Warburg’s dogs: Nobel laureates and scientific celebrity

ABSTRACT

The Nobel prize places scientists who have usually not been the object of attention outside of their own area of expertise in the public eye. This paper investigates two aspects of this. First, it describes theoretically how a public persona that to a significant extent depends on a process of ’celebrification’ has been constructed, not so much of the individual laureate but of the role as Nobel laureate. Second, it investigates the historical roots of this. Looking at the process from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, we find that the Nobel laureates become a special kind of scientific celebrities, since their fame is based not so much on their public achievements as on the selection by a committee. This is traced to the first decades of the prize’s history, using examples from the first award in 1901 to the early 1930s. We also see how the annual repetitions of the media representations of the prize helped create the persona of the Nobel laureate. The conclusion is that the laureates are not celebrities in their own right, but as a representative of a type – a constructed cultural persona called the Nobel laureate.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity history
• scientific celebrity
• media history
• history of science
• Nobel prize

Disclosure statement

The author works at the Nobel Prize Museum which is affiliated with the Nobel Foundation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gustav Källstrand

Gustav Källstrand received his PhD in Culture Studies from Linköping University in 2012 and works as a researcher and editor at the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm. His work deals with the cultural history of science with a special interest in the history of the Nobel prize and its impact on culture and society. He is currently working with a book on the history of the Nobel Foundation and in the ERC funded project PASSIM (Patents as Scientific Information) based at Linköping University.