STOCKHOLM: They were created more than 100 years ago in a world that had yet to discover radioactivity or cinema, but are the Nobel prizes now outdated in our era of information technology and climate change?

Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel stipulated in his 1895 will that his vast fortune be used to create prizes for great discoveries made in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

His wish was carried out and the prizes were first awarded in 1901. In 1968, the economics prize was created by Sweden’s central bank.

Asked whether the Nobel science prizes were still pertinent in our modern times, Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of the respected US journal Science, said they were “even more so.” “There is more really exciting and really pathbreaking science being done now than at the time when the Nobel prizes were founded,” he said.

However, “there are some areas that are increasingly important in science that aren’t covered by the Nobel prizes,” he said, citing ecology and environmental science as an example.

Kennedy, a professor emeritus at California’s Stanford University, noted that the study of “the coupling between atmosphere and oceans that is so important in climate change” does not fit in with “regular physics” and has not yet been given a category.

But the margins of the existing prizes could be enlarged to cover new areas, so that for example the physics prize could cover atmospheric physics and chemistry, he said. One thing is certain: the Nobel Foundation will not be creating any new Nobel prizes, according to its executive director Michael Sohlman.

The Fields Medal, often referred to as the “Nobel of mathematics,” has been awarded since 1936. Legend says Alfred Nobel deliberately omitted such a prize because the woman he loved had an affair with a mathematician, though that’s never been confirmed.

More recently, the Millennium Technology Prize was created in Finland. The award, which honours technological breakthroughs, went to the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in 2004.

Noting that the Nobels focus on the basic sciences, Sohlman acknowledged there are “many other breakthroughs that are purely technological and which are very important” though not covered by the Nobels.—AFP