Fritz Haber
Fritz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1919, after creating the Haber-Bosch process. This invention was groundbreaking, as it allowed ammonia to be produced on a bigger scale. It also helped create fertilizer, which was highly essential for agriculture and helped feed billions of people. Even so, the Polish inventor also helped develop chlorine gas into a destructive chemical weapon, which was highly used in World War I.
Harald Zur Hausen
The German inventor Harald Zur Hausen was awarded the 2008 Nobel physiology or medicine award for his massive discovery of human papillomavirus (HPV), also the way it impacts cervical cancer. Sooner after that, the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca decided to sponsor the Nobel Prize website and also was the one to produce the HPV vaccines.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was directly involved in two Nobel scandals. He received a nomination for a Nobel peace prize in 1939, and even if it was done by a Swedish legislator as a joke, it completely backfired. The nomination was rapidly withdrawn after it made quite an uproar.
The other scandal that took place in 1935 turned out to be even bigger. It all started when German journalist Carl von Ossietzky was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Bon Ossietzky was adamantly criticizing Hitler, which naturally, angered the Nazi leader. Hitler then barred all the Germans from accepting any Nobel Prizes and even invented the country’s own German National Prize for Art and Science.
Barack Obama
Critics believe that former U.S. President Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize way too soon. He was only nine months into his first term when he received the prize in 2009. Many people felt that it was too soon: Brian Becker, national coordinator of Act Now Stop War and End Racism, described that the award should have been translated as a “giving Obama the ‘you are not George W. Bush’ award”.
Geir Lundestad, former director of the Nobel Institute, explained in his 2015 autobiography that the Nobel committee felt that the award would only “strengthen the president”, but it seems that it didn’t happen that way.
