What happens when a Nobel prize winner is subsequently exposed as a fraud?

[Guest guest]

> JustSayNo

> Wed, 4 Aug 2004 04:40:56 -0700 (PDT)

 

> [sSRI-Research] What happens when a Nobel

> prize winner is subsequently exposed as a fraud?

>

> Should they de-Nobel Moniz?

>

> What happens when a Nobel prize winner is

> subsequently exposed as a fraud?

> Nothing, apparently

>

> John Sutherland

> Monday August 2, 2004

> The Guardian

>

> In the British army, when an officer was drummed

> out, his epaulettes would

> be ceremonially ripped from his uniform. Priests are

> defrocked and enter

> the secular world in their underpants. Lawyers are

> disbarred and doctors

> struck off. But no one, as far as I know, has ever

> been de-Nobelled --

> stripped, that is, of the Nobel prize. Like the

> Soviet government (as

> Solzhenitsyn wryly put it), Stockholm's motto is:

> " We never make mistakes. "

>

> In one egregious case, the committee did err. And,

> if the campaign to

> de-Nobel Egas Moniz succeeds, Portugal -- having a

> lousy year, what with

> Euro 2004 and its forest fires -- will lose one of

> its two laureates (the

> other, novelist Jose Saramago, seems safe enough).

>

> Moniz invented human lobotomy in 1935. American

> surgeons had earlier

> observed that if you hacked the frontal lobes off

> chimpanzees' brains, the

> primates stopped jumping round the monkey house. The

> 1930s was a time when the medical profession was

> unimpeded by petty restrictions. In Tuskegee in

> 1932, hundreds of American blacks were (unknown to

> them) deliberately

> infected with syphilis to see what happened. They

> got very sick.

>

> Moniz - despite the lack of surgical expertise -

> went to work on the

> (unconsenting and mainly female) inmates of Lisbon's

> asylums. As with the

> chimps, the results were dramatic. Moniz trumpeted

> to the world the

> beneficial effects of lobotomy. He duly got his

> Nobel prize in 1949. He

> was, the committee said, " a wonderful man " . Not all

> of his patients agreed;

> Moniz's career as a psychosurgeon ended when an

> ungrateful lobotomee shot

> him, shattering his spine.

>

> The operation was popularised in the US by Walter

> Freeman who trundled round

> the states in his " lobotomobile " , demonstrating his

> " ice pick and hammer

> technique " to any hospital that would let him into

> their operating theatre.

> Failing that, he would operate in hotel rooms,

> lobotomising children for

> " delinquent behaviour " and housewives who had lost

> the will to do the

> washing-up.

>

> Freeman is immortalised in the the 1982 biopic

> _Frances_, where the heroine

> (played by Jessica Lange) is given the works in

> front of an admiring

> audience by a mallet- and ice pick-wielding Freeman

> boasting he can do 10 an

> hour and " lobotomy gets 'em home. "

>

> Most, one gathers, came home vegetables -- at best

> Stepfordized; at worst,

> zombies (Frances Farmer was the latter). The asylums

> loved lobotomy: it

> cost a mere $250 and kept the noise down in the

> wards.

>

> Protest came from some unlikely places: notably the

> USSR (which preferred

> overdosing its inconvenient citizens with

> psychotropic drugs) and L Ron

> Hubbard's Scientologists. But mostly, it was the

> writers and film-makers

> who got across to the public the full horror of

> carving up the human brain

> like a Thanksgiving turkey. Lobotomy inspired

> Tennessee Williams's 1958

> play, _Suddenly Last Summer_ (just ending a

> successful West End revival).

> Williams had a sister who had undergone the

> operation. He knew, too, that

> it was sometimes inflicted on gays -- to render them

> " morally sane " . Ken

> Kesey won a Pulitzer in 1962 for _One Flew Over the

> Cuckoo's Nest_, in which

> the hero, Randle McMurphy, is lobotomised because

> Big Nurse simply can't

> stand his unruly behaviour.

>

> By 1975, when the Oscar-winning film starring Jack

> Nicholson came out,

> lobotomy was history. Freeman had lost his surgeon's

> licence in 1965, after

> killing a patient with his icepick. But Moniz (who

> died in 1955) still has

> his Nobel prize. The campaign to strip him of it has

> been led by Christine

> Johnson, who had a close relative destroyed by

> lobotomy and has mobilised on

> her website (www.psychosurgery.org) a powerful lobby

> of victims and their

> families. The Nobel Foundation wrote to Johnson a

> couple of weeks ago

> declining to withdraw the award -- although they

> declare themselves relieved

> that " the medical profession can today offer much

> more humane and effective

> therapies for the severely mentally ill patients " .

>

> Should they de-Nobel Moniz? A no-brainer, I'd say.

>

>

>

>

> [Non-text portions of this message have been

> removed]

>

>

>