The Nobel Prize is the highest honour in science. It is awarded to fewer than a dozen scientists per year, selected from a global pool of researchers by committees that deliberate for months. Winning once places a scientist among the most celebrated figures in the history of human knowledge. Winning twice is something else entirely — a distinction so rare that in the 125-year history of the Nobel Prize, only five individuals have achieved it.
These five scientists did not simply repeat themselves. Each double laureate won their prizes in domains that required fundamentally different kinds of thinking — or pressed so far into a single field that they transformed it twice over, from the inside. Their stories are not just records of achievement. They are case studies in what sustained scientific ambition looks like across a lifetime — the costs it exacts, the obstacles it encounters, and the mark it leaves on the world.
This article tells the full story of each of the five double Nobel laureates, and considers what their lives reveal about the nature of scientific greatness.
Marie Curie (1903 Physics, 1911 Chemistry)
Marie Curie is not only the first person to win two Nobel Prizes — she is also the first woman to win one, the first person to win in two different scientific disciplines, and the only person whose prizes span physics and chemistry. These facts are so numerous that they have become almost numbing through repetition. The reality behind them is considerably more striking than the list of superlatives suggests.
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, under Russian imperial rule. Women in Russian-controlled Poland were barred from university education. She studied at the underground Flying University — a clandestine network of Polish educators who taught women in private apartments, at real risk to themselves and their students. In 1891, at the age of 24, she moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, where she was one of very few women. She lived in poverty, studying in an unheated garret, sometimes too cold to write. She finished first in her physics degree and second in mathematics.
She met Pierre Curie in 1894. He was already an established physicist. She was a graduate student looking for laboratory space. Their intellectual partnership became a marriage, and their marriage became one of the most productive scientific collaborations in history. They worked together on the phenomenon that Marie had noticed in Henri Becquerel’s work on uranium — the spontaneous emission of rays from the element, which she named radioactivity. Working in a leaking shed with no proper laboratory, through winters of brutal cold, they systematically processed tonnes of pitchblende to isolate two previously unknown elements. She named one polonium, after her occupied homeland. The other was radium.
The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Becquerel and the Curies for the discovery of radioactivity. Marie was initially omitted from the nomination — the Nobel committee had intended to award only Becquerel and Pierre. Pierre refused to accept under those conditions. The Nobel committee relented. Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.
Pierre died in 1906, struck by a horse-drawn wagon in a Paris street. He was 46. Marie was 38. She took over his professorship at the Sorbonne — the first woman to hold a professorship there — and continued the research. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the isolation of radium and polonium and the characterisation of their properties. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that the work had been carried out largely by her alone after Pierre’s death.
That same year she was denied admission to the French Academy of Sciences by a single vote, on the grounds that she was a woman. She never applied again.
The radioactive materials she had worked with throughout her career were slowly destroying her from the inside. She carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her coat pockets. Her laboratory notebooks — still radioactive today, stored in lead-lined boxes in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, available to researchers only with signed waivers — are contaminated to a degree that makes them dangerous to handle. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, her bone marrow destroyed by decades of radiation exposure.
Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband Frédéric. Marie Curie is the only person whose child has also received a Nobel Prize. The Curie family has won five Nobel Prizes in total across two generations.
John Bardeen (1956 Physics, 1972 Physics)
John Bardeen is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same discipline — Physics — and the only person to have led two entirely separate research programmes, in entirely separate areas of physics, each of which produced a Nobel Prize-winning result. He is, by most measures, the most consequential physicist of the twentieth century whose name is not Einstein or Feynman.
Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908. He was quietly, almost inconveniently brilliant. He completed his undergraduate degree at Wisconsin in three years, worked as a geophysicist for several years, then returned to academia for a PhD at Princeton under the supervision of Eugene Wigner. He was modest, methodical, and deeply collaborative — a style of working that was unusual among the leading physicists of his era, who tended toward the dramatic and the individualistic.
At Bell Laboratories in the late 1940s, Bardeen worked with William Shockley and Walter Brattain on the problem of semiconductor amplification. In December 1947, the three demonstrated the transistor — a device that could amplify electrical signals using a small piece of germanium. The transistor replaced the vacuum tube, which was large, fragile, power-hungry, and hot. Everything in modern electronics — every computer, smartphone, radio, and server — is built on transistors. The integrated circuit that powers your phone contains tens of billions of them. The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain for this invention.
Bardeen left Bell Labs shortly after, partly due to tensions with Shockley’s management style. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he turned his attention to a problem that had resisted solution for half a century: superconductivity. Certain materials, when cooled to near absolute zero, conduct electricity with precisely zero resistance — no energy is lost, no heat is generated. The phenomenon had been observed since 1911 but had no theoretical explanation. Classical physics could not account for it. Early quantum mechanics could not account for it.
Working with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, Bardeen developed what became known as BCS theory — the first complete microscopic theory of superconductivity. The key insight was that at very low temperatures, electrons in a superconductor form Cooper pairs — pairs of electrons that, counterintuitively, attract each other through their interaction with the vibrations of the crystal lattice. These pairs condense into a quantum state that flows through the material without resistance. The BCS theory, published in 1957, was immediately recognised as a masterwork of theoretical physics. In 1972, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Bardeen thus won Nobel Prizes for the two most consequential contributions to applied and fundamental physics of the twentieth century — the transistor, which made the information age possible, and BCS theory, which underpins superconducting technology including the superconducting qubits at the heart of quantum computers. For a look at how superconducting qubits — built directly on the physics Bardeen helped establish — are now being used to build quantum computers, see our article on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025.
He continued working into his seventies, publishing on high-temperature superconductivity shortly before his death in 1991. He was 82.
Frederick Sanger (1958 Chemistry, 1980 Chemistry)
Frederick Sanger is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, and he is among the most technically inventive scientists in the history of biology. Where Curie and Bardeen made conceptual breakthroughs — discovering new phenomena, developing new theoretical frameworks — Sanger’s genius was methodological. He invented two techniques that transformed what biology could do, each so powerful that it earned him the highest recognition in science.
Sanger was born in Rendcombe, Gloucestershire in 1918, the son of a Quaker doctor. He was quiet, self-effacing, and almost aggressively modest — a man who described himself as “not academically brilliant” and attributed his success to persistence and the willingness to try things that might not work. He spent his entire career at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, one of the great scientific institutions of the twentieth century.
His first prize came for solving a problem that had defeated biochemists for decades: determining the amino acid sequence of a protein. Proteins are chains of amino acids folded into specific three-dimensional shapes, and their sequence determines their structure and function. But in the late 1940s, no one knew how to read that sequence. Sanger spent ten years developing chemical methods to systematically break insulin — chosen for its relatively small size — into fragments, identify the fragments, and work out the order in which they connected. In 1955 he published the complete amino acid sequence of insulin — the first protein ever sequenced. The 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to him alone for this work.
He then turned to an even more ambitious target: DNA. If amino acid sequencing had been difficult, DNA sequencing seemed nearly impossible. DNA molecules are enormously long — human chromosomes contain hundreds of millions of base pairs — and the chemistry is more complex. Through the 1960s and 1970s Sanger developed increasingly powerful methods for reading DNA sequences, culminating in 1977 with the Sanger sequencing method — a technique using modified nucleotides that terminate DNA chain elongation at specific points, producing fragments of known length that can be separated and read.
With this method, his team sequenced the complete genome of a bacteriophage — the first complete genome ever sequenced — in 1977. The 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Sanger, Walter Gilbert, and Paul Berg.
Sanger sequencing, in modified and automated forms, remained the dominant DNA sequencing technology for three decades. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, used Sanger sequencing to read the three billion base pairs of the human genome. Every genetic discovery, every personalised medicine application, every forensic DNA test of the past forty years rests on foundations that Frederick Sanger built. His contribution to human health is incalculable.
He retired in 1983, returned to his garden in Cambridge, and declined all further honours — including a knighthood, which he refused on the grounds that he did not want to be called “Sir.” He died in 2013, aged 95. His obituaries noted that he had seemed entirely unbothered by his extraordinary legacy.
Linus Pauling (1954 Chemistry, 1962 Peace)
Linus Pauling is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes — both prizes awarded entirely to him alone — and the only person to win in two completely different fields: chemistry and peace. He is also, by many accounts, the closest thing the twentieth century produced to a universal scientific genius in the tradition of the great polymaths of earlier centuries.
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon in 1901. He was voraciously curious from childhood, a self-taught reader who consumed whatever came to hand. He studied chemistry at Oregon Agricultural College and went on to Caltech for his PhD, where he encountered the new quantum mechanics coming from Europe and immediately grasped its implications for chemistry — implications that almost no chemist had yet worked out.
The central insight of Pauling’s career was that chemistry — the science of how atoms bond to form molecules — could and should be understood quantum mechanically. The properties of chemical bonds, the shapes of molecules, the stability of structures — all of these followed from quantum mechanics, and Pauling spent decades working out the detailed consequences. His concepts of electronegativity, resonance, and hybridisation are taught in every introductory chemistry course today. His book The Nature of the Chemical Bond, first published in 1939, is one of the most cited scientific texts of the twentieth century.
He applied the same structural thinking to biology. In 1951, working with Robert Corey, he proposed the alpha helix and the beta sheet — two fundamental secondary structures that proteins adopt. The same year, James Watson and Francis Crick were racing to determine the structure of DNA, and Pauling was their most feared competitor. He published a proposed triple-helix structure for DNA in early 1953 that turned out to be wrong — an unusual stumble for a man of his precision. Watson and Crick published the correct double helix structure two months later. Pauling received the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the structure of complex substances.
If the 1954 prize marked the summit of Pauling’s scientific career, his second Nobel marked the beginning of a different kind of life. He had been politically active throughout the 1950s, signing petitions against nuclear weapons testing and speaking publicly about the dangers of radioactive fallout. The US State Department revoked his passport in 1952 — he was unable to attend a conference in London where he might have seen the X-ray crystallography images that would have helped him solve the DNA structure. The passport was restored in 1954, in time for him to travel to Stockholm to receive his chemistry prize.
He continued his anti-nuclear activism through the late 1950s, circulating a petition eventually signed by more than 11,000 scientists calling for a ban on nuclear testing. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. The 1962 Nobel Peace Prize — awarded the day after the treaty was signed — went to Linus Pauling, recognising his sustained campaign for nuclear disarmament. He remains the only individual to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.
Karl Barry Sharpless (2001 Chemistry, 2022 Chemistry)
Barry Sharpless is the most recent double Nobel laureate and the second person after Frederick Sanger to win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. His prizes came 21 years apart — the longest gap between any double laureate’s prizes — and they represent two distinct contributions to the field of synthetic chemistry, each of which opened new directions of research that continue to be actively developed.
Sharpless was born in Philadelphia in 1941 and studied chemistry at Dartmouth and Stanford. He spent most of his career at MIT and Scripps Research, and he has a reputation as one of the most creative and unconventional thinkers in organic chemistry — a field that tends toward the systematic and the methodical, and in which Sharpless was neither.
His first Nobel Prize, shared with William Knowles and Ryoji Noryori in 2001, recognised his development of asymmetric catalytic oxidation reactions — specifically, Sharpless epoxidation and Sharpless dihydroxylation. These are methods for adding oxygen atoms to organic molecules in a way that produces a specific mirror-image form of the product. Why does this matter? Because molecules that are mirror images of each other can have completely different biological effects — one mirror image may be a medicine, while the other is ineffective or even toxic. The ability to synthesise a specific mirror image of a molecule is essential in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, and Sharpless’s methods made this possible with unprecedented reliability and efficiency.
His second Nobel Prize, shared with Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal in 2022, recognised his development of click chemistry — a concept he proposed in 2001, the same year he received his first prize. Click chemistry is the idea that chemical synthesis should be redesigned around reactions that are fast, reliable, and produce no undesirable byproducts — reactions that “click” together like two pieces of Lego. The prototypical click reaction is the copper-catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, which joins two specific chemical groups with almost perfect efficiency under mild conditions.
Click chemistry has transformed the way chemists build complex molecules — in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and especially in biology, where it allows molecules to be labelled and tracked inside living cells without disrupting cellular function. Bertozzi extended click chemistry to bioorthogonal chemistry — reactions that proceed inside living organisms without interfering with the organism’s own biochemistry — enabling entirely new approaches to imaging, drug delivery, and the study of biological processes in real time.
Sharpless lost the sight of one eye in a laboratory accident in 1970. He has spoken about the accident as a turning point — the experience of losing partial vision, and of the period of recovery that followed, changed how he thought about risk, creativity, and what mattered in science. He continued his research for more than five decades, receiving his second Nobel Prize at the age of 81.
What These Five Lives Have in Common
Looked at together, the five double Nobel laureates do not conform to a single archetype. Curie was a woman working in a field actively hostile to her presence. Bardeen was a collaborator in an era of scientific individualism. Sanger was a methodologist who distrusted grand theories. Pauling was a theorist who believed chemistry could be unified under quantum mechanics. Sharpless was an iconoclast who wanted to redesign the conceptual foundations of his field.
What they share is not a personality type or a working style. What they share is a willingness to continue working at the frontier after achieving recognition — to resist the temptation to consolidate and defend an established position, and instead to move into new territory where failure was again possible. Each of them, after winning their first Nobel Prize, chose a harder problem rather than an easier one.
They also share, with varying degrees of openness about it, an unusual relationship with failure. Curie’s later work was partly built on grief and endurance. Sanger’s DNA sequencing took fifteen years of incremental development before it worked reliably. Pauling was wrong about the structure of DNA in a very public way. Sharpless lost an eye and rebuilt his research programme. Bardeen moved out of one of the most competitive environments in physics — Bell Labs — and started over at a university.
The Nobel Prize is awarded for success. But the stories of the people who have won it twice are largely stories of what happened in between — of work that did not immediately succeed, of persistence through difficulty, and of the choice to keep going when stopping would have been entirely reasonable.
For a related look at a scientist who shaped the foundations that several of these laureates built on — and whose refusal to compromise on mathematical rigour changed the landscape of twentieth-century physics — see our article on Paul Dirac: the strangest man who predicted antimatter and built the foundation of modern physics. And for a look at the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 and the work it recognised, see our article on the quantum circuit discoveries that make quantum computers possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people have won the Nobel Prize twice?
Five individuals have won the Nobel Prize twice: Marie Curie (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911), John Bardeen (Physics 1956, Physics 1972), Frederick Sanger (Chemistry 1958, Chemistry 1980), Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962), and Karl Barry Sharpless (Chemistry 2001, Chemistry 2022). Two organisations — the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UNHCR — have also won multiple times.
Who was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes?
Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes — Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win in two different scientific disciplines.
Has anyone won three Nobel Prizes?
No individual has won three Nobel Prizes. The International Committee of the Red Cross has received three Nobel Peace Prizes (1917, 1944, 1963), but no individual has won more than two.
Who is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics?
John Bardeen is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics — in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, and in 1972 for the BCS theory of superconductivity. These represent two completely separate and equally foundational contributions to physics.
How long was the gap between Sharpless’s two prizes?
Karl Barry Sharpless received his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 and his second in 2022 — a gap of 21 years, the longest interval between prizes for any double laureate.
Did any double laureates refuse their Nobel Prize?
None of the five individual double laureates refused their prizes, though Frederick Sanger did refuse a knighthood. Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, and Le Duc Tho refused the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 — but neither was a multiple laureate.
Further Reading
- Nobel Prize — Official Site
- Wikipedia — Marie Curie
- Wikipedia — John Bardeen
- Wikipedia — Frederick Sanger
- Wikipedia — Linus Pauling
- Wikipedia — Barry Sharpless
- Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith — biography of Marie Curie
- Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics by Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel
Sources
- Nobel Prize — Marie Curie
- Nobel Prize — John Bardeen
- Nobel Prize — Frederick Sanger
- Nobel Prize — Linus Pauling
- Nobel Prize — Barry Sharpless
- Web News For Us — Paul Dirac
- Web News For Us — Nobel Prize Physics 2025
- Web News For Us — Richard Feynman
About the Author
Baryon is the founder and editor of Web News For Us. Driven by a deep fascination with the biggest unanswered questions in science — from quantum physics and cosmology to the nature of consciousness and the genetic code written into every living cell — he has spent years studying modern physics, biology, and the history of scientific thought. He covers Science & AI, Space, Genetics & Research, and the timeless wisdom of history’s greatest thinkers and mystics.
If you have ever looked at the night sky and felt that pull to understand what is out there — or wonderd about an entire universe coiled inside your genes — you are in the right place.
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