Nobel Prizes 2025: Announcement begins with medicine, Peace Prize to Machado sparks controversy

Few other awards in the world are associated with so much prestige: this week this year's Nobel Prize winners will be announced in Stockholm and Oslo. The award begins this morning in the Physiology or Medicine category. In 2025, three scientists from Japan and the USA, Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, shared the Nobel Prize for their research on the immune system. Their discoveries help develop new therapies.

This week the Nobel Prizes for Physics (October 6th), Chemistry (October 7th), Literature (October 8th), Peace (October 9th) and on Monday next week the Swedish Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences (October 12th) will also be announced. The latter has only been awarded since 1969 and is the only prize that does not go back to the Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

The remaining prizes are celebrating a special birthday this year: they are turning 125 years old. The awards were given out for the first time in 1901, five years after the death of the prize founder Alfred Nobel. The French writer Sully Prudhomme received the first Nobel Prize in Literature. Last year the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai received it. The first Nobel Peace Prize ever went to the Swiss Henry Dunant, who is considered the founder of the Red Cross, and to the French Frédéric Passy, ​​who, among other things, was very committed to international peace conferences.

Controversy over the Nobel Peace Prize: Medal as a Trump souvenir

The Nobel Peace Prize 2025, which is the only prize to be awarded not in Stockholm but in the Norwegian capital Oslo, went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. The award to her is controversial. Machado dedicated the award to US President Donald Trump and later gave him her medal. The Nobel Institute then made it clear that the prize is not transferable - even if it is passed on symbolically.

The controversy surrounding Trump was not only bad for the Nobel Prize, said the managing director of the Norwegian peace research institute Prio, Haakon Gjerløw. “It was precisely because the award was controversial that it received international attention,” says Gjerløw. "Perhaps that's why people are particularly excited to see who the prize goes to this time - even if this year's award is completely uncontroversial."

In his opinion, actors who provided humanitarian aid under the most difficult conditions in the face of many wars and crises in the world, such as the children's rights organization Save the Children or the Emergency Response Rooms network in Sudan, deserved the Nobel Prize this year.

This year, the coveted awards are worth twelve million Swedish crowns - the equivalent of around one million euros - per prize category. They will be presented on the anniversary of the death of the prize founder Alfred Nobel, December 10th, in Stockholm and Oslo.