Every Nobeldagen, Sweden briefly becomes the centre of the scientific world. It is a ritual of prestige and a global moment that compresses centuries of enquiry into a single narrative: these are the discoveries that matter.
However, the day’s origins are rooted in immense suffering. Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite brought industrial progress and violence, generating a lot of wealth, some guilt, and a desire to leave behind a better legacy.
Nobeldagen, 10 December, also marks his death anniversary. According to one tale, when his brother died, a newspaper mistakenly published an obituary for Alfred himself, saying “the merchant of death is dead.” Shocked by how he might be remembered, Nobel redirected his fortune to create annual prizes rewarding work that benefited humanity.
The first awards were given in 1901 in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Over time, the prizes became a global benchmark for scientific and intellectual excellence. Not without controversy, they reflect both the brilliance of individual discovery and the institutional, geopolitical, and cultural priorities of their era.
But the Nobel Prize is more than a celebration of scientific excellence. It is a barometer of what the world chooses to elevate, reward, and remember. And in 2025, this matters more than ever, because the gap between the science we award and the science that shapes society is widening.
This year’s laureates represent extraordinary work in molecular biology, physics, chemistry, and economic sciences. These discoveries have already bent the trajectory of medicine, energy, computation, and global policy. Yet, the patterns emerging across all categories point to a deeper shift: the most consequential research today sits at the intersection of biology, computation, and human behaviour. And that is precisely where the Nobel system remains structurally blind.
The Nobel paradox — rewarding what fits the frame
The Nobel Prize was designed for a scientific world that no longer exists. Its categories reflect a 20th-century model of discovery, where breakthroughs were discrete, mechanistic, and discipline-bound. Today’s breakthroughs are none of those things.
Modern science is not a single eureka moment. It is interdisciplinary scaffolding. Experimental neuroscience meets AI modelling. Molecular biology intersects with digital behaviour. Epidemiology informs political stability. And the discoveries shaping our societies most profoundly are often those that cannot be easily placed into the old categories.
This is why neuroscience, computational psychiatry, and digital behaviour research, AI, the domains directly affecting global mental health, polarisation, algorithmic manipulation, and extremism, rarely reach Nobel consideration. Not because the work lacks impact, but because impact in human behaviour is diffuse, long-term, and often politically uncomfortable.
Meaningful science may not win a Nobel
If we assess societal relevance through an epistemic lens, the discoveries with the greatest influence on humanity today are not the ones receiving medals in Stockholm. They include:
-The mechanisms linking chronic stress to long-term cognitive decline
-The neurobiology of loneliness and its political consequences
-AI-driven influence architectures that shape voting behaviour and identity formation
-The digital pathways through which extremist ideologies spread
-The cognitive vulnerabilities that misinformation exploits at scale
-Neuroimmune interactions that determine mental health trajectories
And most importantly, the research on geopolitical instability, state-aggression and war.
None of these fields sit comfortably within Nobel categories, and all are reshaping the 21st century.
We now live within complex cognitive ecosystems where information, identity, and neurobiology constantly interact. The discoveries that govern these systems are among the most important scientific advances of our time, yet they remain structurally excluded from the Nobel imagination.
Also read: Why the Nobel Prize continues to elude India
Prestige, memory, and the blind spots of science
The Nobel Prize has immense symbolic power. It shapes scientific memory. It determines which fields receive funding, which researchers receive global attention, and which discoveries become part of public consciousness. But it also reinforces hierarchy.
Breakthroughs in molecular biology are celebrated. Breakthroughs that illuminate why humans believe harmful ideas, how digital systems radicalise people, or how AI exploits our cognitive shortcuts will remain peripheral. Moreover, the nomination system, which takes decades, itself is exclusionary, limited largely to leaders of international organisations like the ICJ and the US Congress and established university professors — a good proportion of them Swedish and rarely from the Global South.
This matters because society’s most urgent questions are behavioural, not just molecular.
Why are democracies becoming cognitively unstable in the presence of AI-generated political information? Why are young men being pulled into misogynistic digital ideologies at scale? What is the neural architecture of extremist belief formation? How does trauma, identity, and algorithmic exposure interact to create polarisation? Why do young men get trapped into the manosphere? Why are people so eager to fight wars?
These questions sit at the core of global security, mental health, and democratic resilience, yet none are likely to be elevated as major scientific questions. A pattern is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
The Nobel Prize rewards what is safe, clean, mechanistic, and politically neutral.
The world, meanwhile, is being reshaped by what is messy, behavioural, interdisciplinary, and politically charged. There is no better example than the 2025 Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado — she used polarising misinformation to align herself with Donald Trump, supported US aggression in the Caribbean and sanctions in Venezuela, creating a major humanitarian crisis and a large number of deaths, including children aged under five, across 152 countries, according to a Lancet Health study.
Another major scientific frontier of this decade is the brain — under stress due to the pandemic, climate uncertainty, social media influx, polarised environments, hijacked by algorithmic systems that learn faster than humans adapt.
This is not a crisis of recognition; it is a crisis of scientific prioritisation.
What the Nobel should reward but doesn’t
If the Nobel Prize were redesigned for 2025, we would see more recognition for: AlphaFold & AI-driven protein structure prediction, quantum error correction threshold demonstrations, psychedelic neuroscience: mechanisms of rapid-acting antidepressants, long Covid and post-viral neuroimmune mechanisms, breakthroughs in climate and earth systems, and digital manipulation and radicalisation research. These are not fringe fields; they are scientific foundations in a world undergoing rapid technological transformation.
Also read: Why hasn’t India won Nobel Prize for literature after Independence? Quality of education
A more honest Nobeldagen
Nobel Day should not only be a retrospective celebration. It should be a moment of scientific accountability — a reminder that prestige does not equal relevance, and that the discoveries shaping human behaviour, democracy, and mental health deserve far more visibility than they currently receive.
In a decade defined by cognitive instability, algorithmic influence, and the psychological consequences of war and global uncertainty, the science we ignore will cost more than the science we reward. Nobeldagen offers an opportunity to celebrate excellence. It also invites a harder question: Are we recognising the science that actually protects society, or the science that fits a comfortable narrative?
Until we confront that distinction, Nobel Day will continue to honour brilliance, while overlooking the discoveries that determine the future of how humans think, act, and survive.
Dr Sumaiya Shaikh is a neuroscientist and an author based in Sweden. Her interests are scientific misinformation, pain physiology and violent aggression. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)