I was wondering if the Nobel committee ever awarded a prize that later, with the passage of time, seemed like a mistake. You know, a “breakthrough” that didn’t end up leading to much, etc. I realize they don’t do these hastily (didn’t the TI physicist just get the award for something he developed in 1958???) but still…
I think I recall that some think Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” was a dumb choice for lit.
Others?
There are a few people who wondered why Ernest Hemingway got one for The Old Man and the Sea.
Obviously, you could pick on the literature choices all day.
Several Nobel Peace Prizes have been given to people who efforts turned out to be unsuccessful, most notably Arafat, Rabin, and Peres in 1994.
The Award given to Henry Kissinger in 1973 is a sick joke. His Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, had the decency to decline the award.
A remarkable number of Nobel Peace Prizes have been given to the United Nations or those working for them, though the UN’s efficacy in solving the world’s conflicts is pretty questionable.
I thought the Economics prizes were going to have a lot of bad winners, but actually it’s a decent list. They’ve only been handing them out since 1969.
Rigoberta Menchu.
I still can’t believe those Nobel bastards screwed over Eudora Welty. Rotten filthy Swiss bastards.
Swedish, I think you mean…
-durp-
thank you, scratch1300. the brain doesn’t work so good this early in the morning.
jb
Well, ya know, Einstein got the Nobel Prize in physics for the photoelectric effect, not for special or general relativity.
Time this week pointed out the cases of three medicine/physiology winners:
Johannes Fibiger, who won for supposedly discovering a parasite that causes cancer (1926),
Antonio Moniz for the invention of the prefrontal lobotomy (1949), and
Julius Wagner von Jauregg, for infecting patients with malaria to treat dementia (1927).
Info on all can be found on the Nobel e-museum web site.
Where is my Book of Top Ten Lists when I need it? Dave had a real funny one about the Top Ten Pet Peeves of Nobel Prize winners, way back when.
I think one was “The smirk on the mailman’s face when he hnds the mail, saying ‘Here’s this month’s issue of Big Jugs magazine, Mr. Nobel Laureate’”
Maybe my favorite Top Ten List of all time! Others include (and I’m not going to remember them verbatim):
People always trying to take advantage of the 10 percent discount at participating Red Lobsters.
Run-ins with gangs of Pulitzer Prize winners always end in bloodshed.
People come up to you at parties trying to get free advice in particle physics.
And the No. 1 reason …
You’ll never see a dime from Mattel’s line of Nobel Prize action figures.
From what I understand, the literature prizes are supposed to be an award for the author’s life work so far, and not
any specific book.
Well, this one is unfortunate, but not quite as stupid as it first seems. The dementia that he was treating was very likely General Paresis of the Insane, which was a major cause of dementia until the second half of this century. GPI came from the final stages of Syphilis, which lacked an effective treatment until Penicilin. (Forgive my spelling, I’m a bit rushed.) One of the sucessful treatments for GPI was inducing a very high fever. Doctors had tried inducing TB (I think) and Smallpox, but um, found those to be a bit too dangerous. So Wagner von Jauregg apparently decided to try Malaria.
Look, I’m not saying this was a good idea. Anyway, GPI stuck around until antibiotics, now it’s extremely rare.
I don’t know if that’s exactly fair. In more general terms he achieved the first controlled induction of cancer in laboratory animals. Being able to do that is a pretty big step in understanding cancer.
His research was based in the prevailing theories of cancer at the time, which suggested that cancer was caused by tissue irritation. But his experiments were a springboard for other scientists (like Katsusaburo) who uncovered important information about carcinogens.
Here’s a good article on Fibiger.
Oscar Arias, ex-president of Costa Rica, winning the Nobel Peace Price. What a joke!
I don’t know a great deal about Senor Arias, quasar, so tell me what’s your beef with him? To my knowledge, and in contrast with many of the “peacemakers” on the Nobel Prize list, he at least hasn’t started any wars. (Not intended as a flame; question asked for purposes of fighting my ignorance only.)
Sua
I don’t know anything about Oscar Arias either, but I do know that Latin America in general hasn’t exactly been deluged with peaceful and kind leaders.
It seems like the Peace Prize is the most blatantly political of all of the Nobel prizes.
Yeah, I very briefly scanned through some articles on Arias in connection with the Nobel Prize, and leaders on both the left and the right had praise for him. So quasar or any other anti-Arias doper, what’s the deal? 
Basically, with the exception of John Hume, no one who’s ever won a peace prize for trying to end the war in Ireland deserved it.
What, really, did either of these two do to encourage peace?
The scientific and literature prizes still seem to have some merit, but the peace prize appear, at least to me, to be getting more political and less relevant as time goes on.
As regards David Trimble, my recollection of analysts thoughts at the time was that the Nobel Committee was engaging in some peacemaking of its own when it awarded the prize to Mr. Trimble. The thinking was that Mr. Trimble was going to have an extremely tough time getting the Unionist mainstream to accept the Good Friday accords, so awarding him the Nobel Prize would give him international approval and the weight to being a Nobel Laureate as he tried to get approval from his followers. The same rationale was behind not awarding Sen. Mitchell the prize for his mediation of the accords - deemphasize the involvement of outsiders, again a bone of contention in the Unionist mainstream.
You can decide for yourself whether this is an appropriate use of the cachet (sp?) of the Nobel Peace Prize. Me, if it helps, I have no problem with it.
Sua