The Nobel Prizes, the most prestigious official awards in the world, are presented during the second week of October each year in Stockholm. There are six categories: medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economics. Among the many nominations and the requirement that nominees must be alive (posthumous Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded), there is room for only one, or at most three, winners in any given group. The others do not win—or rather, they lose. They miss out on the fame that comes with recognition from the Nobel Committee, as well as the financial prize.
Yet, when we look at the missing names in the history of the Nobel Prizes, we are left astonished: the list is incredibly long. There are numerous debates about unawarded Nobels, and activists advocating for changes to the selection criteria have been striving for years to expand inclusivity to women, smaller institutions, and groundbreaking ideas. However, the criteria tied to geopolitics or the prestige of the universities candidates come from often prevail. This book offers a journey through the lives of twenty-four Beautiful Losers—extraordinary individuals who have devoted and continue to devote their lives to advancing our planet and the community of living beings through their research, work, writings, and activities, in pursuit of a world of greater peace, well-being, equity, and awareness.
In this edition of the ISTUD Business School’s Master program ‘Scienziati in Azienda’ twenty-eight students have taken on the task of recounting their biographies, their forms of intelligence, the Nobel Prize criteria for each category in which they were eligible or nominated, and their reactions to not winning the Nobel. Through these twenty-four testimonies, we will observe the varied responses of the Beautiful Losers.