Table of Contents
- At a Glance: Every 1937 Winner
- Physics: Clinton Davisson & George Paget Thomson
- Chemistry: Walter Norman Haworth & Paul Karrer
- Physiology or Medicine: Albert Szent-Györgyi
- Literature: Roger Martin du Gard
- Peace: Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
- The Vitamin C Coincidence Nobody Mentions
- Why There’s No 1937 Economics Winner — And a Ban That Landed That Same Year
Five Nobel Prizes went out in 1937. Nobel’s own site splits them into five separate pages with no cross-links, so here’s all five in one place — plus the connection none of those pages mention: two of the year’s prizes trace back to the same vitamin.
At a Glance: Every 1937 Winner
| Category | Winner(s) | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physics | Clinton Davisson & George Paget Thomson | USA / UK | “For their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals” |
| Chemistry | Walter Norman Haworth & Paul Karrer | UK / Switzerland | Haworth: “for investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C.” Karrer: “for investigations on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B2” |
| Physiology or Medicine | Albert Szent-Györgyi | Hungary | “For discoveries in connection with the biological combustion processes, with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid” |
| Literature | Roger Martin du Gard | France | “For the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict… in his novel-cycle Les Thibault” |
| Peace | Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood | UK | “For his tireless effort in support of the League of Nations, disarmament and peace” |
| Economics | Not awarded | — | The prize didn’t exist yet. It wasn’t created until 1968 and wasn’t first handed out until 1969 |
Physics: Clinton Davisson & George Paget Thomson
Davisson and Thomson split the physics prize for proving something that sounds like a contradiction: electrons act like waves. Fire a beam of them through a thin nickel or gold crystal and they produce a diffraction pattern, the same striped signature light makes passing through a slit. That confirmed Louis de Broglie’s 1924 theory that matter has a wave side, one of the load-bearing ideas of quantum mechanics.
Davisson made the discovery at Bell Labs almost by accident. A vacuum tube in his lab shattered in 1925, oxidizing his nickel target, and the fix — heating the metal to purify it — accidentally regrew it as a handful of large crystals instead of many small grains. That new structure is what produced the clean diffraction pattern he later got credit for.
Thomson’s contribution carries its own irony. His father, J.J. Thomson, won a Nobel in 1906 for showing the electron was a particle. Three decades later, the son won for showing it also behaves like a wave — same object, opposite proof.
Chemistry: Walter Norman Haworth & Paul Karrer
The chemistry prize went to two men who spent the 1930s mapping the molecular structure of vitamins, split between Haworth’s work on carbohydrates and vitamin C and Karrer’s work on carotenoids and vitamins A and B2.
Haworth, working with Edmund Hirst at Birmingham, worked out the structure of ascorbic acid and then synthesized it in the lab — the first vitamin ever made artificially rather than extracted from food. That single step is why vitamin C tablets exist as a cheap, mass-produced product instead of something you’d only get from citrus and organ meat.
Karrer got there from the other direction. In 1930 he nailed down the chemical structure of carotene, the pigment that gives carrots their color, and showed the body converts it into vitamin A. It was the first time anyone had mapped a vitamin’s structure at all — Haworth’s vitamin C breakthrough followed the trail Karrer’s carotene work had already blazed.
Physiology or Medicine: Albert Szent-Györgyi
Szent-Györgyi’s prize covers two separate strands of work that happen to share a molecule. He identified fumaric acid’s role catalyzing the cell’s oxidation reactions — the early groundwork for what would later be named the Krebs cycle — and, separately, isolated and identified vitamin C.
The detail that makes this one memorable: he isolated hexuronic acid, proved it was identical to vitamin C, and then needed a cheap source to extract it in bulk for further study. Citrus fruit was too expensive to get in the quantities he needed at his lab in Szeged, Hungary. Paprika wasn’t. He pulled vitamin C out of Hungarian paprika by the kilogram, which is not a sentence that shows up in most vitamin-history writing but is exactly why Szeged still calls itself the paprika capital of Hungary with some pride.
Literature: Roger Martin du Gard
Martin du Gard, one of France’s Nobel Prize Winners, won for Les Thibault, a multi-volume novel cycle tracking a French bourgeois family from the turn of the century through the outbreak of World War I. He’d started publishing it in 1922 and wouldn’t finish it until 1940 — the Nobel committee gave him the prize for a work that was, at the time, still three years from completion.
He came to fiction sideways. Trained as an archivist-paleographer, he spent years working with historical documents before turning to the novel, and that training shows: Les Thibault reads less like invention than like a case file on a family, assembled with the patience of someone used to sorting through records.
Peace: Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
Cecil won for decades of work building and defending the League of Nations, the institution the United Nations would later replace. He was one of the principal drafters of the League’s founding covenant in 1919, and in the same year he helped found the League of Nations Union, which became Britain’s most influential pressure group on foreign policy between the wars.
The award reads, in hindsight, like a eulogy delivered early. Cecil kept advocating for the League right up until it was formally dissolved in 1946, but by 1937 the institution he’d spent his career building was already failing to stop the aggression that would trigger World War II two years later.
The Vitamin C Coincidence Nobody Mentions
Here’s the connection that gets lost when each prize sits on its own page: two of the five 1937 Nobel Prizes were built on the same vitamin, from two different angles.
Haworth’s chemistry prize covers making vitamin C — synthesizing ascorbic acid in the lab so it could be produced cheaply at scale. Szent-Györgyi’s medicine prize covers finding it — isolating the compound from paprika and proving it was the same thing sailors had needed to avoid scurvy for centuries, then tracing its role inside cellular metabolism. One man solved the supply problem; the other solved the identification problem. Nineteen thirty-seven is the year both halves of the vitamin C story picked up a Nobel in the same twelve months, and neither committee’s citation mentions the other.
Why There’s No 1937 Economics Winner — And a Ban That Landed That Same Year
There’s no gap in the table above where Economics should be — the prize simply didn’t exist in 1937. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences was created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969, more than three decades after this list. Every “complete” Nobel table that includes an empty Economics row for 1937 is technically wrong; there was nothing to award.
The more consequential thing happening in 1937 had nothing to do with who won. On January 30 of that year, Hitler signed a decree forbidding German citizens from ever accepting a Nobel Prize again, retaliation for the 1936 Peace Prize going to Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist journalist who’d spent years in a concentration camp for exposing Germany’s secret rearmament. None of the 1937 laureates were German, so the ban didn’t touch this particular list — but it was already in force by the time these five prizes were announced, and it would go on to force two future German winners to decline: chemist Richard Kuhn in 1938 and physician Gerhard Domagk in 1939. The 1937 prizes sit right at the hinge point, the last round handed out before the Nobels became, for one country’s citizens, forbidden.
