Nobel laureates to be honoured at centennial ceremony

STOCKHOLM, (SWEDEN) OCT. 7. The discoverers of X-rays and a diphtheria vaccine were among a handful of dignitaries arriving in Stockholm in December 1901 with a secret.

They were the first Nobel Prize winners, and had been asked to keep the decision to themselves until it was announced at a banquet that on December 10, the fifth anniversary of the death of the award's creator, Swedish Industrialist, Alfred Nobel.

In neighbouring Norway, it was announced in Parliament that Red Cross founder, Jean Henri Dunant of Switzerland and French peace activist, Frederic Passy would share the first Nobel Peace Prize. They were informed in writing.

It was very different from the hype and locked-tight secrecy that will accompany this week's centennial Nobel prizes, which begin on Monday with the prize for physiology or medicine.

``It has become bigger and bigger,'' historian Tore Fraengsmyr said. ``Of course this would be impossible to keep a secret in the modern world.'' The Physics prize is announced on Tuesday, the prizes in Chemistry and Economics come on Wednesday and the Peace Prize winner is named on Friday. No date has been set for the literature prize.

The awards will be handed out on December 10. To mark the centennial, all living laureates have been invited to the ceremonies and related seminars, with peace laureates, Mr. Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev of Russia among the nearly 200 expected.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee already has decided this year's peace prize winner but is keeping silent as always until the scheduled announcement on Friday.

The Swedish committees for the other prizes have made recommendations, but the final decisions will be made by the full membership of the academies involved on the day each prize is announced.

In literature, arguably the most subjective of the prizes, the 18 lifetime members of the Swedish Academy will pick the honoree during one of their weekly Thursday meetings around an antique table watched over by a bust of the academy's founder, King Gustav III, who ruled in 1771-92.

Afterward, they will retire, as they do every week, to the 279- year-old Golden Peace restaurant in Stockholm's medieval Old Town for a meal of traditional Swedish fare, including reindeer meat. Adding to the mystique, the academy doesn't reveal when the literature prize will be announced until two days beforehand - maybe this week, maybe not.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who had companies and laboratories in more than 20 countries, gave the selectors little guidance with the will of some 300 words that established the prizes.

The reclusive bachelor, who never married or had children, specified five categories of prizes - peace, medicine, chemistry, physics and literature and named the institutes that should choose them. Sweden's central bank set up the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1968.

Nobel said the prize money derived from the interest on his legacy should go to ``those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.'' Nobel ``had in mind young inventors and writers who would be guaranteed finances for their experiments,'' said Mr. Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, which oversees the awards.

- AP

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Section  : International
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