Quick answer: The Nobel Prize's reputation rests on the people it honoured. Its most interesting history is the people it did not. Gandhi, Meitner, Franklin, Bell Burnell and Tolstoy all went without, while a prize for the lobotomy still stands, because the Foundation has no mechanism to take one back.
Three rules generate almost every Nobel controversy: no more than three laureates per prize, no posthumous awards, and no way to revoke one. Everything below follows from those.
Gandhi: nominated five times, never awarded
Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and once more in January 1948, days before he was assassinated.
The committee's advisers raised objections that read very differently now: that he was a nationalist rather than an internationalist, that his positions had shifted, that it was unclear whether his campaign fitted the categories in Nobel's will. In 1947 the partition of India and the violence that followed weighed against him.
In 1948 the committee chose to award no Peace Prize at all, noting that there was no suitable living candidate. The decision is generally read as a silent acknowledgement of who had just died. In 2006, the committee's then secretary Geir Lundestad publicly described the failure to award Gandhi as the greatest omission in the prize's history.
Lise Meitner and the fission prize
Meitner worked with Otto Hahn for three decades in Berlin. In 1938 she fled Nazi Germany because she was Jewish, and continued to correspond with Hahn from Sweden. When his experiments produced results he could not explain, Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out that the uranium nucleus had split, and gave the process its name: fission.
The 1944 chemistry prize went to Hahn alone. Meitner was nominated dozens of times across both physics and chemistry, and never won. Element 109, meitnerium, is named after her. Hahn's public account of the discovery, which minimised her role, shaped the record for decades.
Rosalind Franklin and the clock
Franklin's X-ray diffraction work at King's College London, especially the image known as Photo 51, provided the evidence that let Watson and Crick model the double helix. The image was shown to Watson without her knowledge.
She died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at 37, likely linked to her radiation exposure. The DNA prize was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Nobel rules bar posthumous awards, so the question of whether the committee would have included her is unanswerable, and the three-laureate cap would have made it a genuine dilemma.
The graduate students
Jocelyn Bell Burnell spotted a regular pulse in radio telescope data in 1967 and pushed to have it taken seriously. The 1974 physics prize for the discovery of pulsars went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. She has responded to the omission with unusual grace, and in 2018 gave away a three-million-dollar prize to fund students from under-represented backgrounds.
Chien-Shiung Wu designed and ran the experiment that disproved the conservation of parity, one of the most consequential results in twentieth-century physics. The 1957 prize went to the theorists who proposed the idea, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang. Wu was not included.
Literature's permanent argument
The Swedish Academy has never given the literature prize to Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges or Chinua Achebe.
Tolstoy is the founding wound. When the first prize went to Sully Prudhomme in 1901, 42 Swedish writers sent Tolstoy a letter of protest. Borges is the modern one, and is usually attributed to his acceptance of an honour from Chile's military government in 1976.
In 2018 the Academy suspended the prize entirely after a sexual assault scandal involving the husband of a member led to resignations and criminal conviction. Two prizes were awarded in 2019 to cover the gap.
The awards that aged badly
| Year | Award | Why it is contested |
|---|---|---|
| 1918 | Chemistry, Fritz Haber | Ammonia synthesis feeds billions, and Haber also directed Germany's chemical weapons programme in the First World War. |
| 1926 | Medicine, Johannes Fibiger | Awarded for a parasitic cause of cancer that later work showed to be wrong. |
| 1949 | Medicine, António Egas Moniz | The prefrontal lobotomy, performed on tens of thousands of patients before being abandoned as harmful. |
| 1973 | Peace, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho | Awarded during an unfinished war. Le Duc Tho declined, and two committee members resigned. |
| 2009 | Peace, Barack Obama | Awarded nine months into a first term, on aspiration rather than record. The committee's own secretary later called the result disappointing. |
The Haber case is the sharpest illustration of what a science prize measures. The Haber-Bosch process is arguably the single most consequential chemical discovery of the twentieth century, and it sits alongside his personal supervision of chlorine gas attacks at Ypres.
Why nothing can be taken back
The Nobel Foundation has no procedure for revoking a prize, and has consistently declined to create one. The most sustained recent test was the campaign to strip Aung San Suu Kyi of her 1991 Peace Prize after the Myanmar military's persecution of the Rohingya, which she declined to condemn. The Foundation's position was that the award reflects the committee's judgment at the time and cannot be reconsidered later.
The same logic protects the lobotomy prize. It is a historical record, not an endorsement that renews itself each year.
The structural fix nobody has made
Most modern omissions trace back to the three-laureate cap in an era of large collaborations. The 2017 gravitational wave prize honoured three people from a collaboration of more than a thousand. The 2013 Higgs boson prize went to two theorists while the thousands of physicists at CERN who found the particle received nothing.
The Foundation has resisted changing the rule, arguing that Nobel's will framed the awards around individuals. Critics point out that the will also could not have anticipated a paper with 3,000 authors. That argument will run for as long as the prize does.
The context behind all of it
Our Nobel Prize week 2026 page has the announcement schedule and four free courses, including The Nobel Prize: From Dynamite to Legacy, whose final lesson deals with exactly these omissions. For the rules that create them, read how the Nobel Prize works. For the laureates who did make it, read famous Nobel Prize winners.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Gandhi never win the Nobel Peace Prize?
He was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and again days before his assassination in January 1948. Committee reports from the period cite his nationalism and questions about whether his methods qualified under the will's terms. In 1948 the committee chose to make no award, referring to the absence of a suitable living candidate. A former secretary of the committee later called the omission the greatest in its history.
Why didn't Rosalind Franklin win the Nobel Prize for DNA?
She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37. The prize for the structure of DNA went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962, and Nobel rules do not permit posthumous awards. Her X-ray diffraction data, particularly the image known as Photo 51, was essential to the discovery.
Was Lise Meitner denied a Nobel Prize?
She was nominated dozens of times across physics and chemistry and never won. The 1944 chemistry prize for the discovery of nuclear fission went to Otto Hahn alone, although Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch provided the theoretical explanation of what Hahn's experiments had produced. Element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.
Who discovered pulsars and did not get the Nobel Prize?
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who identified the first pulsar signals as a PhD student in 1967. The 1974 physics prize went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. She has consistently declined to express bitterness about it, and in 2018 donated a three-million-dollar Breakthrough Prize to fund physics students from under-represented groups.
Has a Nobel Prize ever been revoked?
No. The Nobel Foundation's statutes provide no mechanism to withdraw an award, and it has refused repeated petitions, including calls to strip Aung San Suu Kyi of her 1991 Peace Prize. The 1949 medicine prize for the lobotomy also stands.
Which Nobel Prize is considered the biggest mistake?
Two are cited most often. The 1926 medicine prize to Johannes Fibiger for a supposed parasitic cause of cancer, later shown to be wrong, and the 1949 medicine prize to António Egas Moniz for the prefrontal lobotomy, a procedure now regarded as a serious harm to tens of thousands of patients.
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