By: Akanksha
The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious scientific achievement recognition, awarded to scientists who have advanced their field in revolutionary ways.
Only five awards were established in Alfred Nobel’s will: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace. Between 1901 and 2025, 633 prizes were awarded to 1026 laureates.
Alfred Nobel intended his 31.2 million Swedish kronor (SEK) to honor those who conferred the “greatest benefit to mankind.” Yet, one midnight call can make the recipient an overnight god-like figure in the scientific community.
Still, he probably did not expect the Karolinska Institute to hand over a gold medal to the inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy. The world conveniently forgets that the committee’s history is polluted with bad science, blind spots and choices that aged like open milk. As the 2026 Nobel season is in full swing — wrapping up with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences on October 12 — here are some cases where the Nobel committee got it all wrong.
In 1926, Johannes Fibiger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma — a parasitic roundworm that was believed to cause cancer.
Although Fibiger was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize, he received the prize one year later, in 1927. During the 1926 selection process, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine decided that none of that year's nominations met the criteria set out in Alfred Nobel's will, so the prize was reserved until the following year.
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He was the first person to reproducibly induce cancer in rats via a controlled experiment. During his experiment, he noted that wild rats had epithelial hyperplasia with formations of papilloma in their stomachs, with the foreign bodies identified as nematodes (parasitic worms) and their eggs (Spiroptera neoplastica). Cockroaches served as the intermediate hosts in the transmission cycle. By feeding these infected cockroaches healthy rats, Fibiger produced lesions he interpreted as malignant epitheliomas and pulmonary metastases in the lungs, concluding that the tumors were caused by toxic secretions from the worms.1
His discovery was later proven to be fundamentally flawed.
Fibiger had fed his lab rats exclusively on white bread and water, a diet severely deficient in vitamin A. The pathological consequences of malnutrition and vitamin A deficiency were largely unknown at the time.1
In 1935, pathologist Richard Passey found that infected rats did not develop the lesions when fed a full, healthy diet, reporting that Fibiger had likely mistaken metaplasia caused by vitamin A deficiency for malignant cancer and lung metastases.1
Hitchcock and Bell, in 1952, repeated the experiments and confirmed that it was the combination of nematode infection and vitamin A deficiency that caused the large ventricular papillomas.1
A re-examination of Fibiger’s original microphotographs indicated that the tissue-changes represented advanced benign reactions rather than malignant cancer.1
António Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.
He invented the prefrontal cortex leucotomy (now known as lobotomy), a surgical procedure to treat severe mental illness that involved an incision into the prefrontal lobe to sever the connections between different parts of the brain. He proposed that severing nerve fibres connecting the frontal lobes with the thalamus could help realign disruptive thought patterns.2
The procedure aimed to ease symptoms of serious mental illnesses like psychosis, depression, and anxiety. At his award ceremony, the procedure was highly appreciated as “one of the most important discoveries ever made in psychiatric therapy.”
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The surgical procedure resulted in catastrophic, irreversible personality changes and severe brain damage, often leaving patients permanently in paralyzed or completely devoid of personality. Even when the operation was termed successful, it left patients emotionally numb and unresponsive, and frequently described as “apathetic, lethargic, childlike, docile, passive, and dependent.”
Observers often described lobotomized patients as “mental invalids” or “drooling zombies.”2 The procedure also carried a high risk of complications, including seizures, incontinence, appetite leading to weight gain, and sometimes even death. The practice posed severe ethical dilemmas regarding informed consent, as it was routinely performed on children and severely mentally ill individuals who were unable to give their consent.
In 1917, Julius Wagner-Jauregg intentionally exposed his patients to malaria-infected blood and discovered that in this way he could cure or relieve general paralysis.
General paralysis is a stage of syphilis in which the brain and psyche are attacked, leaving the patient in a lethargic and paralytic stage that can result in death. The malaria used was comparatively mild, and consequently, the patient’s health could improve.
He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the malarial therapy for general paralysis of the insane (GPI).3 He developed the treatment after observing that mental illness and psychoses could sometimes be cured following attacks of feverish infectious diseases.
The therapy involved intentionally injecting vulnerable psychiatric patients with a dangerous disease. The referee for the Nobel Prize initially blocked the award, as he considered a physician who injected malaria into paralytic patient to be “a criminal”.3
The treatment itself was highly risky and caused some deaths. In one instance. Wagner-Jauregg accidentally injected patients with blood containing a malignant type of malaria tropica; the fever did not ease even after massive doses of quinine, and three patients died after 31 days.3
Other researchers also warned about the high mortality of the treatment and the risk of the malaria parasite being transmitted to other persons via mosquitoes.3
The treatment is no longer used today, as the disease is treated safely at an earlier stage with antibiotics.3
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Swiss scientist Paul Müller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) as a contact poison against several arthropods. He did not invent DDT, but discovered that it could be used to kill flies, mosquitoes, and beetles in a short period of time.
The compound proved very effective in protecting agricultural crops and fighting insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives and helped eradicate malaria from southern Europe.
In the 1960s, environmentalists found that DDT was poisoning wildlife and the environment, leading to a US ban in 1972 and an international treaty ban in 2001.
However, DDT is not subject to a universal ban. Under the Stockholm Convention, its production and use remain permitted for disease-vector control when no equally effective and efficient alternative is available, subject to the Convention’s conditions and relevant WHO recommendations.
DDT is highly stable, biodegrades slowly, persists in the environment for a long time, and accumulates in the food chain.4 It is also toxic to freshwater and marine microorganisms, fish, amphibians, and birds.
It caused considerable thinning of eggshells in fish-eating birds like falcons, resulting in hatching difficulties and a severe population decline. High levels of the pesticide also caused reproduction failures in some fish.
It has been reported to affect neurobehavioral functions and is associated with premature births. The pesticide can accumulate in human adipose (fat) tissue, and it would take approximately 10 to 20 years for it to disappear from an individual even after all exposure has completely ceased.
DDT acts as an endocrine disruptor with estrogenic properties, and its main metabolite (DDE) acts as an androgen receptor antagonist.4
There is convincing experimental evidence that DDT and its metabolite are carcinogenic, inducing tumors in the lungs and liver, and lymphomas in laboratory rodents.4
It also contaminates human breast milk worldwide, sometimes exposing breast-fed infants to daily intakes of DDT that greatly exceed acceptable daily doses.4 Due to the ubiquitous presence of the chemical, there is not even single organism on the planet that does not contain DDT.4
However, these cases also show why historical scientific decisions need to be judged in the context of the evidence and medical knowledge available at the time. Fibiger’s cancer interpretation was later shown to be flawed, while Moniz’s leucotomy eventually became associated with serious personality changes and declined after psychiatric medications emerged. Malaria therapy was dangerous but represented an important treatment for neurosyphilis before antibiotics, while DDT was highly effective as an insecticide before resistance and environmental concerns emerged.
Although the Nobel Prize is widely considered the highest honor in the scientific community, it can be considered one of the oldest scientific awards, but it should not be viewed as the gold standard for scientific discovery.
(OG/APC/MSM)