On November 27, 1895, a year before he died, Alfred Bernhard Nobel signed his last will and testament at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. Eight years before his death the Swedish chemist, inventor and engineer who held 355 patents and made his fortune in armaments and explosives (he invented dynamite and ballistite, and owned the gun-making firm Bofors) had an unexpected change of heart. In 1888, a French newspaper erroneously published Nobel’s obituary – it was actually his brother Ludvig who had died – in which it described the inventor as “the merchant of death.” Concerned at how he might be remembered, Nobel attempted to right his wrongs: He bequeathed 94 percent of his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes to recognize scientists and inventors whose achievements conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind” in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901. In 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank (the National Bank of Sweden) instituted a prize for Economic Sciences in Nobel’s memory. Laureates receive a medal, a diploma and a sum of money that varies in relation to the Nobel Foundation’s income that year – in 2011 each prize was worth about $1.45 million. The awards are presented annually in Stockholm, Sweden (except for the Peace Prize, which is presented in Oslo, Norway).
Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman, one of three recipients of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, at her tent in Change Square in Sanaa, Yemen. Karman's Nobel Peace Prize draws attention to the role of women in the Arab Spring uprisings; they have rebelled not only against dictators but against a traditional, conservative mindset that fears women as agents of change. Women have participated in all the protests sweeping the Arab world, working both online to mobilize, and on the ground to march, chant and even throw themselves into stone-throwing clashes with security forces side by side with men. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)
Leymah Gbowee of Liberia is one of three 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winners. Gbowee campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon in her country's brutal civil war. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia's current president and presidential candidate of the Unity Party (UP), is the third Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Liberia's October 11 general election will be the first domestically organised vote since an on-off 1989-2003 civil war and a test for a West African country struggling to close the book on its bloody past eight years after the fighting ceased. REUTERS/Luc Gnago
The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded on Thursday to poet and author Tomas Transtromer of Sweden, whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet of recent decades. (AP Photo/Scanpix, Maja Suslin)
Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the secret of quasicrystals, an atomic mosaic whose discovery overturned theories about solids. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
Astronomer Adam Riess in his office at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that American Saul Perlmutter, US-Australian citizen Brian Schmidt and US scientist Adam Riess will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The trio were honored "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." (AP Photo/The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Gail Burton)
Australian Academy of Science Professor Brian Schmidt is one of three US-born scientists to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. (AP Photo/AAS Irene Dowdy)
Saul Perlmutter, one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, poses with his daughter's telescope at his home in Berkeley, California after hearing he had won. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said American Perlmutter would share the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award with US-Australian Brian Schmidt and US scientist Adam Riess. Working in two separate research teams during the 1990s, Perlmutter in one and Schmidt and Riess in the other, the scientists raced to map the universe's expansion by analyzing a particular type of supernova, or exploding star. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
Dr. Bruce Beutler, director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at UT Southwestern Medical Center, acknowledges applause from attendees at an event announcing Beutler as a recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in Dallas, Texas. Beutler is one of three scientists chosen to share the prize for discoveries about the immune system. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Canadian-born scientist Ralph Steinman died three days before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for "his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity". Steinman died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 68, having extended his life using a kind of therapy he designed. This is the first time in history, that the Nobel Prize, which is never awarded posthumously, will go to a dead person. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
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