Michael Polanyi was nominated for the Nobel Prize twelve times between 1959 and 1974 — six in Physics, six in Chemistry — and never won

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The Nobel Foundation's own nomination archive records Michael Polanyi as "Nominee in 12 nominations": six for Physics (1961, 1968 ×2, 1970, 1973, 1974) and six for Chemistry (1959, 1960, 1967 ×3, 1973), the Chemistry nominations including Cyril Hinshelwood and Eugene Wigner among the nominators. He is separately recorded as a nominator (not nominee) for the 1937 and 1947 Chemistry prizes. He never won either prize.

This gives Polanyi a direct, Tier-1-sourced touchpoint with the same Nobel Foundation institutional cluster that Carl von Ossietzky anchors in this vault — but through an entirely different, non-interacting mechanism. Ossietzky's single 1935 award triggered a Nazi decree mechanically forcing unrelated scientists' declines (claim-ossietzky-1935-nobel-peace-prize-hitler-decree-forced-decline); Polanyi's touchpoint is repeated unsuccessful nomination across two decades, a routine feature of the prize's own process, in a different prize category (Physics/Chemistry rather than Peace) with no shared nominator or nominee. The two men's Nobel-adjacency does not meet in the middle — it is the same institution's name attached to two unrelated processes, consistent with the finding that the two men's cosine proximity in this vault reflects shared write-up genre, not a shared fact.

The nomination archive's /nomination/archive/show_people.php path resolved cleanly to archive_page, unlike the general nobelprize.org prize/summary/API routes logged as known-blocked in sources.md since 2026-08-30 — see that file's maintenance note.