Nobel prizes are usually linked with groundbreaking research bettering mankind, but the awards have also honored some quite unhumanitarian inventions such as chemical weapons, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and lobotomies.
Numerous Nobel prize controversies have erupted over the years: Authors who were overlooked, scientists who claimed their discovery came first, or Nobel Peace Prizes that divided public opinion. However, some of the science prizes appear in hindsight to be embarrassing choices by the committees.
When the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, it was perhaps a way of making up for the Nobel “war prize” it awarded to German chemist Fritz Haber in 1918.
Haber was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the synthesis of ammonia, which was crucial for developing fertilizers for food production.
However, Haber, known as the “father of chemical warfare,” also developed poisonous gases used in trench warfare in World War I at the Battle of Ypres, which he supervised himself.
Following Germany’s defeat in that war, “he didn’t expect to win a prize. He was more afraid of a court martial,” Swedish chemist Inger Ingmanson, who wrote a book about Haber’s prize, told reporters. “Some saw it as a Germanophile prize. There were people who had wanted Sweden to join the war alongside Germany.”
The prize remains one of the most contested Nobels ever awarded — the jury had to be aware of Haber’s role in, and the effects of, chlorine gas being used in the trenches. However, he had also brought the world revolutionary fertilizers.
The 1918 controversy might have encouraged the Stockholm jury to think carefully about the laureates they choose after a conflict.
However, in November 1945, just three months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry honored the discovery of nuclear fission.
The laureate was another German, Otto Hahn, whose 1938 discovery was crucial to the development of atomic bombs.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ choice is bewildering, especially given its apparent urgency right after the damages just wreaked by the bombs.
Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine “for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.”
Today the brain surgery procedure is known as a lobotomy and is only used in rare circumstances. The Nobel Foundation’s Web site notes soberly that the surgery was “controversial.”
In addition, there are the laureates blasted by environmentalists.
One year before Moniz, the medicine prize jury honored Swiss scientist Paul Mueller for his discovery that DDT could be used to kill insects that spread malaria.
DDT was later banned worldwide, after it was discovered to pose a threat to humans and wildlife.
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