Kofi Annan’s bracelet has an ankh symbol, an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol which has been interpreted as “the key to life”. The Copts – a Christian people of Egypt – retained the symbol in their depiction of the cross used in Christian churches.
The ankh symbol reflects Kofi Annan's primary goal with his work on behalf of the United Nations: to save and improve people’s lives. He bought the bracelet when he was stationed in Cairo with the Sinai peace-keeping forces.
In his book Interventions: A life in War and Peace, Annan describes his work in Egypt:
“I had been sent to Egypt as chief administrative officer for civilian personnel serving in the peacekeeping operation that was under way. The UN Emergency Force in Egypt (known as UNEF II) was stationed to supervise the withdrawal of forces from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The job of the force was to demarcate the cease-fire line between the Egyptians and Israelis, and reinforce both parties’ confidence in the other’s commitment to the ‘line in the sand.’ The mission was beset with complications, as all peacekeeping operations were, which affected my work every single day: there were administrative and logistical challenges arising from a force made up of multiple troop-contributing nations, including Finland, Sweden, Peru, Ireland, Canada, Poland, Panama, and others. This meant multiple lines of command and logistics chains, numerous languages, clashes in military and administrative cultures, and irregular fluctuations in the size of the force, as different countries provided and withdrew troops at different times.”
Kofi Annan donated the bracelet to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2010.
These micrographs of crystals show substances closely related to pepsin and chymotrypsin, enzymes that are active in digestion. John Northrop managed in 1929 to produce a pure crystal form of these enzymes. His studies revealed that they are proteins.
The photographs were donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Northrop family in 2009.
This passport was issued to John Northrop for his trip to Sweden in December 1946 to attend Nobel Prize award ceremony.
The passport was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by John Northrop’s family in 2009.
This inkstand belonged to John Northrop.It includes an inkwell, which was used to store ink during writing with a quill or dip pen.
The inkstand was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Northrop family in 2009.
This microscope belonged to John Northrop. It was made by the distinguished microscope maker Joseph Zentmayer in Philadelphia.
The microscope was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Northrop family in 2009.
This small microscope belonged to John Northrop. who probably used it when he was young. Northrop spent his entire life dedicated to chemistry, in which he made ground-breaking discoveries on proteins.
This microscope, which belonged to John Northrop, was made by the distinguished microscope maker Joseph Zentmayer in Philadelphia. This model was patented in 1876. Northrop was born in 1891 and was likely given the microscopes when he was young. Perhaps he inherited it from his father, a zoologist who died tragically in an explosion two weeks before his son’s birth. John Northrop dedicated his entire life to chemistry, making ground-breaking discoveries on proteins.
The microscopes were donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Northrop family in 2009.
This electronic control panel was used by Wolfgang Ketterle in experiments to create “Bose-Einstein condensates”. The electronic control panel was built by the researchers themselves. It was installed between the experimental apparatus and a computer to protect against water failure in the cooling of the coils in the apparatus.
Wolfgang Ketterle donated the equipment to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
This atomic beam shutter in two parts was used by Wolfgang Ketterle to create “Bose-Einstein condensates” in experiments in 1994–2001 .
Wolfgang Ketterle donated the atomic beam shutter to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
This coil was used in Wolfgang Ketterle's experiments in 1996 to create “Bose-Einstein condensates”. The material called that keeps the coil together is epoxy. The coil was cooled by water through the tubes.
Wolfgang Ketterle donated the coil to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
Under flera decennier syntes på många svenska kuvert en scen ur Selma Lagerlöfs bok Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige. Med träffsäker symbolik fungerade bilden som stämpel på försändelser på väg till mottagare i landets olika delar. Bilden togs fram av reklamkonstnären Bengt Mellberg 1969 och detta är en reproduktion från originalet.
Bilden fungerade som utdelningsstämpel för masskorsband, en form av massförsändelser som tidigare användes. Avsändaren avtalade med Posten ett rabatterat pris och försändelserna behövde ej frankeras. Förlagor för stämpeln lämnades i stället ut till tryckerier och stämpeln trycktes direkt på försändelser som skickades ut till många adressater.
Hur många försändelser som stämpeln tryckts på går inte att säga exakt, men det kan röra sig om sex miljarder.
Bilden donerades till Nobelprismuseet av Bengt Mellberg 2001.
In his doctoral thesis from 1884, Svante Arrhenius presented a revolutionary theory on how salts, when dissolved in water, divide into electrically charged ions. At Uppsala University, his ideas met with skepticism, and his dissertation was barely approved. His theory eventually became accepted and resulted in his Nobel Prize.
The doctoral thesis was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
In 1948, Linus Pauling was trying to determine the three-dimensional structure of a component found in many biologically important molecules. He found the key to the solution while recovering from a cold, when he was bored and drew the molecular chain on a piece of paper and then folded the paper into a tube. He realised that the structure was helical. It is now known as alpha helix.
The model was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by Linda Pauling Kamb in 2000.
This model was built by Ava Helen and Linus Pauling in the 1930s. It represents the crystal structure of the mineral zunyite, one of the many structures Linus Pauling discovered.
The model was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by Linda Pauling Kamb in 2000.
Linus Pauling often wore a beret. With this artistic headgear, he demonstrated his radical standpoint during the Cold War in the USA. After the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the chemist Pauling engaged in the fight against nuclear weapons. His activism led to accusations of communist sympathies, and his passport was revoked.
The beret was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by Linda Pauling Kamb in 2000.
This dish contains mould from the Penicillium family. It was cultivated from the mould discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 in a dish that had been left standing in his laboratory. He noted that the mould had inhibited growth of the bacteria that the dish had been used for. It turned out that the mould had formed a substance, penicillin, which was later used in treatments for bacterial infections.
Ernst Boris Chain, Howard Florey and their colleagues succeeded in the early 1940s to produce penicillin in pure form and investigate its properties in greater detail. Additional efforts led to a drug that could be produced in large quantities.
A penicillium culture was given in 2001 to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at St Mary's Hospital in London. The culture is kept at the Karolinska Institutet, which regularly supplies the Nobel Prize Museum with a new dish of Penicillium culture.
The cloud chamber, developed by C.T.R. Wilson, became an important instrument for studying the tracks of speeding particles and radiation.
While hiking in Scotland, C.T.R. Wilson was fascinated by the light phenomena that sometimes occurred in clouds and fog. To study these more closely, he tried to create artificial fog in a laboratory environment. This was the beginning of Wilson’s cloud chamber. However, instead of providing a tool for the study of weather and light phenomena, the chamber was primarily used to investigate the components of matter. Particles passing through the fog chamber leave visible tracks when they knock out electrons from the atoms they pass.
This cloud chamber is a replica of Wilson’s early model.
The replica of the cloud chamber was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
This cryostat is a replica of a device used by Pyotr Kapitsa around 1940 to study superfluid helium. A glass “spindle”with six capillaries is balanced on a needle in a container with liquid helium. If a ray of light is focused on the device so that the liquid is heated, the spindle begins to rotate. The explanation is that at temperatures below 2.19 Kelvin, liquid helium is a mixture of normal liquid helium and a suprafluid helium. When heated, the superfluid quantum liquid is transformed into normal liquid and squirts out through the capillaries. Because the superfluid liquid can seep in along the walls of the capillaries, this process goes on for as long as heat is added.
The cryostat was manufactured at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which Pyotr Kapitsa helped to found. It was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa had a specially-designed key cut for the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge where he worked in the 1920s and 1930s. The key’s design was inspired by Kapitsa’s nickname for his mentor and 1908 chemistry laureate Ernest Rutherford, “The Crocodile”. This later became Kapitsa’s own nickname. There are several theories on how the nickname came about. Kapitsa’s wife Anna revealed in her later years that none of the more imaginative ones were true, but they are interesting nonetheless. Kapitsa himself offered one explanation: “In Russia, the crocodile is a symbol of the head of the family, and is both feared and admired because of its stiff neck and inability to move in any direction but forward. It just keeps on going straight ahead with its jaws wide open – just like science, just like Rutherford.”
This key is a copy of the original, which is kept at Kapitsa’s laboratory in Moscow. The replica was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
A pair of scissors and a letter-knife are from the desk of William Butler Yeats.
The scissors and the letter-knife were donated to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
This samizdat booklet with “Yuri Zhivago’s poems” by Boris Pasternak was written in the late 1940s. Samizdat was underground literature that circulated in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the communist regimes. Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, which ends with a cycle of poems, was banned in the Soviet Union. In the booklet there are notes by Olga Ivinskaya, whom Pasternak lived with.
The booklet was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Pasternak family in 2000.
This is a part of an antenna system which was designed and constructed in the 1960’s by a team led by astrophysicist Antony Hewish. The entire system covered a large field outside Cambridge, UK.
A young graduate student, Jocelyn Bell, observed a source of radiation which had not registered before. Further research verified that a new type of star had been discovered – a pulsar.
For the discovery of pulsars Antony Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics of 1974. A controversy broke out where several people argued that Jocelyn Bell should have been awarded a share of the prize.
Antony Hewish donated parts of the antenna system to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
Using this box, Sperry studied apes whose hemisphere-connecting nerves had been cut.
In the monkey’s brain, the right and left visual fields are connected to the opposite hemisphere. Using filters in front of the monkey's eyes, the right or left field of vision could be shielded. In this way, an image projected on a screen in front of the monkey could be shown to only one hemisphere of the brain. This made it possible to train and study the two brain hemispheres separately. The studies provided a basis for studying the different functions of the two brain hemispheres in humans.
Roger Sperrys widow, Norma Sperry, presented the training box to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
This prosthetic leg was produced by Handicap International (now Humanity & Inclusion), an organisation founded in 1982 to help refugees in camps in Thailand and Cambodia. Activities eventually expanded to other countries suffering from conflicts and catastrophes. It co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the ICBL.
The prosthetic leg was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Humanity & Inclusion in 2001.
The Mekong wheelchair was made In Cambodia, where many people have lost one or both legs due to landmines. The wheelchair was made by the Jesuit Refugee Service, a member of the ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The ICBL began operating in 1991 and is an umbrella for numerous people and organisations. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1997, the ICBL was represented by Tun Channareth, who began campaigning against landmines after losing both legs in a landmine explosion. He used this Mekong wheelchair at the award ceremony.
The development of the Mekong wheelchair began around 1990. The initiators and designers, David Constantine, Simon Gue, Richard Frost and Ian Harris, have striven to design it in a way that is suitable for low-income countries. They embarked on a partnership with the Jesuit Refugee Service, which has been producing the Mekong wheelchair at its factory in Phnom Penh since 1993.
A lot of wood was used for the wheelchair, since steel was not reliably available in Cambodia at the time. The wheelchairs were flat-packed at the workshop in Phnom Penh and distributed to local workshops where they were assembled.
Due to the country’s poor infrastructure at the time, shipping was a problem. The designers tried to factor in the conditions and still achieve a functional and comfortable product with the available materials.
The wheelchair was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Jesuit Refugee Service in 2001.
This light guide comes from the large CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, where the smallest particles of matter are studied. The experiments often involve hundreds of researchers, and the equipment is both large and small. Light guides like this one were used in an experiment to find “W” and “Z” particles. The energy from incoming particles is reradiated as light using the light guides, but with a lower energy. Light guides were used to adjust the radiation so that it matches the sensitivity of the apparatus and gives better measurements. The experiment earned Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984.
The light guide was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by CERN in 2000.
An oar symbolises the success of Cambridge University in science. Boat races are a common event in Cambridge. Every year, Cambridge competes against Oxford, a race that is taken very seriously. Standards are rigorous, also, for the scientists who work at Cambridge. To obtain a position at Cambridge, you have to constantly achieve new results. Only the best are allowed to remain. More than 120 Nobel Prize laureates have some link to Cambridge.
The oar was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum in 2001.
These ears of maize were studied by Barbara McClintock in her research on genetics. As early as the 1940s, ground-breaking insights were being made thanks to her studies: parts of the maize genome can jump from one place to another in the chromosomes. This is what causes colour variation of kernels in an ear of maize. It took years before McClintock’s discoveries were acknowledged, however, but they eventually had a revolutionary impact on genetics.
The ears of maize were deposited at the Nobel Prize Museum by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2000.
Alfred Nobel spent a great deal of time traveling to and from factories and business meetings. In his suitcase, he carried silverware for eating, writing tools and books to read.
One of the industrial projects Alfred Nobel was involved in during the 1890s was the Svea Velocipede, a multi-geared bicycle developed by Fredrik and Birger Ljungström. It was designed so that the pedals moved in an up-and-down motion instead of rotating.
The model shows the structure of hemoglobin, which was mapped by Max Perutz.
A haemoglobin molecule consists of around ten thousand atoms. In this model, each ball represents an amino acid. The molecule consists of four chains of amino acids. There is one haeme group associated with each chain. The haeme groups are represented by pink balls in the model. At the haeme groups, clefts are formed. These clefts enable the haemoglobin in the blood to transport energising oxygen to the muscles of the body.
The model was acquired by the Nobel Prize Museum on the advice of Max Perutz in 2000.
This photograph is one of thousands of images that Max Perutz used to map the structure of the hemoglobin molecule. The image shows diffraction patterns caused by x-rays passing through a crystal of hemoglobin molecules taken from blood. The positions of the spots on a large number of X-ray photographs and extensive calculations help determine the molecular structure.
The photograph was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2000 by Max Perutz.
The X-ray camera was used by Max Perutz and John Kendrew in their research on the structure of the proteins hemoglobin and myoglobin.
The camera was invented by mineralogist M. J. Buerger in the early 1940s. On its X-ray diffraction photographs the spots are arranged at the corners of a three¬dimensional lattice which is the reciprocal of the real lattice. These photographs were more straightforward to interpret than the ones taken with other types of camera used before.
The precession camera moves the crystal about one of its axes like a spinning top. Max Perutz and John Kendrew used it together with a home-built X-ray tube with a rotating anode that gave a beam ten times more intense than any commercial tube. Thanks to these instruments they were better equipped for protein crystallography than any other laboratory in the world; this contributed decisively to their solution of the first protein structures.
The camera was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2000 by Max Perutz.
The 1931 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for the poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Karlfeldt, who had been the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, had died a few months before the prize was awarded. Since 1974, Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously.
The Nobel Prize diploma was created by the artist Berta Svensson-Piehl, who described the diploma as follows:
“Erik Axel Karlfeldt’s poetry was like a deeply-rooted, fruit-bearing tree, with a fresh spring at its foot. The figure is a symbol of the art of poetry, a Fridolin with his golden lyre. At his feet lies a cornucopia with Flora and Pomona. The deer a symbol of the listening audience. The laurel wreath symbolises the Nobel Prize, the golden corn sheaf bowing down to the earth and the figure pointing upwards to the clouds signify that the prize was awarded after the poet’s death.”
The diploma was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Erik Axel Karlfeldt's family in 2000.
The 1931 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for the poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Karlfeldt, who had been the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, had died a few months before the prize was awarded. Still, a Nobel Prize medal was made. Since 1974, Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously.
The medal was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Erik Axel Karlfeldt's family in 2000.
