Should Mark Twain Have Won a Nobel Prize?
Of course. He didn’t. And dozens of writers you have never heard of, much less read, much less quoted in everyday conversation, have. These wrongs are corrected in an alternative universe described here. The Biology/Medicine Prize has also been fairly ridiculous, although at least Robert Gallo hasn’t gotten one:
Mistakes of commission: 1. Frontal lobotomies. 2. Eric Kandel. If you think he deserved it, read Explorers of the Black Box.
Mistakes of omission: 1. The scientists who discovered that smoking causes lung cancer. 2. The scientists who discovered that folate deficiency causes birth defects.
Several years ago, at a big Thanksgiving dinner in an Oakland loft, I told the woman sitting next to me, a genetic counselor, what a travesty the Biology prizes were. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer had improved the lives of millions of people, I said; the discovery of so-called oncogenes hadn’t improved the life of even one person. She replied that she was the sister of one of the oncogene discoverers. The next day I learned she complained I had been rude!
October 26th, 2007 at 12:05 am
The truth is unfailingly rude.
October 26th, 2007 at 3:39 am
The book ” Explorers of the Black Box” gives reasons against Kandel?. I thought his work was very important and he seems very intelligent to me.
I went to Amazon but there are no reviews yet.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:13 am
Explorers of the Black Box describes Kandel’s attempts to get more credit than he deserved.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Every famous scientist gets more credit that he deserves, but I don’t see why Kandel’s work is of significantly less than typical Nobel (medicine) caliber.
As for the Nobel in Literature, think maybe the issue is that we are native English speakers, not native speakers of some other language, so English Lanugage authors loom large?
October 26th, 2007 at 10:29 am
The situation described in Explorers of the Black Box is extraordinary.
I don’t know if English writers get the LIterature prize more or less than they deserve. Twain deserved it more than all other English writers who have won it.
July 30th, 2010 at 4:59 am
I had dinner with Eric Kandel at a conference once, when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s (this was before Kandel won the Prize). He got into an argument (a civil one) with a fellow graduate student about some fine point of neurotransmitter receptor structure. Later, we looked it up — and Kandel was wrong. That still amuses me.