There is no doubt in my mind that President Obama is a very good man indeed, but the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him is too early in my opinion. The wider world was not even aware of him just a mere three years ago.

I am not saying that he is not a worthy candidate, but there are more worthy people in this life who indirectly save millions of lives, are completely unknown for their effects on global peace work and are therefore never considered for the Nobel award.

This is the dilemma confronting the Nobel Peace Prize. Have those who won the prize saved more lives that anyone else through their actions? Unfortunately I have to say that at this point in time I doubt that Obama can be included on such an illustrious list of people who have, literally, saved more lives than any others in our world history.

I had the privilege of working with two of the world’s most unknown celebrities who did indeed save millions of lives through their incredible work and where this work still saves millions every year all over the world.

The first is the late Glenn Seaborg, the ‘father’ of the chemistry of chemotherapy and initiator of the ‘Test Ban Treaty’ for nuclear weapons.

It is estimated that Seaborg through his chemistry and his creation of many of the chemical isotopes used in chemotherapy, has saved literally over 100 million human lives over the past 50 years alone. This has been through a cure or an extension of human life as families have benefited from having these loved ones with them far longer than would have been the case without Seaborg’s incredible creativity. Many more millions of human lives ravaged by cancer will be saved in the future. Indeed the number of people saved by the nuclear test ban initiation is incalculable as one has to only think where the world might be today without Seaborg’s initiative. Indeed, nuclear war might well have happened already in our own lifetime.

The second person I worked with was the late John Argyris, the modern-day inventor of the ‘Finite Element Method’. To put this great engineering achievement into perspective is hard to do for the layman, but it has revolutionised global engineering design so much that we now have far safer cars, buildings, bridges, aeroplanes, dams, trains, and the list goes on. Indeed, without Argyris’s input for NASA’s pre-runner, the 1969 moon landing would never have happened and the space shuttle may never have taken off from planet Earth.

Added to this, today, thanks to Argyris’s revolutionary engineering work we live in a completely safer world as his work has spread into all the sciences, including physiology where the minutest of stress in the human body can be detected and a patient’s life saved. Indeed, it is also estimated that Argyris has saved hundreds of millions through this far greater safety in structural design throughout the world, through buildings and dams et al not collapsing.

But were these two great men of science and engineering who have saved literally millions and millions of lives ever considered by the Nobel Foundation for their Peace Prize by saving all these millions? No.

I therefore feel that the Nobel Prize today belittles itself again, its real value and is against those humanitarians who do truly deserve it.

But then again it has to be said that Gandhi never received it, even though he was nominated five times. In the year of his death, the Nobel Foundation said that there were no candidates worthy enough and did not award the prize that year.

Dr David Hill

World Innovation Foundation

Bern

SWITZERLAND