Analysis of more than 200 Nobel Lectures in Physiology or Medicine across a century reveals a surprising lack of mentor recognition by awardees

The Nobel Prize is one of the most coveted awards in the world. The Nobel winners, also called Laureates, are invited to Stockholm to deliver their Nobel Lecture. Typically, this includes a historical and scientific overview of their discoveries, often enriched by anecdotes from their personal and professional lives. In this study, we explored more than two hundred Nobel Lectures to examine whether, how and whom newly crowned Nobel Prize winners explicitly mentioned as their mentors. We conducted an exploratory analysis of 208 Nobel Lectures in Physiology or Medicine delivered between 1901 and 2023 by using the search function to look for the keyword <i>mentor</i>. Only twenty Nobel Laureates have explicitly acknowledged their mentors in their Nobel Lectures. This recognition, which first occurred 73 years after the award's establishment, is more common among women, who are disproportionately underrepresented among awardees and often cited their postdoctoral advisors as mentors. The lack of overt recognition is surprising, especially considering the crucial role of mentorship in science, its broad societal value and the non-random patterns of Nobel mentoring relationships, where winners tend to have more Laureate ancestors, descendants and mentees. The word <i>mentor</i> appears more frequently in the Lasker Awards, although these were launched only in 1945 and feature brief 'Acceptance Remarks'. Even Oscar speeches, introduced nearly 30 years after the Nobel Prize and typically lasting less than a minute, mention mentors more frequently than Nobel Lectures do. This highlights an unexpected gap in the explicit acknowledgment of mentors in the context of the Nobel Prize, which we report and discuss for the first time.