As the 2008 Nobel Lau­re­ates are announced, SciAm looks at the top 10 Nobel snubs – those who undoubt­edly deserved the award, but never did:

  • Lise Meit­ner: left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for the dis­cov­ery of nuclear fission
  • Oswald Avery: never won a Nobel for show­ing that genes are made of DNA, not protein
  • John Bah­call: left out of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for research on solar neutrinos
  • Albert Schatz: no 1952 Nobel Prize in Phys­i­ol­ogy or Med­i­cine for the dis­cov­ery of streptomycin
  • Ros­alind Franklin: her work on the struc­ture of DNA never received a Nobel
  • Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell: frozen out of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the dis­cov­ery of pulsars
  • Vic­tor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun and David Baulcombe: missed out on the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology
  • Keith Porter: 1974 Nobel Prize in Phys­i­ol­ogy or Med­i­cine for inno­va­tions in cell biology
  • Ralph Alpher: missed out on the 1978 and 2006 Nobel Prizes in Physics
  • Josiah Gibbs and Dim­itri Mendeleev: missed out on the early Nobel Prize in Chemistry

In addi­tion I can’t help but notice that these two were snubbed from this list too:

  • Ein­stein for never receiv­ing a Nobel for his achieve­ment in devel­op­ing spe­cial or gen­eral rel­a­tiv­ity or the famous E=mc2 equa­tion of mass–energy equiv­a­lence (he did, how­ever, receive a Nobel in 1921 for explain­ing the pho­to­elec­tric effect in terms of quan­tum the­ory: essen­tially invent­ing the con­cept of photons).
  • Fritz Zwicky for pre­sent­ing ideas about neu­tron stars and super­novae in 1934.

Of course, Ein­stein and Zwicky were the­o­rists, and the Nobel com­mit­tee has never looked kindly on the­o­rists, pre­fer­ring those who con­duct key exper­i­ments instead.

Again, on top of all of these are the count­less other sci­en­tists who have been denied a Nobel Prize sim­ply because they died before the impor­tance of their dis­cov­ery was shown: Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously.

via Seed