Awards shape careers, make research visible, and create role models. They provide evidence of prestige and credit and play a key role in evaluating individual scientists. Nevertheless, the understanding of prize cultures in science has remained surprisingly superficial. This book explores the prize cultures of the most famous scientific award worldwide: the Nobel Prize. It contributes to modern approaches in history and sociology of science that focus on the social context of scientific practices and gives new insights into the role of status and impact in academia.

Nils Hansson is Professor of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. His research interests include recognition in academia, research ethics, and medical history in the Baltic Sea region.

Ad Maas is Curator of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, the Dutch National Museum of the History of Science and Medicine, and Professor in Museological Aspects of the Natural Sciences at Leiden University.

Table of Contents; Preface by Klaas Landsman; 1. Nils Hansson, Ad Maas: Introducing Prize Studies: Perspectives on Reward Mechanisms in Science; 2. Gustav Källstrand: Everybody’s Searching for a Hero: Controversial Nobel Laureates and the Status of the Nobel Prize; 3. Ad Maas, Louise Lagarde: Nobel Artefacts: Material Heritage of Nobel Prize Laureates in the Netherlands; 4. Daniela Link: What Heroes does Literature Need? Insight into the Nobel Prize as a Literary Motif; 5. Annelie Drakman: The Post-Heroic Nobel Laureate having Fun – a New Scientific Ideal in Post-War America; 6. Jelmer Heeren: Demythologizing Science: Reijer Hooykaas on Hero Worship as “Undesirable” and “Disdaining”; 7. Christian Engberts: Honors Without Impact: Emil von Behring’s Inconsequential Nobel Prize; 8. Rob van den Berg: A Hotly Contested Nobel: Christiaan Eijkman, Gerrit Grijns and the Discovery of Vitamin B1; 9. Daniela Angetter-Pfeiffer: Konrad Lorenz, Nicolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch – the Scientific Network and the Controversy over the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973; 10. Nils Hansson, Giacomo Padrini, Andreas Winkelmann, Mathias Schütz: What does it take for an Anatomist to get a Nobel Prize? An Analysis of the Nobel Prize Nominations for Wolfgang Bargmann, Albert von Kölliker and Hans Spemann; 11. Leander Scheel, Nils Hansson: Physicians as Candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize; Index