How many scientists became Nobel laureates more than once?

If receiving a Nobel prize is the highest recognition for a scientist, being awarded twice by the Swedish Academy of Sciences is an extraordinary fact of which, until now, only four people can boast: Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and Marie Curie.

The first person in history to accomplish the feat of twice receiving a Nobel Prize was the Polish scientist Marie Skłodowska Curie, first awarded the prize in Physics and, later, in Chemistry.

The only person twice decorated with a Nobel Prize not shared with anyone else was Linus Pauling. The first award, the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, recognized his research into the nature of chemical bonding. And eight years later, his militant pacifism during the Cold War, focused primarily on combating nuclear weapons, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize (1962).

The fact that today we can listen to the radio, watch television or talk by mobile phone owes much to John Bardeen, the only scientist in history to have received two Nobel Prizes in the Physics category.

The fourth person, and so far the last, was Frederick Sanger, an enthusiast of biochemistry who succeeded in determining the amino acid sequence of a protein. Sanger chose none other than insulin, the key hormone in the regulation of glucose metabolism, and for his feat he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958. Not content with this, in 1980 he won the award once again in the same category for developing a method to read DNA.