“The call from Stockholm: Nobel laureates’ first reactions”

If a Swedish voice at the end of the line tells you that you’re going to receive the Nobel Prize, how would you react? Every October for the past 18 years, during the week of the annual Nobel Prize announcements, Adam Smith has been recording conversations with all the new Nobel laureates just as reality is dawning, capturing that life-changing moment and their excitement, reflections and surprise at receiving the news. In this talk he will relive a selection of the most enjoyable and arresting of those first reactions, and search for insights into what gives these select individuals their extraordinary perseverance, creativity and ingenuity.

About

Adam Smith is Chief Scientific Officer of the Nobel Foundation’s outreach arm, Nobel Prize Outreach AB. A chemist by training, he took Fellowships in neuroscience, anatomy, physiology and molecular biology in Oxford, Harvard and Heidelberg, before moving into science publishing with Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group and Informa, as a Chief Editor and Publishing Director. He has recorded interviews with well over 300 Nobel Laureates and, since 2006, his is one of the first voices that a new Nobel laureate will hear. His current projects involve running educational programmes that take laureates to meet and inspire young scientists all over the world, hosting the Nobel Prize Conversations podcast and curating Nobel Prize Outreach’s long-running global science & society meeting series, the Nobel Prize Dialogues.

Adam Smith

Chief Scientific Officer for Nobel Prize Outreach