Blame it on Madame Curie. Mix the French-Polish physicist's early celebrity, some jousting for international prestige before World War I, and the surging importance of physical sciences over the last century, and you have the recipe that made the Nobel Prize—announced every year this week in October—the world's preeminent award.
Big headlines greeted three Americans on Monday after they earned the Nobel Prize in medicine. James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Sudhof were honored for unraveling the mystery of how cells shuttle their goods around.
Similar acclaim greeted Belgium's François Englert and Scotland's Peter Higgs, who picked up the award in physics for first contemplating the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson particle, even though it was the least surprising announcement of a physics prize in decades.
The chemistry prize came on Wednesday, awarded to U.S. scientists Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, along with Martin Karplus of France's Université de Strasbourg and Harvard. It will be followed by the peace, literature, and economics prizes. Headlines will celebrate each one. (There is even a traditional parody: see "2013 Ig Nobels Honor Research on Beer Goggles, Cows Ready to Be Tipped.")
Why do we care about the Nobel Prize? Since 1901, the awards have been announced annually by the Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, as directed by the will of Swedish "dynamite king" Alfred Nobel, who died in 1897. But why do they get such fanfare?
"There are other prizes, but none are the Nobel Prize," says Thomson Reuters science analyst David Pendlebury, whose team yearly predicts which researchers might be in line for the award. "I'm always surprised by who they pick. But they do an outstanding, thorough job every time." (For the record, Pendlebury and many others this year had their money on Higgs and Englert, after Europe's CERN lab detected a Higgs-like particle in their data last year.)
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