What is the Difference Between the Lasker Award and the Nobel Prize?

 

The Lasker Award vs. the Nobel Prize: What's the Difference?



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If you had to bet, which would you rather win first?
Roughly 90+ Lasker laureates have gone on to win a Nobel Prize. Does that change your answer?

Take a guess before you keep reading. If you follow medical research long enough, you'll notice a pattern: a scientist wins the Lasker Award, and a few years later — sometimes the very same year, sometimes a decade on — their name turns up again for a Nobel Prize. It happens often enough that the Lasker has earned its nickname, "America's Nobel." But the two prizes aren't the same thing wearing different medals. They differ in scope, origin, selection process, and what they're actually trying to reward. Keep your answer in mind — by the end of this post, you may have changed it.

Scale and Scope

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is global — one of six categories in the broader Nobel Prizes, awarded by Sweden's Nobel Assembly to at most three people a year, drawn from any country, any institution, any field of medical science.

The Lasker Awards are American in origin and, historically, in orientation, though the pool of winners has become increasingly international over the decades. Rather than one prize, the Lasker Foundation gives out several each year across distinct categories: the Basic Medical Research Award, the Clinical Medical Research Award, the Special Achievement Award, and, periodically, the Public Service Award. This structure means the Lasker recognizes a wider range of contributions in a single year than the Nobel does — not just the single biggest discovery, but also clinical translation, career-spanning leadership, and public health advocacy.

Origins: A Scientific Institution vs. Two Advertising-World Philanthropists

The Nobel Prizes were established through the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and the inventor of dynamite, and have been administered by Swedish and Norwegian institutions since 1901.

The Lasker story is different, and more American in flavor. It was founded in 1945 by Albert Lasker, an advertising executive, and his wife Mary Woodard Lasker, a health advocate who spent much of her life lobbying Congress to dramatically expand funding for the National Institutes of Health. Neither was a scientist. Their goal wasn't just to honor discoveries — it was to draw public attention to medical research at a moment when funding for it in the US was thin, using the same tools of public persuasion Albert had built a career on in advertising.

Selection Process

Both prizes rely on expert nomination and rigorous internal deliberation, but the Lasker's jury has a distinctive feature: it is chaired by a scientist who has won both a Lasker and a Nobel Prize — Joseph L. Goldstein, recipient of the 1985 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the 1985 Nobel Prize. The Lasker Jury has spoken publicly about specifically seeking work characterized by originality, boldness, and surprise — the kind of finding that upends the field's existing assumptions rather than incrementally extending it.

This overlap in philosophy between the two prizes' selection criteria is part of why the Lasker so reliably anticipates the Nobel.

The Numbers Behind "America's Nobel"

The predictive relationship between the two awards is well documented. Roughly 87 Lasker laureates have gone on to win a Nobel Prize, with about 40 of those in the last three decades alone. In the Basic Medical Research category specifically, the overlap is even more pronounced — closer to half of its winners have eventually been recognized by the Nobel committee.

Some notable examples:

  • Carl Cori won the very first Lasker Basic Award in 1946, and took home the Nobel just a year later, alongside his wife and research partner, Gerty Cori.
  • James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won a Lasker Award in 1960 for the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure, two years before their 1962 Nobel Prize.
  • Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel won a Lasker Award in 1995 for uncovering how immune cells recognize virus-infected cells, followed by the Nobel Prize just a year later, in 1996.
  • Elizabeth Blackburn won a Lasker in 2006 for her telomerase research, followed by a Nobel Prize in 2009.
  • More recently, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won a Lasker in 2021 for the mRNA vaccine technology, then a Nobel in 2023 — a two-year gap that reflected how quickly their once-overlooked research had reshaped public health.

Not every Lasker winner becomes a Nobel laureate, and the reverse is true too — some Nobel Prizes go to work or scientists the Lasker jury never recognized. But the overlap is large enough that, when a Lasker Award is announced each September, science journalists reliably ask the same question: could this be next October's Nobel Prize?

Why It's Worth Knowing Both

For scientists and science-watchers alike, understanding the Lasker isn't just trivia about a "lesser" prize. It's a way of catching genuinely transformative work early — often years before it earns the more famous prize, and sometimes years before the broader public or even the scientific community has fully grasped its importance. Watching the Lasker Awards each fall is a bit like getting an early, well-informed guess at where the history of medicine is heading next.