Nobel Prizes may be the penultimate achievement for scientists—only next to being crowned the next Albert Einstein, of course—but I’m here to chip away at some of that dearly held glory and wonder that the very word ‘Nobel’ may instill. Because frankly, the prizes aren’t a law; they’re not even an art. And many times, the prizes have been a mistake.
First, the laureates. Consider António Egas Moniz. He received his prize for introducing lobotomy—that is, treating patients with psychoysis by severing some of the neural connections to their prefrontal cortex. It was a swell technique; previously paranoid and some schizophrenic patients would become lethargic and calm, but only with the additional cost that such patients would never be able to feel anger, or any sort of arousal, ever again. Neither the Nobel Committee, nor Moniz himself, did substantial research to discover the long term events of this so-called ‘ice pick lobotomy’; Moniz received his prize well before the time when lobotomy was exposed for the disaster that it really was.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Nobel Prize committee is proof that history tends to repeat itself, because, they recently picked another laureate without waiting for concrete proof of his accomplishments. I’m talking about Barack Obama, of course. He got a peace prize why exactly? Nobody knows—especially not the Nobel committee. Their ‘reasoning’ stems down to Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Obama’s efforts must have been extraordinary indeed, since his presidency term only started two weeks before the nomination deadline. What an inspiration.
Even more heartbreaking are the non-laureates—the people who should have received Nobel prizes, but didn’t. High up on this list is Rosalind Franklin, the one woman that every female biology professor will spew at you about (and for good reason). Franklin was a brilliant scientist who performed x-ray diffraction on DNA to determine its double-helical structure. James Watson and Francis Crick as good as ‘stole’ this information off her desk, and then claimed to have deduced the structure of DNA. In a real twist of tragedy, Franklin died soon after because of her work with x-ray radiation. Since the Nobel committee doesn’t award prizes posthumously, the prizes went to Watson and Crick instead.
And finally, of course, is Mohandas Gandhi. He was nominated for a prize in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and right before his death in 1948. In 1948, it was even strongly considered that Gandhi could be awarded a posthumous award (as per the statute of the Nobel Foundation, which allowed such awards under extraordinary circumstances), but it was turned down anyway for varying reasons. One of these reasons was uncertainty about where to distribute the prize money should Gandhi be awarded the prize.
Of course, the purpose of this article is not to belittle Nobel Prize laureates, or their achievements. Truly, most of them are well deserved and the prizes do commemorate scientific ingenuity, cultural advances, and hard work. Moreover, it should be noted that the Nobel Prize website did devote a small section of their site to Gandhi, claiming him to be the ‘missing laureate’.
Nevertheless, Nobel Prizes shouldn’t be treated as ‘endgame’ or ‘the final chapter’ or ‘the last word in science’. Why? Because it’s not. The committee is made up of people who make their own opinions—and so should you. So the next time you hear about somebody getting a Nobel prize, stop to think: most of the Nobel-recognised achievements might be worth it but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t just as many achievements which aren’t commemorated that are also worth it.
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