Nobel for A Noble Cause

Physicists and chemists can earn the ultimate recognition: a Nobel Prize. Why not accord the same honor to environmental scientists? At the conference, the proposal was backed by everyone from U.S. Senator Albert Gore to Vasili Peskov, a correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. Peskov | suggested that the first environmental Nobel be given posthumously to Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring helped alert the world to the pollution threat.

Alfred Nobel's will set up five awards: physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature and peace. But that limitation was overcome in 1968, when Sweden's Central Bank financed a separate economics prize in memory of Nobel.