Where is the letter from the Nobel nomination committee accepting Dr. Hammesfahr's nomination for the Nobel Prize in medicine? The term "Nobel Prize nominee" is relatively meaningless, since there are no meaningful enforced qualifications for nomination. Unlike, say, the Oscar® brand awards for motion pictures, where the "nomination" process pre-selects a small number of the best entries, the Nobel Prize "nomination" means nothing beyond the fact that somebody thought it worth entering the nominee into the competition.
I would expect that the Nobel Prize Committee probably does acknowledge nominations, but that such acknowledgement is probably nothing more than "Dear XXX: This is to confirm receipt of your submission regarding YYY and the Nobel Prize in Medicine" or somesuch.
I have no idea whether the congressman who nominated this doctor had good cause for doing so; what should be relevant is why this congressman thought the doctor worthy, rather than the fact that he was "nominated".
The reason this came up is that Felos et. al. were claiming that Hammesfahr made up the fact that he was nominated. I even heard one of the talking heads say there wasn't any such thing as a nomination process.
But the fact is he was nominated and it is a legitimate nomination.
The procedure for nomination is given here:
http://www.nobel.no/eng_com_nom.html "Any one of the following persons is entitled to submit proposals:
members of national assemblies and governments;
members of international courts of law;
university chancellors; university professors of social science, history, philosophy, law and theology;
leaders of peace research institutes and institutes of foreign affairs;
former Nobel Peace Prize laureates;
board members of organisations that have received the Nobel Peace Prize;
present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (committee members must present their nomination at the latest at the first committee meeting after February 1);
former advisers at the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
Observing the rules given in the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the Committee does not publish the names of candidates. "