FEW events exceed the splendour of the Nobel ceremony and gala dinner held every December in Stockholm. After champagne toasts to Sweden’s king, and to the memory of Alfred Nobel, 1,300 guests sitting in the city hall cheer the latest crop of laureates in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, literature and economics. (The peace prize is awarded at a separate shindig, in Oslo.) For many of the winners, perhaps more used to sporting white coats than white ties, the occasion is a career-defining moment of glamour. No other prize has anything like the stature of a Nobel. In scientific circles it is known simply as “the trip to Stockholm”. But some do whisper the question, “for how much longer?”

Nobel, who made his money by inventing dynamite, set things off with a bang. In 1895 he bequeathed 31m kronor (roughly $200m at today’s values) to create a foundation, the income from which would pay for the prizes. The endowment is now worth 4 billion kronor (some $500m). That sounds like a lot, but it hardly represents a spectacular return after 120 years.

As a result, the prizes have suffered. Today, an individual award—which can be split up to three ways—is worth 8m kronor in addition to the 18-carat gold medal each recipient receives. A handy sum, but one whose lavishness has fallen as cautious investing has failed to increase the pot as fast as economic growth has increased people’s incomes. According to the foundation’s boss, Lars Heikensten, who was once governor of Sweden’s central bank, when the first prizes were awarded, in 1901, they represented 25 times the annual salary of a professor at a typical university in Europe or America. Now, the ratio is more like ten. Meanwhile rivals, such as the Kavli and Breakthrough prizes, are being endowed by more recent plutocrats. Many of these (see chart) pay out more than the Nobel Foundation—in the case of the Breakthrough prize, three times as much. The Nobel brand may thus be in danger of erosion, as the foundation itself admits in its most recent annual report. This says that “ensuring the importance of the Nobel prize in the long term continues to pose a significant challenge”. Mr Heikensten is trying to take matters in hand. He has overseen a big awareness-raising push on social media, and through conferences and debates that carry the Nobel name. And, sometime in the next 12 months, work will start on a Nobel visitor centre and conference venue in the heart of old Stockholm. This controversial cube of glass, costing 1.2 billion kronor, will be paid for by private donors, with much of the money coming from two families of Swedish billionaires, the Wallenbergs and the Perssons. Which is all well and good, but does not really get to the heart of the matter—that the whole Nobel proposition needs dragging into the 21st century. One ticklish question is whether the prize categories are still relevant. The science prizes—the core of the foundation’s fame—reflect the academic priorities of the founder’s era. Things have changed. Galling though it is to the memory of Nobel, a chemist, pure chemistry is largely worked out as an academic discipline. These days, most of the winners of the chemistry prize could have fitted just as easily into the physics or physiology-or-medicine categories. Meanwhile, biology has hypertrophied. Shoe-horning it into “physiology or medicine” seems bizarre, and excludes important fields such as ecology. Rivals have prizes for categories such as neuroscience and nanoscience. Changing or adding to the Nobel list, though, has not found favour. Even the economics prize, introduced in 1969, is looked down on by traditionalists as not being a proper Nobel.

Then there is the question of replenishing the coffers. A praiseworthy desire to preserve independence by not taking donations into the endowment has become something of a drawback. This, as much as overcautious investing, is responsible for the prizes’ diminished financial value. A more welcoming attitude to donations (even if these are restricted to the personal, rather than the corporate, and perhaps to legacies rather than lifetime gifts that might be seen as involving some quid pro quo) might be sensible, to boost the prizes’ value. For reputation is a funny thing. Scandal can destroy it overnight, of course, and the foundation’s trustees might fairly argue that their cautious approach has avoided that fate. But reputation can also slip away, unnoticed, as the world’s attention shifts elsewhere.