4 cases of Nobel prize for wrong discovery
October 5, 20243 Mins Read
All eyes of the world are now on the Nobel Prize. Discussions are going on in the country about who is getting this one of the most prestigious awards in the world. There is no rule to take back the Nobel. The judges have to sweat a lot before awarding someone with this award. If it goes wrong, it will ruin the reputation of the Nobel Prize.

Fritz Heber

It is not that there is never a mistake in determining the Nobel laureate. More or less controversy is created every year, especially about the Nobel Peace Prize. This error rate is low in all three categories of science.

A scientific discovery is worthy of a Nobel Prize only when it is tested. Nobel is not awarded for theoretical research. However, discoveries that are not beneficial to mankind have received the Nobel Prize. There are even cases of Nobel Prizes for wrong inventions.

Nobel in Chemistry 1918

German chemist Fritz Haber discovered a way to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gases. His method was used to make fertilizers around the world. Added a new dimension to agriculture. As a result, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.

The problem is, the Nobel Committee completely ignores Heber's role in World War I. During the 1915 war, Fritz Heber oversaw a chlorine gas attack by German forces in Belgium. Thousands of allied soldiers were killed as a result. Heber Fritz's award of the Nobel Prize for such inhumane acts has sparked a lot of controversy.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 1926

In 1926, the Danish scientist Johannes Fiebiger received the Nobel Prize in Medicine alone. He won this prize for discovering the cause of cancer in mice.

Fiebiger's research showed that the cause of cancer in mice is a special type of earthworm called Spiroptera carcinoma ( Spiroptera carcinoma ). He asserted that only the rats that ingested the larvae of the worms by eating the earthworms developed cancer.

But it later turned out that worms were not the cause of cancer in mice. The mice developed cancer mainly from vitamin A deficiency. This is a rare example of a Nobel being awarded for a wrong discovery.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 1948

Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 for the discovery of the effectiveness of the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane or DDT.

The powerful insecticide DDT was actually very effective at controlling insects. It kills a lot of mosquitoes and other harmful insects in a short period of time. As a result, DDT became widely used in crop protection. It was an effective weapon against insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria. Thanks to this, malaria was almost completely eradicated from southern Europe. Thousands of lives are saved.

However, by the 1960s, environmentalists found DDT to be extremely harmful to wildlife and the environment. The use of DDT is poisoning the environment. As a result, the United States completely banned the use of DDT in 1972. DDT was banned in many countries through international agreements in 2001.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 1949

Portuguese scientist Antonio Igas Moniz invented leucotomy or lobotomy to treat mental illness. For this reason, he jointly received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 with Walter Rudolf Hesse.

Lobotomy is essentially a brain surgery procedure. which became very popular in the 1940s. At the Nobel Prize ceremony, organizers described it as 'one of the most important discoveries in the treatment of mental illness'.