On December 10th, in the Early Years, the Nobel Foundation Sometimes went Awry

In every year since 1901, except for a few years during World War I and II, the Nobel Prizes have been awarded in Stockholm and in Oslo (Peace) on December 10th, the date of Alfred Nobel’s death. The Laureates will give their Nobel Lecture and be feted at an elegant banquet hosted by the King and Queen of Sweden. The event goes unheralded since all the media coverage and hoopla occurs at the time of the announcement of the winners, two months earlier, in October, the month of Nobel’s birth.

The Nobel Prize in the two hard sciences, Chemistry and Physics, generated little controversy as to merit in the early years, although inevitably important work went unrecognized. The Prizes that were less rigorously defined, Peace, Literature, and, yes, Physiology or Medicine, had some controversial omissions or erroneous selections made by the Nobel Foundation. The failure to give Mahatma Gandhi the Nobel Peace Prize after the peaceful transition of British colonial rule to Indian independence, to which he made a singular contribution, was widely criticized. Later, they gave a Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat. The failure to award Leo Tolstoy the Prize in Literature was greeted by a remarkable response from the great writers and thinkers of the period who wrote a letter venerating Tolstoy and castigating the Nobel Foundation for this gross oversight, despite his multiple nominations for both the Literature and Peace Prizes. Joyce, Chekov, Proust, Ibsen, and Twain suffered the same fate. Some of the authors they chose instead were lost to posterity. The decision to give the Physiology or Medicine Prize in 1926 for research concluding that the larva of a worm, designated Spiroptera carcinoma, caused gastric cancer in rats was, soon thereafter, found to be erroneous.

One of the most compelling errors made in the selection for a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine resulted in giving the Nobel imprimatur to a savage neurosurgical procedure but, also, may have resulted in several positive actions on behalf of those with intellectual disability.

In 1935, a Portuguese neurologist and neurosurgeon, António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz, introduced a neurosurgical procedure, prefrontal leucotomy (a.k.a. prefrontal lobotomy), which cuts the connection of the prefrontal cerebral cortex to the neighboring brain. He applied this procedure to persons who had schizophrenia, severe depression, panic disorder and mania. He reported satisfactory results in a series of patients so treated. The procedure, however, could lead to significant side effects, including behavioral and personality deterioration or a vegetative state. Moniz argued the net effects were beneficial. Because of the absence of pharmacological therapy at that time and the urgent need to find treatments for severe mental illnesses, it gained credibility in European centers and the United States.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was concerned that his daughter Rosemary would be a stain on the family’s reputation because an injury at birth led to, occasional, erratic behavior. He was concerned that her social behavior, sometimes promiscuous, would lead to a child out of wedlock and injure the family’s standing. He had political ambitions for himself and his oldest son, Joseph, Jr. Without anyone’s concurrence, he enlisted two neurosurgeons at The George Washington Medical Center to perform a lobotomy on Rosemary in 1941 at age 23 years. She went from an interacting, engaging young women (see Figure) to a profoundly disabled state, unable to talk or walk. She was institutionalized and died in 2005. These events were thought to have influenced her brother President John F. Kennedy’s supporting and signing the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendment to the Social Security Act and her sister Eunice Shriver’s founding of the Special Olympics to recognize the achievements of the physically and mentally handicapped. A terrible price to pay, but this episode may have led her powerful and influential siblings to provide needed attention to the cause of a caring and supportive environment for those with intellectual disability.

Moniz, remarkably, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 for his neurosurgical procedure. Later, after the procedure was considered dangerous and unethical, an unsuccessful effort was made to get the Nobel Foundation to rescind the Prize to Moniz.

December 2021

On December 10th, in the Early Years, the Nobel Foundation Sometimes went Awry

December 30th, 2021: The 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Insulin

Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Cancer Act of December 1971