Review: Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize at the British Library

There have been 776 winners of Nobel Prizes – for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and (more recently) economics – since they began in 1901. Yet were they recognition for astounding, outstanding individuals, or parts of teams and milieus that happened to be picked out of a communal project?

That’s the central question of an exhibition that has just arrived at the British Library, Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize.

One view starts the exhibition, that of Sir Alexander Fleming: “It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual.” Yet further on you go back to Lucretius in 55BC: “Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

The story certainly begins with one man, the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite in 1867. He proved himself not just an inventor – with more than 300 patents to his name, for goods ranging from artificial silk to aluminium boats – but a brilliant businessman, growing his explosives empire to nearly 100 factories around the globe. Some of their products – or at least one hopes only their packets – are on display.

Nobel was also a cultured man, interested in philosophy and art and fluent in five languages. And although he was constantly on the move he considered Paris his home, explaining “Even the stray dogs smell of civilisation!” Some of his books, ranging from Spinoza to Mill, are on display, and he wrote in his old age: “A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.” He was, however, a model of the unhappy old rich man, and a lot of the effort of his last years seems to have gone into his will, setting up the prizes.

The displays around the walls have a captivating eclecticism, consisting of items associated with the winners. So the shoes of Selma Lagerlof, who had her inspiration for her first book while taking a walk during her time at a teacher’s college, sit beside a culture of the mould that helped Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin. Nearby is a light guide from CERN, the centre of European particle physics, and a samizdat copy of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The multi-coloured and patterned ears of corn that helped Barbara McClintock identify the “jumping genes” that won her the 1983 Medicine prize sit beside a wheelchair manufactured at a workshop run by the Integrated Campaign to Ban Landmines (1997 Peace Prize).

At the centre is a contraption that has a seductive “mad-inventor” style – a circulating rack of banners holding the image and details of every one of the prizewinners. It circulates, not particularly logically, around the table setting from the Nobel banquet of 1991 (the 90th anniversary) – a reminder how important are the prizes for the place in the world of two small countries.

This might not be an obvious exhibition for children, but for those of mechanical and inquiring minds, this central assemblage, and other aspects are likely to be irresistible. The “push this button” urge is fulfilled with the machine that Ahmed Zewali used to demonstrate his “femtochemistry”, modelling the movement of a molecule placed on a fast-spinning electric motor, photographed by a laser shining through a spinning disc that produces a shutter speed of .000000000000001 of a second. (There are 14 zeroes, if they are hard to count.)

Providing a linear route through the exhibition is a decade-by-decade account of the controversies of the prizes, a reminder that while this was a century of tremendous scientific progress and creative achievement, it was a lot more, and a lot worse. Even the first Literature prize, which went to the French poet Sully Prudhomme, was dismissed as an expression of an outdated ideal. Many at the time thought it should have gone to Tolstoy. Most modern opinion would agree.

Some of the controversies were even more fundamental. French opinion in particular was, understandably, horrified by the award of the 1918 Chemistry Prize to Fritz Haber, for he had worked on the development of poisonous gases used in war weapons. Yet the committee showed early the sort of courage that we have come to expect today. The 1935 Peace prize was given to Carl von Ossietzky for his campaigning against Nazism. The recipient could not, however, accept his prize, since he was already in the concentration camp in which he would die three years later.

These were the grand geopolitical realities of the prize, yet in this decade-by-decade account the everyday final results of its prizewinners’ efforts is also acknowledged. For the Twenties is a vial of insulin and a hypodermic syringe, so diabetes need no longer be a death sentence, from a Fifties portable transistor radio marking the birth of the mass media, from the Seventies a small plastic jug marking a kitchen revolution.

Curated by the Nobel Museum in Sweden, this exhibition shows the fact that it has been on the road for years – it looks a bit battered around the edges, and in places the labelling could be better. But that’s being picky – overall this is a fascinating exhibition everyone should see, for there is an answer to the central question – does a Nobel prize come from the individual or the milieu? For this exhibition isn’t just a history of 100 years of outstanding individuals; it is a history of a century of human endeavour. However white and Eurocentric the prizes might have been in their earlier years, they have grown to encompass the globe, and the cultures and communities that have created our world today.

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The exhibition continues until March 15. Entry is free. Elsewhere, this article has more about the exhibition, and the Nobel selection process. The Nobel Prize homepage (in English) has details of every winner, and some fun games and activities for kids. There are terminals in the exhibition linked to it.