These 10 Huge Discoveries Should’ve Been Nobel Prize Winners

Our writers and editors name breakthrough advances and inventions that the Nobel Committee incomprehensibly overlooked.

Thomas Edison is famous for his lightbulb, but he never won a Nobel Prize.

Photograph by AFP/Getty

The annual ritual of Nobel Week is here, a period of frenzied anticipation and speculation that is the equivalent of March Madness for geniuses.

All this hype got the editors at National Geographic thinking: What remarkable discoveries haven’t won? In 2014, we asked our science editors, science writers, and select contributors to name their favorite advance or invention that was wrongfully denied a Nobel, and for the last three years, we’ve monitored these unsung innovations.

Here are our ten picks for discoveries and inventions that haven’t received a victory ceremony in Stockholm—but sorely deserve one…