The 1960s handed out Nobel Prizes to the people who told us what DNA does, dated the Dead Sea Scrolls with carbon, and accepted Peace Prizes while their countries jailed or shot at them. It was also the decade a man turned the prize down on principle and another won it from house arrest.
If you came here for the full roster of 1960s Nobel Prize winners, the table below has all of them, organized by year and category. Scroll past it for the stories that the official lists leave out.
Table of Contents
- The full list: every 1960s Nobel laureate
- The science that defined the decade
- Peace Prizes in a decade of conflict
- Literature: Steinbeck won, Sartre said no
- 1968: the Economics prize arrives
- Firsts, refusals, and odd footnotes
- Frequently asked questions
The full list: every 1960s Nobel laureate
Six categories, ten years. Note that Economic Sciences only appears starting in 1969 — it wasn’t part of Alfred Nobel’s original will and was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968, with the first award handed out the following year. Where a prize was shared, all winners are listed.
| Year | Physics | Chemistry | Medicine | Literature | Peace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Donald Glaser | Willard Libby | Peter Medawar, Frank Macfarlane Burnet | Saint-John Perse | Albert Lutuli |
| 1961 | Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf Mössbauer | Melvin Calvin | Georg von Békésy | Ivo Andrić | Dag Hammarskjöld |
| 1962 | Lev Landau | Max Perutz, John Kendrew | Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins | John Steinbeck | Linus Pauling |
| 1963 | Eugene Wigner, Maria Goeppert Mayer, J. Hans D. Jensen | Karl Ziegler, Giulio Natta | John Eccles, Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley | Giorgos Seferis | Red Cross (ICRC & League) |
| 1964 | Charles Townes, Nikolay Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov | Dorothy Hodgkin | Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen | Jean-Paul Sartre (declined) | Martin Luther King Jr. |
| 1965 | Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman | Robert Burns Woodward | François Jacob, André Lwoff, Jacques Monod | Mikhail Sholokhov | UNICEF |
| 1966 | Alfred Kastler | Robert S. Mulliken | Peyton Rous, Charles Huggins | Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs | (not awarded) |
| 1967 | Hans Bethe | Manfred Eigen, Ronald Norrish, George Porter | Ragnar Granit, Haldan Hartline, George Wald | Miguel Ángel Asturias | (not awarded) |
| 1968 | Luis Alvarez | Lars Onsager | Robert Holley, Har Gobind Khorana, Marshall Nirenberg | Yasunari Kawabata | René Cassin |
| 1969 | Murray Gell-Mann | Derek Barton, Odd Hassel | Max Delbrück, Alfred Hershey, Salvador Luria | Samuel Beckett | International Labour Organization |
The Economics prize debuted in 1969, shared by Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen for their work on dynamic models in economic analysis.
The science that defined the decade
If you want one image of 1960s science, it’s the double helix taking a bow. Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Medicine prize for working out the structure of DNA — the molecule itself had been described in 1953, but the Nobel came nearly a decade later. The conspicuous absence on that citation is Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images were central to the discovery. She had died in 1958, and the prize isn’t awarded posthumously, a rule that keeps her name off the official record and on every honest retelling of the story.
The decade was thick with foundational physics. The 1964 prize went to Charles Townes and two Soviet physicists, Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, for the maser-laser principle — the work that made every laser pointer, barcode scanner, and fiber-optic cable possible. A year later, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga split the physics prize for quantum electrodynamics, the theory describing how light and matter interact, accurate to a precision that still gets cited as the most exact agreement between theory and experiment in physics.
Then there’s Willard Libby, who won Chemistry in 1960 for radiocarbon dating. His method — measuring the decay of carbon-14 to date organic material — rewired archaeology and geology overnight. According to the Nobel Foundation’s own records, Libby’s technique was first validated against samples of known age, including wood from Egyptian tombs.
Two more worth knowing. Donald Glaser took the 1960 Physics prize for the bubble chamber, the device that let physicists photograph the tracks of subatomic particles, reportedly inspired by watching bubbles rise in a glass of beer. And in 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer became only the second woman ever to win the Physics prize, for the nuclear shell model — the first had been Marie Curie, sixty years earlier.
Peace Prizes in a decade of conflict
The 1960s Nobel Peace Prize reads like a map of the era’s fault lines. In 1960, Albert Lutuli — president of South Africa’s African National Congress — became the first African laureate, awarded for nonviolent resistance to apartheid while he was under a government banning order that restricted his movement.
Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr. won at age 35, the youngest Peace laureate at the time. He donated the entire prize sum, then around $54,000, to the civil rights movement. The committee cited his nonviolent campaign against racial inequality in the United States, awarded the same year the Civil Rights Act passed.
The 1961 prize went to Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General, posthumously — he had died in a plane crash in what’s now Zambia while on a peace mission to the Congo. It remains one of the very few posthumous Nobels, awarded under rules that have since been tightened. Twice in the decade, 1966 and 1967, the committee handed out no Peace Prize at all.
Literature: Steinbeck won, Sartre said no
John Steinbeck took the 1962 Literature prize, and even he seemed surprised — when a reporter asked whether he deserved it, he reportedly said “no.” The committee honored him for “realistic and imaginative writing,” singling out The Grapes of Wrath among his body of work.
The decade’s most famous literary moment, though, belongs to a man who refused. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first person to voluntarily turn it down. His reasoning was consistent with his politics: he rejected official honors on principle, arguing that a writer accepting institutional endorsement compromises independence. The Swedish Academy had already announced his name, so he remains on the official list as a laureate who declined.
There’s a Cold War subplot too. Soviet author Mikhail Sholokhov won in 1965 with state approval, four years after Boris Pasternak had been pressured by the same government into refusing his 1958 prize. And Samuel Beckett, who closed out the decade with the 1969 prize, was so allergic to publicity that he accepted the award but skipped the ceremony entirely.
1968: the Economics prize arrives
The category you won’t find in Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will is Economics. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank to mark its 300th anniversary, and the first award came in 1969.
That inaugural Economics prize was shared by Ragnar Frisch of Norway and Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, for developing and applying dynamic mathematical models to the analysis of economic processes. Frisch is also credited with coining the term “econometrics.” The category has drawn a persistent asterisk ever since — purists point out it isn’t technically a Nobel Prize, since it was funded by a bank rather than Nobel’s estate, even though it’s awarded by the same Swedish institutions at the same ceremony.
Firsts, refusals, and odd footnotes
The decade collected an unusual number of notable firsts and one-offs:
- First African laureate: Albert Lutuli, Peace 1960.
- Youngest Peace laureate to date: Martin Luther King Jr., 35, in 1964.
- First voluntary refusal: Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature 1964.
- A rare two-time winner: Linus Pauling won the 1962 Peace Prize (dated to 1962, awarded in 1963) for his campaign against nuclear weapons testing, having already won Chemistry in 1954. He’s the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes in different fields.
- Second woman in Physics: Maria Goeppert Mayer, 1963 — the gap after Marie Curie was sixty years.
- Dorothy Hodgkin, Chemistry 1964, used X-ray crystallography to map the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12, and remains the only British woman to win a science Nobel.
- Two years with no Peace Prize: 1966 and 1967.
That Pauling detail is the kind of thing that wins trivia nights. Two solo Nobels, two completely different disciplines — chemistry for the nature of the chemical bond, peace for nuclear disarmament. It’s worth remembering that the chemistry Pauling helped formalize was still being rewritten in these years: 1962, the same year he took his Peace Prize, was also when Neil Bartlett shattered the textbook rule that the noble gases never react, a story you can follow through the surprising world of noble gas chemistry and the compounds argon can actually form. According to Caltech’s archives, the second prize was announced the same day a partial nuclear test ban treaty took effect.
The 1960s were one decade of this story, and the patterns repeat. Decades later you can find the same mix of breakthroughs and quiet controversies in a single year’s roster, as in the six categories and laureates of the 2005 Nobel Prizes, where a doctor who drank a beaker of bacteria to prove a point was finally vindicated.
Frequently asked questions
Who won the most Nobel Prizes in the 1960s? No single person won more than once during the decade itself. Linus Pauling’s 1962 Peace Prize was his second overall, but his first (Chemistry) came in 1954, outside the decade.
Was there a Nobel Prize in Economics in the 1960s? Only at the very end. The Economics prize was created in 1968 and first awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen. No Economics prizes exist for 1960 through 1968.
Why isn’t Rosalind Franklin listed for the DNA prize? The 1962 Medicine prize for DNA’s structure went to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins. Franklin, whose X-ray work was essential to the discovery, had died in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.
Who declined a Nobel Prize in the 1960s? Jean-Paul Sartre declined the 1964 Literature prize, becoming the first person to voluntarily refuse a Nobel. He cited his opposition to accepting official honors.
Did Martin Luther King Jr. win a Nobel Prize? Yes. He won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against racial segregation, becoming the youngest recipient up to that point.
The 1960s Nobel Prize winners weren’t just a list of names on certificates. They were the decade arguing with itself in public — about science and ethics, war and peace, who deserves recognition and who refuses it. The table tells you who won. The footnotes tell you what kind of decade it was.
