1940 — The Year the Nobel Prize Stopped

What You’ll Learn in This Article

You will understand how the world’s most prestigious science prize could be completely halted for an entire era, and what crucial scientific research continued to progress behind the scenes during that hiatus.

System Downtime: The Nobel Prize’s Six-Year Gap

Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded annually. There have been a few exceptions (1915-1918, 1921, 1925, etc.), but these were usually due to the committee’s judgment that “there is nothing worthy of an award among this year’s nominees.” The award system itself continued to operate.

However, the gap from 1940 to 1942 was entirely different. The entire award system was shut down because World War II made it impossible for the Nobel Foundation to function normally.

The background of this system downtime, the crucial discoveries that continued to be made during this period, and the awards that were belatedly presented after the downtime ended — these are the topics covered in this special article.

The computer science analogy fits perfectly here. This is similar to the relationship between system downtime and background processes.

When a large service goes down, the user interface becomes unresponsive. However, often background tasks — batch processing, log collection, data synchronization — continue in some form. When the service comes back online, the results of these background tasks are accumulated and reflected in the new service cycle.

Even during this period of the Nobel Prize’s suspension, most of the world’s laboratories continued to operate. What was shut down was the award system’s recognition mechanism, not science itself. And the research conducted during this period was largely recognized in the first few years of the Nobel Prize after the war.

The Era: Nazi Occupation of Europe and the Nobel Foundation’s Decision

In 1940, Nazi Germany launched a large-scale occupation of continental Europe.

In April, the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway. Although the Nobel Foundation’s headquarters was in Stockholm, which was a neutral country, Sweden, the fact that neighboring Norway was under Nazi occupation was a major problem. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo, Norway, and the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee were placed under Nazi surveillance.

In May, the Nazis invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. France surrendered in June. Within six weeks, the entire western continental Europe fell under Nazi control. Heijmans (1938 laureate) of Belgium and Löwi of Austria (already annexed) were also in Nazi-occupied territories.

From July to October, the Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe attempted to bomb Britain into submission, but failed. This was the Nazis’ first major setback, and Britain became a crucial center of resistance in World War II. What is especially important to us today is the fact that the penicillin team at Oxford continued their research during this aerial bombardment.

In this situation, the Nobel Foundation had to make a critical decision. There was great pressure to cooperate with the Nazis. The Nazis made several demands of the Swedish government, one of which was to award the Nobel Prize to individuals approved by the Nazis. The Nazis had opposed this award system politically since the 1935 award to Carl von Ossietzky (a German journalist critical of the Nazi regime).

The Nobel Foundation’s decision was to suspend the awards. They judged that suspending the awards altogether was the only way to protect the integrity of the awards rather than awarding them. This decision led to the complete suspension of the awards from 1940 to 1942.

In parallel with Korean history, 1940 was the year in which name-changing to Japanese surnames was enforced (February) and the Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo newspapers were forcibly closed (August). At the same time that the world’s most prestigious science prize was suspended in Europe to protect the integrity of the system, the systems that protected names and freedom of the press were forcibly destroyed in Korea. Two forms of suspension — suspension for self-defense and forced destruction — occurred in parallel.

Science Did Not Stop, Even So

Crucial research continued behind the scenes during this period of suspension. Most of these research efforts later led to Nobel Prizes or became the foundation of medicine in the latter half of the 20th century.

Mass Production of Penicillin: Under the Roofs of Oxford

In May 1940, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain’s Oxford team successfully produced the first purified form of penicillin. Their paper published on May 27 — “Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent” — was the pivotal moment that transformed penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a clinical drug.

This was 12 years after Fleming observed the antibacterial effect of the Penicillium mold in 1928. During those 12 years, penicillin could not be clinically applied because there was no way to purify it. It was only after the Oxford team developed an extremely difficult chemical purification process that this drug became actually usable.

It is remarkable that this research continued under the roofs of Oxford during the Nazi bombing raids. Some members of the team were preparing to rub the Penicillium mold culture onto their clothes and somehow smuggle it out of the country to another country if the Nazis occupied Britain.

The clinical use of this discovery was expanded to American mass production facilities and used on Allied soldiers from 1943. Penicillin was a crucial reason for the significant reduction in Allied casualties in the latter half of World War II. This discovery was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize jointly to Fleming, Florey, and Chain. It was an award given five years later.

The Rh Factor: A Second Major Discovery in New York

Karl Landsteiner (1930 laureate) made a second major discovery in New York at the Rockefeller Institute during this period: the Rh factor.

If his previous ABO discovery had established the safety of blood transfusions between different individuals, the discovery of the Rh factor revealed the problem of blood type incompatibility between pregnant women and their fetuses. If an Rh-negative mother is pregnant with an Rh-positive fetus, a severe fetal hemolytic disease can occur from the second pregnancy.

Following this discovery, Rh testing of pregnant women was standardized, and a RhoGAM injection therapy was later developed to make this problem clinically manageable. Today, millions of pregnant women worldwide benefit from this test and preventive measures each year.

DDT

During this period, Paul Müller of Switzerland was identifying the insecticidal effect of DDT. This discovery contributed critically to the control of typhus and malaria during World War II. Müller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The story of DDT is more complex. Initially welcomed as a miraculous substance for controlling infectious diseases, its environmental hazards were revealed after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and it was banned in most countries. Today, we view this Nobel Prize from a complex perspective — as a case where a judgment that was accurate at the time later revealed its shortcomings.

Research on Metabolic Processes with Radioactive Isotopes

In the United States, George de Hevesy was establishing a method of tracking the movement of specific elements within a living body using radioactive isotopes. This method revolutionized metabolic research. Hevesy was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The Connection: What Emerged from This Downtime

In 1943, the Nobel Committee decided to resume the awards. The candidates from the 1940-1942 suspension period began to be reviewed. The awards given during this period were:

• 1943: Henrik Dam and Edward Doisy (discovery of vitamin K). Research that was completed by the two in the late 1930s.
• 1944: Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser (functional differentiation of nerve fibers). Research that was demonstrated in the 1930s.
• 1945: Fleming, Florey, and Chain (penicillin). The Oxford team’s purification in 1940 was crucial.

These three awards were the results of the background tasks accumulated during the downtime. When the award system was restarted, these results were recognized in order.

Another implication of this period is that the United States emerged as the center of world science. While continental Europe was under Nazi occupation, the combination of European scientists who had fled and the United States’ vast resources led to the United States taking the lead in world science. This trend expanded over the following decades.

There is an irony in the fact that the Nobel Foundation, which suspended the award system to protect its integrity, actually accelerated the reorganization of world science. The United States began to build its own award system (such as the Lasker Award), and the geographical center of world science shifted definitively from Europe to North America.

Lessons Learned

This period of suspension leaves us with some lessons. “Even when a system is suspended, there are tasks that continue to be performed behind the scenes. How these background tasks are handled when the system is restarted is crucial.”

When a large organization is suspended due to a crisis, its surface-level activities stop. However, the individual people and small teams within that organization often continue to work quietly. When the organization is restarted, how these people’s accumulated work is integrated determines the speed of the organization’s reconstruction. The Nobel Foundation did this integration well — the results of 1940-1942 flowed into the awards of 1943-1945.

Another lesson: There are times when it is right to suspend a system for a while in order to protect the integrity of the system. The Nobel Foundation’s decision to suspend the awards in order to refuse cooperation with the Nazis was a decision to protect the future credibility of the awards. Today, there are times when it is right for an organization or service to be suspended for a while.

Even as you read this sentence, various system downtimes are occurring in different parts of the world. The tasks that continue to be performed behind the scenes during this suspension are often more important than the suspension itself.

Summary of the 1940-1942 Nobel Prize suspension: In the context of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe during World War II, the Nobel Foundation suspended the award system to protect the integrity of the awards. However, crucial research, such as the purification of penicillin by the Oxford team and the discovery of the Rh factor in New York, continued during this period, and these accumulated efforts flowed into the large number of awards given when the awards were restarted in 1943-1945.

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