Mistakes and Oversights

It was 1913, still an age of innocence for science, long before the shameless lobbying for prizes and grants that prevails today, when two dedicated physicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic were racing to unlock the mystery of what causes cancer.

American Francis Peyton Rous, just 34 years old, had been dissecting tumors taken from barnyard animals for four years, noting how the cells mutated without any identifiable infection. By 1911, he had concluded that a virus was the culprit.

Johannes Fibiger of Denmark, 47, had his own theory about the origins of the illness that would take his life 13 years later. His laboratory mice had come from a roach-infested sugar refinery, where they had fed on the insects found to carry a roundworm parasite. In that unglamorous age, bereft of underlings and supplies to order, Fibiger scoured the refinery floor himself, trapping cockroaches to feed his four-legged, long-tailed subjects. With mounting pride, he watched his suspicion grow into certainty: the larvae of the roundworm were the cause of the cancer.

Even with more than a dozen years to reflect on the conflicting conclusions, the judges of the Nobel Prize in medicine chose the wrong honoree. The worm won. Fibiger received the 1926 award a month before his death, an intercession of fate that spared him the humiliation of seeing his life’s work debunked a handful of years later.

Rous eventually received recognition from the arbiters of medical advancement--55 years after publishing his theory that tumors can be caused by viruses. It was one of the more notorious oversights of what constitutes the most beneficial discovery in medicine or physiology each year.

Nobel Prizes for literature and peace have long been criticized as too subjective and vulnerable to the influences of politics, lobbying, cronyism and quirky judgment. But as Fibiger’s errant discovery and half a dozen other misguided awards in the hard sciences demonstrate, those judging physics, chemistry and medicine also are susceptible to the imperfections of human nature.

From the blatantly sexist decision to not credit Lise Meitner of Germany for her discovery of nuclear fission to the awards bestowed on the inventors of DDT, the lobotomy and chemical weapons, the prestigious Swedish academies charged with deciding the Nobels have had their own troubles recognizing genius.

In the hushed, polished-wood conference rooms of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, where the Nobel Prizes in economics, physics and chemistry are decided, professor Anders Barany cautions against expecting all judgments to stand the test of time.

“It would be nice if we could always pick something of eternal validity to recognize with the awards. But that goes against science,” says Barany, who is secretary of the Nobel committee for physics. “Progress in science is not only in one direction--always forward and upward. Sometimes it moves sideways, or even backward, on its way to achievement.”

That was the case with Fibiger. Although the Dane’s conclusion was dead wrong, it was understandable in the parameters of its time and, even after being discredited by breakthroughs in virus research in the 1930s, Fibiger’s work furthered the medical world’s understanding of cancer, if only by contributing to the latter side of trial and error.

If it was a mistake to award Fibiger the 1926 Nobel for his wayward conclusion, no one in the hallowed realm of the awards committee is willing to concede that. In fact, the prizes that bestow both prestige and wealth on each laureate can never be rescinded, which has left some honors in the hands of scientists who used their brilliance for destructive ends.

Take, for example, Fritz Haber, the 1919 chemistry laureate who was rewarded, along with fellow German Carl Bosch, for discovering a process for synthesizing ammonia, which led to the production of artificial fertilizer and averted worldwide famine. But Haber also was a trailblazer in enlisting chemistry in the service of war. In 1915, he produced the first poison gas canisters to add to the horrors of trench warfare, weapons that were to be perfected by nationalist scientists on both sides of the World War I battle lines until more than 1 million young men had succumbed in agony to their cruel inventions.

“Haber’s development of poison gas weapons turned out to be one of the biggest disasters for humanity, even if his agricultural work met the prize standards,” says Karin Bojs, science editor for Stockholm’s respected daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Like other Nobel historians, she defends the awarding bodies’ dubious selections as a margin of error to be expected in any process involving fallible human judgment. Nationalism, sexism, provincial boosterism and back scratching have all clouded the committees’ choices at times.

“It takes many years before anyone can say whether a prize was correct or not,” she says. “Haber’s invention arguably saved more lives than any other discovery for decades, as fertilizer was becoming scarce and the whole world was threatened by hunger.”

Keeping each award in the context of its time is essential, says Tore Frangsmyr, a professor of science history at the University of Uppsala and editor of the Nobel Foundation’s handbook. That is true of the prizes awarded for the discoveries of DDT and the lobotomy, regarded in their time as momentous advances, with dangerous side effects and abuses coming to light later.

“You can’t be anachronistic about the Nobel choices. You operate from the knowledge of the time, and it’s wrong to judge history from the standpoint of what we know today,” says Frangsmyr, who has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a Nobel physics judge since 1984.

He argues that, contrary to the notion that many have of the Nobel Prizes, they are neither an exact science nor a faultless reflection of founder Alfred Nobel’s appeal for laureates who have made the greatest contributions to humankind. “There is no perfect laureate or perfect time,” he says. “Science prizes aren’t like a sports competition, where everyone competes under the same conditions and the best man wins.”

When Portuguese researcher Antonio Egas Moniz shared the medicine prize in 1949 “for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leukotomy in certain psychoses,” a severance of nerves in the brain later called the lobotomy, there were few worthy nominations because World War II had so disrupted the progress of science.

“Pharmacology was not so well developed then,” says Per Snaprud, another Stockholm science writer. “Mental patients were being treated with shock therapy and cold water. In the context of its time, it wasn’t so controversial.”

More deserving of criticism, concede Nobel historians, are the instances of discrimination for or against candidates bestowed career-crowning glory through ulterior motives. That the Nobel chemistry prize judges in 1944 recognized Meitner’s male colleague, Otto Hahn, for her discovery of nuclear fission is an enduring embarrassment among members of the academy. Sexism escalated into outright scandal on other occasions. When Marie Curie won her second Nobel, for chemistry in 1911, she was asked by the academy not to attend the awards ceremony because Swedish newspapers had made her out to be a husband-stealing hussy for having had an affair with a married colleague. The 44-year-old widow showed up anyway.

The hallowed Nobel institutions also have shown indifference to nepotism and old-boy networks. Irene Joliot-Curie, the daughter of 1903 physics laureates Pierre and Marie Curie, was able to sweep into the Paris Radium Institute in her parents’ wake, where she and her husband earned Nobel chemistry honors in 1935 while still in their 30s. The same accident of birth also helped William Lawrence Bragg become one of the youngest Nobel laureates at 25, when he shared the physics prize with his father in 1915 for their alleged joint analysis of crystal structures through X-rays. Letters, diaries and Nobel archives going back more than 50 years, and thus available to scholars at the discretion of the academies, have disclosed overt arm-twisting and favor trading among the judges, according to extensive research and writings by Nobel historians Elisabeth Crawford and Robert Marc Friedman.

Analysts blame the manipulations conducted behind the scenes, especially at the highly secretive Karolinska Institute (which makes the prize selections for physiology or medicine), for the occasional lapses of judgment.

Back-channel promotion of favored nominees has usually served to delay recognition of worthier advancements. Max Planck had to wait 18 years to be honored for developing quantum law, and Albert Einstein, easily the world’s most recognizable laureate, was nominated 64 times over 10 years before receiving the physics prize in 1922, and then only for one portion of his discoveries. And, like Rous, the long unrequited discoverer of cancer’s cause, the inventors of electron microscopy, German Ernst Ruska, and the computer chip, American Jack Kilby, had to wait more than half a century for Nobel notice.

But as a whole, argues Barany, the Nobel track record is an impressive reflection of the accomplishments of the 20th century, recognizing discoveries such as X-rays, penicillin and DNA that fulfilled Alfred Nobel’s challenge to reward the most beneficial fruits of science.

“The prize choices have not always been perfect, but most of them have been quite good,” says Barany, estimating that no more than 1% of Nobel decisions can be deemed errors, even with the clarity of hindsight. “There has been such tremendous advance in science over the past century that we could easily have given twice as many prizes and still have had deserving people who went unrecognized.”