Nobel Prize history: from lobotomies to mRNA vaccines

Let's not forget medical history

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to…

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was recently awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries “concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”

Note that the prize was not for inventing mRNA vaccines. If they had wanted to award that, they would have needed to award Robert Malone, who has actually criticized his own invention.

More on the history of the mRNA vaccines can be found here: The tangled history of mRNA vaccines

And here:

Did Dr. Robert Malone Really "Invent mRNA Vaccines?"

But I’m not here to discuss the merits of this award, though you could probably guess my general stance on mRNA vaccines from some of my previous articles:

Do mRNA vaccines interfere with a cell's natural RNA?

What proteins are we actually getting from the COVID vaccines?

We're still being misled about how long the mRNA vaccines last in the body

How mature is LNP technology?

Instead, let’s remind ourselves of some history.

The 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

In 1949, a Portuguese doctor, António Egas Moniz, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering the lobotomy, “a surgical operation involving an incision into the prefrontal lobe to mitigate severe symptoms of serious mental illnesses.”

The legacy of the lobotomy

The Nobel Prize website is somewhat open about the fact that this procedure is not exactly seen as a success nowadays:

The operation was widespread during the 1940s and 1950s, but it became apparent that it could lead to serious personality changes.

In this article about Moniz:

… lobotomised patients were also left with irreversible changes in their persona, and were described as mental invalids and drooling zombies. Moniz himself came under attack for understating the complications, inadequate documentation and poor patient follow-up.

Some have even called for the Nobel Prize to be rescinded from Moniz, though he’s now dead. For more on that, listen to this interview with Jack El-Hai, author of the book The Lobotomist: Nobel Panel Urged to Rescind Prize for Lobotomies

“Greeted with quite a bit of enthusiasm”

In the interview, they talk about how lobotomies “which offered the possibility of a relatively quick blunting of symptoms painlessly… was something that was greeted with quite a bit of enthusiasm.”

The early press reports from the 1930s and '40s were “very enthusiastic about lobotomy.”

Lobotomies performed on patients with chronic headaches and children as young as four

Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed, at first only on those suffering from severe mental illness, but later on patients with chronic headaches as well as criminals and even children as young as four years old.

Critics silenced

They also mention that “there were a lot of critics back then” but when Moniz won the Nobel Prize, “they were all silenced.”

It’s hard not to see parallels with today’s mRNA vaccine technology.

Today’s medical breakthroughs… tomorrow’s barbarisms

There’s an eerie line from the interview with El-Hai:

And today's medical breakthrough, says El-Hai, might be considered tomorrow's barbarisms

You could say that again.

Now, by no means am I saying that all the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were screwups. But it’s useful to remind ourselves of the ones that were.