Last year the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm once again overlooked you in the categories of medicine, physics, and literature. Clearly their judgment is faulty, and it makes me wonder about other mistakes they may have made. Aside from the subjective peace and literature (and economics?) prizes, has anyone been awarded a Nobel for work that has later turned out to be wrong? What happens to the prize (and the money)? –Your student, Dr. Z, Connecticut
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Several Nobel Prize awards have been controversial, but in the hard sciences none has involved work later shown to be flat-out wrong. There are several reasons for that, the most obvious being that the Nobel folks aren’t idiots and their screening process is pretty thorough. Equally important, a long interval typically separates the discovery from the award–more than 20 years in the case of the 2004 physics prize–by which time most nagging doubts have been resolved. Still, looking back on at least a few awards must make the Nobel committee cringe.
Sometimes a Nobel is given to a guy who’s a flake but probably deserves it anyhow. One case in point is Cambridge University professor Brian Josephson, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1973 for predicting how electrons could tunnel through an insulating barrier. Later in life, Josephson became a believer in the paranormal and a fan of such chimeras as cold fusion and homeopathy; he directed the Mind-Matter Unification Project, which among other things tried to use physics to explain telepathy. Another example is Linus Pauling, recipient of both the 1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize, whose career took a weird turn after he became obsessed with vitamin C, believing it capable of everything from curing the common cold to extending life to treating cancer. Pauling may yet be at least partly vindicated, since recent research shows that in certain cases high doses of vitamin C can help terminal cancer patients and may even alleviate the common cold.
