Nobel Prize Announcements Begin Monday

Posted October 3rd, 2011 at 1:00 am (UTC-5)
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A week of Nobel Prize announcements begins Monday in Stockholm, Sweden with the 2011 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will name the winner in physics Tuesday and chemistry Wednesday. An award for economics, given in memory of Alfred Nobel, will be announced October 10.

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipient will be named Friday.

The Nobel Prizes were created by Alfred Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901.

Ninety-one Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded. On 19 different occasions the prize committee felt there were no nominees who met the criteria for the award..

The International Committee of the Red Cross has been recognized most often, with three awards.

Only one peace laureate has declined the award. In 1973 Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho was recognized along with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho declined the Nobel Peace Prize.