Nobel Prize 2020 – List of Winners
in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Peace and Literature
The Nobel Foundation is declaring the list of eminent personalities as the winners for 2020, for their individual contributions in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology (or Medicine), Economics, Peace and Literature.
List of the 2020 Nobel Prize winners
2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.
2020 Nobel Prize in Physics
The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics went to Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.
2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for development of a method for genome editing known as CRISPR.
2020 Nobel Prizes in Literature
American poet Louise Gluck has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 10 million Swedish crown ($1.1m) prize is named after dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will. The Swedish Academy said Gluck was honoured “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Gluck previously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris, and the National Book Award in 2014. A professor of English at Yale University, she “seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works”, the Academy said. It said her 2006 collection Averno was a “masterly” and “a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death”.
2020 Prize in Economic Sciences
2020 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson. They have improved auction theory and invented new auction formats, benefitting sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world. The auction formats developed by the winners have been used to sell radio frequencies, fishing quotas and airport landing slots. Both economists are based at Stanford University in California.
2020 Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 has been awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict. The World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation addressing hunger and promoting food security. In 2015, eradicating hunger was adopted as one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The WFP is the UN’s primary instrument for realising this goal.
Indians Nobel laureates
- 12 Indians (5 Indian citizens and 7 overseas persons of Indian origin) have been awarded Nobel Prize in various categories.
- The first person of Indian origin and also first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize was Rabindranath Tagore for his works “Gitanjali” in 1913.
- First Indian recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics was C. V. Raman for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him” in 1930.
- First Indian recipient of Nobel Prize for Peace was Mother Teresa in 1979.
- First Indian recipient of Nobel Prize in Economics was Amartya Sen in 1998.
- First Indian recipient of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was Har Gobind Khorana for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis in 1968.
- First Indian recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry was Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome in 2009.
- The only woman from India in the list of Nobel Prize recipient is Mother Teresa.
All About the Nobel Prize
- Nobel winners are given a medal, a certificate and a cash award of about $900,000 (when multiple people win a single Nobel, they typically split the cash award.)
- The awards are instituted by the Nobel Foundation based on the recommendations from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the Nobel Prize in Economics, Physics and Chemistry, Karolinska Institute for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Swedish Academy for Literature, and a Committee of five persons elected by the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) for the Peace Prize.
- First established in 1895 at the will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Annual awards are given in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics.
- From 1901 till 2018, 908 laureates and 27 organisations have received the Nobel Prize.
- All the Prize except Peace Prize awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. Peace Prize awarded in Oslo, Norway.
- Youngest Nobel Laureate (17-years): Malala Yousafzai for Peace in 2014.
- Oldest Nobel Laureate (97-years): John B. Goodenough for Chemistry in 2019.
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