NOBILITY OF THE NOBEL PRIZE.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
“ He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.”
Abraham Lincoln.
How noble is the Nobel Prize? I was pleased to read in one of our English dailies an open letter written by ten noted physicists to the Nobel committee protesting the exclusion of Prof. EVG (George) Sudarshan from this year’s Nobel in physics while giving it to Prof. Glauber. I feel they are fully justified in doing so as Sudarshan richly deserved this honour much before Glauber. The Nobel tradition has been like that all through if one looked critically at the history of Nobel Prizes ever since Alfred Nobel, who made his millions by selling dynamite, had a heart transformation following a devastating fire in his own factory. He then realized, for the first time, that it is in giving that one gets. He gave it all to establish this great tradition of honouring great brains in several fields. The list got expanded after some years with more money coming in. Respice to prospice - let us look back to look forwards. Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace, never got the Nobel Peace Prize, while some confirmed criminals got the same for their heart transformation in their evening of life (vridda naari pathivritaa).
Wagner Juregg got the Nobel for medicine in 1927. He claimed, in a “scientific” paper that he invented the fever therapy for successfully treating the most dreaded disease of those days, GPI (General Paresis of the Insane), miserable complication of the then King of diseases, syphilis. What is AIDS today was syphilis then. These are all dynamic diseases having their cycles periodically. Just as any one worth his salt that “researches” AIDS today gets a large booty of the $ 8 billion of the NIH research grant money, people were venerated when they talked about syphilis those days. The story repeats in history with an unchanged pattern of falsehood and mystery. We talk and do so many things about this enigma called AIDS while the father of the PCR test, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Kary Mullis, is wondering as to what is the connection between the AIDS syndrome and the (in) famous HIV virus. He should know better as all viruses are identified using his test. His friend, Professor Peter Duesberg, a virologist of great fame at the Berkeley University, in his great book Inventing the AIDS Virus goes to great lengths to expose the fraud in the field. That is for another time.
Be that as it may, let us go back to our friend Wagner Juregg. His name came up before the Nobel committee in 1926. Gladius, a physician member of the Nobel committee that year knew that Juregg did not invent anything new. It was Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, in 100 BC that introduced fever therapy to medicine. Juregg tried to inject malaria parasite into the GPI victims in mental hospitals to see if the very high fever that malaria parasites produce could kill the treponema pallidum, the fearsome germ of syphilis, which people normally acquired through sexual intercourse. Six of the one hundred patients thus injected improved clinically and more than fifty of them died (not reported in the paper) of malaria as Europeans do not have racial immunity against falciparum malaria. Of course, both Juregg and Gladius did not know the existence of the now well know caste system among malaria parasites. Juregg thought all malarial parasites belonged to one caste. Gladius could thus avert a tragedy in 1926. Gladius told the committee that Juregg must be tried in a criminal court instead for killing that many patients out of the one hundred that he used for his experiments! There were no ethical committees those days! But read on to know that Wagner Juregg got the Nobel Prize the following year after Gladius died providentially of a massive heart attack in 1926.
There are exceptions and many good deserving people did get the Nobels. One of them was my teacher, Bernard Lown, who deserved the Nobel for his invention-the Lown’s defibrillator-the machine that saves many lives in the emergency room after cardiac arrest. But he did get the Nobel Peace Prize instead much later. He founded the Physicians Against Nuclear War (PANW) in 1974 and fought against the might of the US war lords to prevent further nuclear stockpiling and was instrumental in getting the Russian communists to talk to the American capitalists. He was mainly responsible for preventing America dumping its plutonium waste in a small island off the west coast of Africa. But the numbers that were cheated in this process are too many to enumerate. However, a few deserve to be mentioned for their great contributions in different fields of human endeavour for which they richly deserved the Nobel.
John OM Bockris is a distinguished Emeritus professor of chemistry at the A&M University in Texas. He is the father of “cold fission” - nuclear fusion occurring in a laboratory test tube! He was ridiculed, persecuted but he survived all that. He was cheated of the Nobel despite several nominations over the decades! Professor Rustom Roy, Evan Pugh Professor of material sciences (and many other professorships) at the Penn State University is the world’s top material scientist. His laboratory is considered the leader. He invented the “sol-gel” technique that is used even today to extract nano-particles. He should be rightly called the father of nanotechnology. He was nominated a dozen times for the Nobel without the committee selecting him. His technique is the one that scientists use even today, though.
Most recent is the case of Professor Eddie Escultura, from the Philippines, a great mathematical brain who contributed something novel in the field of quantum physics. He was considered for the Nobel this year by the committee only to be rejected in favour of Professor Glauber. But the developments following this would reveal the sickness that has afflicted the Nobel committee. Professor Gerholms, an eminent physicist on the Nobel committee resigned from the committee to protest the dropping of Eddie. He goes one step further. In a personal letter to Prof. Escultura, Prof Gerholms wrote as to what went on inside the committee room and named two prominent members of the committee lobbying for their candidates. Gerholms in his resignation letter wrote to the committee that lobbying is highly objectionable inside the Nobel committee. Bold man indeed!
Another distinguished Indian mathematician, Professor Lakshmikantham of the Florida Institute of Technology, whose original work in the field of non-linear analysis has taken him to the top in the world of mathematics also falls into this category of losers. He was rejected several times. One could go on and on. I have come to one conclusion that where there are men manning any organization, including governments, morality and authenticity would be the casualties. Poor Alfred Nobel did not know that it would have been better to have the Nobel committee of laws rather than of men. Even government of laws would make the world more tranquil in place of the crafty criminal politicians manning governments! Men, “whether in palace or pad; castle or cottage”, are governed by the same emotions and passions. Winston Churchill was dead right when he said that “it is better to deserve than to get.” All the losers mentioned above and the countless others who have “wasted their sweetness in the desert air” (including the one Indian who keeps telling me that he should have got the Nobel in his field) could take heart from the knowledge that it is better that they deserved the Nobel much more than many around them that managed to bag the prize. Injustice is called justice these days and justice seems to be convenience of the powerful today.
“Only the wise possess ideas, the greater part of mankind are (is) possessed by them.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge