When you win a Nobel prize, you become much in demand. Eric Sorensen takes a look at how laureates decide which worthy causes to lend their name to.

Half a century has passed since chemist Linus Pauling spearheaded one of the biggest petitions ever in science. More than 11,000 scientists, including 36 of Pauling’s fellow Nobel laureates, signed on to call for the “ultimate effective abolition of nuclear weapons”. The petition led to the first international attempt to control nuclear weapons — the Partial Test Ban Treaty. And on the same day in 1963 that the treaty went into effect, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Pauling would receive the peace prize to go with his 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Scientific petitions graced by laureates have become common tools of activism — clamouring to free the unjustly imprisoned and cure a myriad of perceived ills, from drug laws to inadequate research funding to nuclear proliferation. Having a Nobel laureate’s name on a petition almost guarantees it extra attention: in a newspaper story’s first paragraph, if not its headline.

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