Nobel celebrations: an elegant turn with science's elite

Science News, Jan 22, 2005 by Emily Sohn

I was halfway through my appetizer when the lights went dim in the Blue Hall--an ornate and cavernous room in the Stockholm City Hall. A spotlight scanned the elegant brick space and its 1,300 well-dressed guests, then came to rest on two opera singers. They stood on a grand stairway. Behind them was the sparkling Golden Hall, with its 18 million mosaic pieces of glass and gold. The performance that followed, "Homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart," included an operatic rendition of a refrain from the Simon and Garfunkel song "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy)." When the singing ended, the lights came back on. We all picked up our forks and resumed eating.

"Just another day at the Nobel prize ceremonies," I said, before washing down a bite of lobster-tomato pate with a sip of Dom Perignon, vintage 1995.

As a journalist who covers science and health, usually for publications aimed at young people, I am often surprised at the access I have to people and places. But the Nobel prize ceremonies are a special case. The prizes are the most coveted awards in science, literature, economics, and social accomplishment. To win one of the three science prizes given each year, researchers must shake the foundations of what we know, usually by creating a fundamental shift in the way we think about things. "The world should not be the same after the discovery as it was before," says Hans Jornvall, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

Scientists dream of winning these prizes, which set them up with eternal honor and a comfortable sum of money--$1.3 million this year--to be split among the winners in each category. Almost as intensely, Swedes dream of attending the awards ceremony and the grand party that follows.

Just as people in the United States gather around their television sets every February to watch the Academy Awards ceremony honoring stars of the film industry, everyone in Sweden is glued to the television each Dec. 10, when King Karl XVI Gustav hands out the Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology, economics, and literature. (The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded the same day in Oslo.)

In both the Oscar and Nobel ceremonies, glamour is a major draw. There are famous people, gorgeous dresses, and, perhaps most appealing of all, lots of exclusivity.

Journalism, in my experience, is not a high-glamour job, and I am not a high-glamour person. I sometimes work at home in my pajamas. I don't know how to put on eyeliner. I've never yearned to attend a ball. Nevertheless, I was delighted to find myself scouring the streets of Stockholm last Dec. 8, looking for the perfect gown to wear to the Nobel festivities.

I had been very lucky to score a seat. I was in Stockholm that week to write about a group of young scientists who would be attending the Nobel events as part of an annual program called the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar (SIYSS). The program's 24, participants came from 15 countries. All were between the ages of 18 and 24, and each had either won national or international science fairs or been selected by their universities or countries on the basis of the strength of their research. The organizers of SIYSS agreed to let me embed myself with the group for a busy week that included meetings with members of Nobel committees, tours of science institutions, and ballroom dancing lessons (for the thrilling details of that last item, go to www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20050105/Feature1.asp).

When it came to getting a ticket for the actual festivities, however, I was on my own. My only hope was an appeal to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and everyone I spoke to in Sweden made it clear that my chances were extremely slim. More than 70 members of the foreign press applied in 2004, I was later told. Only 12 would be allowed in. A week before my plane left for Stockholm, I learned that I was one of them.

Once in Sweden, with a ball gown picked out and altered to fit me--at 5 feet 2 inches, I'm smaller than the average Swede--I joined the young women in my group for a morning at the hair salon. A hairdresser there invested an entire can of hairspray on my do. Then, we returned to our rooms at the local youth hostel to apply makeup and other finishing touches, while the young men dressed in tails. At 3 p.m., a line of white limos arrived to drive us around Stockholm, in style, until 4:30 p.m., when the ceremonies would begin.

By the time we arrived at the Stockholm Concert Hall, a few minutes from the lavish city hall where we would end the evening, it was as dark as only a Scandinavian winter afternoon can be. People in heavy coats lined up behind barricades on the street, struggling to get glimpses of the rich and famous emerging from their limos. A helicopter hovered overhead. For the first time in my life, I felt like a movie star.

At the concert hall ceremony; I sat on the edge of my assigned seat in the front row of the second balcony. After a formal procession, the royal family took seats onstage opposite the new Nobel laureates, with the Nobel Committee members behind them. Bengt Samuelsson, chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation, opened with a speech about women in science and culture. He had been inspired by the unusual cluster of 3 women among the 12 winners of Nobel prizes this year.