Winning Nobel Prize Adds Years to Life

Jan. 18, 2007 — Winning a Nobel prize not only is good for your career and pocketbook: it also imbues recipients with about an extra two years of life.

British researchers curious about how social status affects lifespan compared the longevity of Nobel prize winners to those who had been nominated but not given the awards.

"Walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about two years to a scientist's life span," said Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, and the lead researcher of the study. "How status does this, we just don't know."

Oswald and colleagues collected data on 528 male scientists awarded or nominated for a Nobel between 1901 and 1950. They could not use more recent nominees because the list is kept confidential for 50 years.

Only men were considered for the study to avoid lifespan differences that could be attributed to gender.

And statistics on four men on the list who died in combat or by other non-biological causes were omitted from the study, leaving 524 scientists, of whom 135 won Nobels.

As a group, the men lived an average of 76 years. But laureates averaged 77.2 years, compared to nominees, who lived to be about 75.8 years old. Further paring the group into nationalities increased the difference, adding another eight months to prize-holders' lives.

Researchers also compared the changes in value of the Nobel Prize cash award, which currently is about $1.4 million, to see if wealth was a factor in the laureates' enhanced longevity. But they found no correlation there, suggesting that it was the enhanced status of winning that alone accounts for the extra years of life.

"Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic," Oswald said.

Even being nominated more than once had no affect on lifespan. Only winning makes a difference, according the university's study titled "Mortality and Immortality," which was published earlier this month.

The Sweden-based Nobel Foundation awards five international prizes annually for outstanding achievements in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, as well as for the promotion of world peace. In 1969, a sixth prize, established by the Bank of Sweden, was added for economic sciences.

The Nobel Prizes, were created by Swedish chemist and businessman Alfred Nobel, who left a will directing that the bulk of his estate should be used to establish the prizes.

Nobel reportedly decided on the endowment after reading an obituary about himself that was accidentally published by a newspaper upon his brother's death.

Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, reportedly was concerned about the military's growing use of his invention and took umbrage in the paper's labeling him a "merchant of death."

The new study suggests Nobel, who died in 1896, actually turned out to be an agent for life.