How do Nobel laureates spend their prize money?

Stockholm: Nobel laureates sometimes display as much ingenuity when deciding how to spend their prize money as they did on the work that won them the award in the first place.

When Sir Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001, he decided to upgrade his motorbike. A fellow winner in 1993, Richard Roberts, installed a croquet lawn in front of his house. Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won in 2004, said the prize meant "financial independence."

This year's awards get under way on Monday, starting with the medicine prize and wrapping up a week later with the economics prize.

Once the frenzied media attention, formal appearances and ceremonies are over, this year's Nobel laureates will also have to decide how to spend the eight million kronor ($1.25 million, 925,000 euros) prize money.

And judging from past experience, anything can happen. Sometimes they donate it to charity or scientific research, but that is by no means universal.

Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, said there were no obvious shopping trends among laureates.

"I think it depends a lot on which country they come from, their personal finances... what kind of incomes they have when they get the prize, and where they are in life," he said.

However real estate is a popular option, at least among those willing to reveal what they spend the money on.

Over a million dollars sounds like a lot but it is often shared between several winners, diluting their Nobel spending power.

Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who shared the 2001 physics prize with two colleagues, put his share towards a house and his children's education.

"Since half goes to taxes in the US, there was nothing (more) left," he said.

Phillip Sharp, the American co-winner of the 1993 medicine prize, decided to splash out on a 100-year-old Federal style house.

"I took that money and bought a little bit bigger house... It's a beautiful old place," he told AFP, adding that "the money is a nice part of the process" but "the important thing about the prize is the recognition."

Deciding how to spend their money can take some time as new laureates are inundated with offers to attend meetings, lectures and inaugurations during their first year.

"I've not managed to think about the prize money. There have been great demands on my time," said Serge Haroche, joint winner of the 2012 physics prize, although he said he would probably look into real estate.

For winners of the peace prize the decision is often more clear-cut, as the honour tends to go to politicians, organisations and activists who are under more public scrutiny.

Many, like US President Barack Obama in 2009 and the European Union in 2012, donate to charities.

Others support pet projects: the 2008 winner, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, said he would finance a conflict resolution group he had set up.

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank -- which gives loans to lift people out of poverty -- said he would fund an eye hospital and a business making affordable food for the poor with his 2006 prize money.

But there has been one notable exception to the charitable giving.

US President Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1920 but left it in a Swedish bank to earn interest, apparently because he was concerned about life after retirement in an age when former presidents got no government pension, according to one biography.


Cash prize lowered after economic crisis

Literature laureates tend to be more private about how they use the money but the choice is often equally straightforward.

"Even if Nobel-winning authors are quite well known many of them will not have made much money from writing," said Anna Gunder, a Nobel literature expert at Uppsala University.

While the prize might keep the wolf from the door for some years, giving them freedom to write, it can also briefly have the opposite effect.

"It really changes their careers... During the first year after they've won they often write less but they generally continue after a year or two," said Gunder.

The Nobel prize sum has fluctuated over the years, most recently in 2012 when it was reduced following the financial crisis.

"We chose last year to act pre-emptively and take down the prize money and our expenditure by 20 percent," said Heikensten.

"Since we're in this 'forever' we had to act in good time."

There are no plans to increase the prize money again in the near future but few are likely to complain when they get that Nobel phone call.

"I don't think the prize money is the real issue," said physics laureate Haroche.

"I think the prize would be just as prestigious without it."

Group nominates Vladimir Putin for Nobel Peace Prize

Moscow: He is credited with commanding a war to crush separatism in Chechnya, approving a full-scale attack on Georgia over a minor border dispute and complaining when NATO led an air war in Libya to stop Moammar Gadhafi from killing thousands of his own people. And he is still selling weapons to the murderous government of President Bashar Assad of Syria.

Nevertheless, seizing on his proposal to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons stockpile and forestalling a missile strike that had been threatened by President Barack Obama, a Russian advocacy group said Tuesday that it had nominated President Vladimir V. Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Members of the group, called the International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World, said at a news conference here Tuesday that Putin was far more deserving of the peace prize than Obama, who received it in 2009 but has continued to lead U.S. military operations - including drone strikes that have killed civilians and U.S. citizens abroad.

By contrast, they portrayed Putin, who has opposed military intervention throughout the two-and-a-half-year-old civil war in Syria, as a man who favours diplomatic solutions.

"Barak Obama has the title of Nobel Prize winner - the man who initiated and approved such aggressive actions on the part of the United States of America as in Iraq, Afghanistan, some others, and now is preparing for invasion of Syria," Iosif Kobzon, a popular Russian singer and a member of Parliament, said at the news conference. "I think our president, who is trying to stop the bloodshed, who is trying to help to resolve this conflict situation through a political dialogue, through diplomatic language, deserves this title more."

Critics of Putin say that Russia, at his direction, has extended a lifeline to the Assad government, an old ally, and repeatedly used its veto in the U.N. Security Council to block international action that could have stemmed the violence in Syria and prevented the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians. Putin has insisted that the Syrian rebels bear equal responsibility for the violence and that, under international law, Syria's sovereignty must be respected.

Although the group announced its plans Tuesday, it sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee formally proposing Putin as a candidate for the Peace Prize on Sept. 16, two days after Russia and the United States reached an agreement in Geneva on a plan for Syria's surrender of its chemical arms.

"Being the leader of one of the leading nations of the world, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin makes efforts to maintain peace and tranquility not only on the territory of his own country but also actively promotes settlement of all conflicts arising on the planet," the group wrote.
The 2013 Peace Prize recipient will be announced in Oslo on Oct. 11; nominations for this year's prize had to be postmarked by Feb. 1.

Putin would not be the first formerly war-waging leader to win the Peace Prize. The Israeli prime minister and former general, Yitzhak Rabin, shared it in 1994 with the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, who was long accused of terrorism.

Putin is also not the only Russian resident to be nominated this year for a major international prize. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has received temporary asylum here, is among the nominees for the Sakharov Prize, which is awarded by the European Parliament to honor supporters of human rights and free expression.

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the jailed former Yukos Oil tycoon and a political opponent of Putin's, was also nominated for the Sakharov award.