drops on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is represented in Oslo by its three co-chairs Terumi Tanaka, Shigemitsu Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mimaki. 92-year-old Terumi Tanaka will give the traditional Nobel speech on behalf of the organization to around 1,000 guests in the town hall, including the Norwegian royal couple and the crown prince couple.

Warning against the use of nuclear weapons

In view of the global tensions with wars and conflicts as well as isolated threats to use nuclear weapons, the award for Nihon Hidankyo is extremely timely. “The reason why we are receiving this prize now is the situation in the world,” said Tanaka himself at a press conference in Oslo the day before the prize was awarded. The cruelty of a nuclear attack could be repeated, he warned.

After the presentation of the Peace Prize in Norway, attention turns to Sweden: from 4 p.m., all other Nobel Prize winners will be honored there one by one – they will receive their medals in Stockholm from the hands of the Swedish King Carl XVI. Gustaf. Among them are the South Korean Nobel Prize winner for literature Han Kang as well as those chosen in the other prize categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and economics.

Nobel Prize winner for literature among men

Han Kang is the only woman among the Nobel Prize winners this year. She will sit on the stage in Stockholm alongside ten male fellow honorees: including the two Nobel Prize winners in medicine Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who are being honored for the discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation, the AI ​​basic researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton in physics, protein researchers David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper in chemistry, and prosperity researchers Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson in economics.

This year, the awards in the scientific categories all go to researchers from North America and Great Britain, while the two most prestigious Nobel Prizes – those for literature and peace – surprisingly go to Asia. Unlike in previous years, this time there are no winners who do research in Germany or come from the Federal Republic. The last German prize winners in 2021 were the physicist Klaus Hasselmann and the chemist Benjamin List.

The names of the Nobel Prize winners were announced by the respective awarding institutions at the beginning of October. The awards are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize founder and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This year, the honors are once again associated with prize money of eleven million Swedish crowns (around 950,000 euros) per category.