The Marie and August Krogh Prize
The Marie and August Krogh Prize
In the name of the pioneers
The Marie and August Krogh Prize was established in 1969 and is awarded annually to an outstanding health researcher in Denmark. The Organization of Danish Medical Societies awards the Prize, which is accompanied by DKK 1,500,000 (€200,000), comprising a personal award of DKK 250,000 and a research grant of DKK 1,250,000. The Prize is conferred every year at the annual conference of the Organization of Danish Medical Societies.
The Board of the Organization of Danish Medical Societies acts as the Prize committee, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation provides the money. Affiliated members of the Organization of Danish Medical Societies may nominate candidates for the Prize.
The Prize was known as the August Krogh Prize until 2009, when it was renamed the Marie and August Krogh Prize. The Novo Nordisk Foundation proposed the name change as a result of increasing awareness of Marie Krogh’s role in the years leading up to the establishment of the Foundation and her role as a pioneering woman researcher.
Marie Krogh (1874–1943) was the fourth Danish woman to earn a doctorate in medicine. She worked for many years as a general practitioner and carried out various independent research projects.
August Krogh (1874–1949) was Professor of Zoophysiology at the University of Copenhagen and was one of Denmark’s most eminent scientists of the 20th century. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. During a lecture tour in the United States undertaken in 1922 as a result of winning the Nobel Prize, Marie, who had diabetes, told her husband about the research on treatment of diabetes in Canada. Following a visit to the University of Toronto, August Krogh returned to Denmark with the rights to manufacture insulin in the Scandinavian countries. This was the beginning of the establishment of what is now The Novo Nordisk Foundation and Novo Nordisk A/S, one of the world’s leading companies in the treatment of diabetes.