Though he correctly notes that the “Nobel Prize in Economics” was not set up by Nobel but by the Bank of Sweden, Cecil missed a chance to clarify that this means that the prize is not actually a Nobel Prize at all. Its official name is the" Bank of Sweden Economics Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel."
Although not fraudulent work, the appropriation of Lisa Meitner’s discovery and naming of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn (both misogynist and anti-semitic) ranks as one of the greatest miscarriages of Nobel Prize History. It has been written that Lisa Meitner’s greatest achievement was Otto Hahn’s Nobel Prize.
Lisa Meitner was fleeing Nazi Germany at the time this occurred.
If you are interested in pursuing this further, there is a recent book on Lisa Meitner that you will find by putting her name in at Google or Amazon.com.
Sometimes the prize has been given for what appears to be less-than-groundshattering work. One that particularly sticks out is the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics, given to Nils Gustaf Dalen for inventing a better way to control lighthouses.
Before antibiotics were discovered, one of the first cures for syphilis was to deliberately infect patients with malaria, and then treat them with quinine after high fever had killed off the syphillis infection.
That discovery earned Julius Wagner von Jauregg a Nobel Prize. And while von Juaregg was not a quack (his treatment DID work, after all), I suspect his is not one of the medical awards the Nobel COmmittee is most proud of.
Just wanted to add another more recent flakey Nobel guy, Kerry Mullis, who picked up the Chemistry prize in 1993. No doubt deserving, for essentially discovering the omnipresent technique of PCR. However, he has been linked to HIV deniers, and also recounts the time an alien talked to him in a forrest in the form of a glowing raccoon.
This brings up a subject that close to the heart of many chemists. While certainly, those that have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry have accomplished great things. In fact they probably deserve a Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking work they have done; however, many of the recent recipients of this award (the most recent recipient being one of them) could barely be described as chemists.
This is not to say that RNA transcription is not a groundbreaking work, but it really belongs in another category. The trouble is that since the Nobel Prize was created, new fields have developed that really bridge the current categories of Nobel Prizes. It’s time to create new Nobel Prize categories to reflect this.
Cecil mentioned Nazi physicist Philipp von Lenard, but neglected to mention Nazi physicist Johannes Stark.
Wasn’t Fermi’s 1938 prize for physics based at least partly on error. It was awarded for his work on nuclear reactions due to nuetron radiation, but my understanding is that he thought the products of those reactions were heavier-then-Uranium, never before seen elements when in fact they were much lighter fusion products.
Checking the Nobel site, Fermi was given his award for: ““for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons””
Just scanned through the presentation speech of Fermi’s prize. I think I’m correct, the prize was given to Fermi for the production of trans-uranic elements via slow nuteron bombardment, something that (according to wiki) wasn’t actually accomplished till 1940. Going off memory since I don’t have the book here, I think that according to Richard Rhodes Making of the Atomic Bomb Fermi was seeing the by-products of (at that time, undiscovered) nucler fission but didn’t think it was possible for an element as large as U to decay to much lighter elements, and so he incorrectly interpreted the byproducts to be brand new never before seen elements.
Of course Fermi had a long list of Nobel worthy discoveries under his belt, but the one for which he was actually awarded the prize appears to have been an error.
Fermi certainly thought that he was producing transuranic elements - and went so far as to name elements 93 and 94 Ausenium and Hesperium in his Nobel lecture when he was presented with the prize in Stockholm in December 1938. Barely weeks later he learned of the suggestion of fission and the printed version of the lecture (a pdf) had to add a footnote acknowledging that events had moved on. Your description of the award being “at least partly in error” is correct.
In keeping with that “partly”, however, the citation also singles out slow neutrons and Pleijel’s presentation speech emphasises him being the first to successfully get reactions using neutrons as projectiles. In other words, the rest of the work he was being awarded for - not to mention the stuff he’d already done that wasn’t mentioned at all - was significant and might well have been sufficient for the Swedish Academy to have made the award anyway.